Count Your Lucky Stars is the quietest book in Bellefleur’s trilogy and the one that aches most. Margot Cooper plans weddings for a living and has arranged her life around never being left. Olivia Grant was her best friend until one night in college ended that, and now arrives back in Seattle with a collapsed marriage behind her and nowhere to live. Margot has a spare room.
Three findings before the list.
Second chance is everywhere; “former best friends who had one night and never spoke about it” is not. That is a much narrower thing than exes reuniting, and it is the specific hurt this book runs on. Only three books below reproduce it — In the Event of Love, Youngblood and, over a much longer span, On the Same Page.
The wedding is common as an occasion and rare as a career. Plenty of sapphic romances put their leads at somebody’s wedding: a brother’s, an ex’s, a stepsister’s, a televised one. Almost none give you a professional who does this for a living and has therefore stopped believing in it. Margot’s job is doing more work than it appears to, and if that was the appeal, D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding and Accidental Honeymoon are the nearest equivalents.
And forced proximity in this genre is almost always a house. Not an office, not a business trip — a spare room, a shared flat, a farm two people both have a claim on, a boarding-school dormitory. Late Bloomer is the most extreme version: neither woman can legally make the other leave.
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All 12 Books at a Glance
| Book | Second chance | Former friends | Forced proximity | A wedding | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count Your Lucky Stars (the original) | Yes | Yes, one night | A spare room | Her whole job | Open door |
| Written in the Stars | No | No | Holiday visits | No | Open door |
| On the Same Page | No | A decade of it | No | No | Low, fade to black |
| Those Who Wait | No | Yes | No | No | Explicit |
| The Fiancée Farce | No | No | A fake engagement | An engagement | Open door, high |
| Delilah Green Doesn’t Care | No | No | A small town | The whole week | Open door |
| D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding | No | No | A TV format | The whole plot | Open door |
| No Rings Attached | No | No | A trip abroad | A brother’s | Open door |
| Playing with Matches | No | No | A B&B for a week | An ex’s | Not verified |
| In the Event of Love | Yes | More than friends | A small town | No | Open door |
| Youngblood | Yes | Yes, childhood | Roommates | No | Closed door, YA |
| Late Bloomer | No | No | One house, two claims | No | Open door |
| Accidental Honeymoon | No | No | A performance | A required one | One scene |
1. Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur
Darcy Lowell is an actuary who does not do feelings. Elle Jones writes horoscopes. After a disastrous blind date arranged by Darcy’s brother, Darcy claims it went well and needs a girlfriend for the holidays.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: Book one of the same trilogy, with Margot on the page throughout. It won the Lambda Literary Award and it is where the friend group and the Seattle you have just spent a book in were built.
How it differs: Fake dating rather than second chance, and the two leads are strangers — there is no history to reopen. Lighter and funnier, with less of the ache.
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2. On the Same Page by Haley Cass
Riley Beckett produces digital news. Gianna Makinen is an influencer. They have been each other’s person since Boston University, and the book cuts between that decade of friendship and the holiday party where the arrangement stops being survivable.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: The purest former-friends book in the subgenre. The dual timeline does what Bellefleur’s flashbacks do — shows you exactly what was lost and when — over a decade rather than one night. If the friendship is the part that hurt, this is the one.
How it differs: They never actually stopped speaking, so there is no estrangement to repair, and no wedding anywhere. It is also the least explicit of Cass’s novels, with a lot more fade-to-black. No Bookshop print edition.
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3. Those Who Wait by Haley Cass
Sutton Spencer is twenty-five and a literature graduate student. Charlotte Thompson is twenty-eight, Deputy Mayor of New York, and about to run for Congress. They start as an arrangement, become friends, and then spend six hundred pages refusing to name what has happened.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: Six hundred pages of two people who know each other completely and will not say the one thing. If what you want is the specific agony of a friendship that both parties are quietly ruining, nothing goes longer or harder at it.
How it differs: No wedding, no estrangement and no forced proximity — they choose each other’s company every time. It is also enormous, and self-published without a Bookshop print edition.
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4. The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur
Tansy Adams invented a girlfriend using a romance cover model’s photograph. The model, Gemma van Dalen, is a publishing heiress who needs a wife to satisfy her grandfather’s will, and proposes on the spot.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: Bellefleur’s other sapphic couple, with an engagement rather than a wedding and the hottest writing she has done. Same banter, same city, same interest in what families expect of women who will not comply.
How it differs: No second chance and no shared history — Tansy and Gemma meet on page one. Forced proximity comes from a fake engagement rather than a spare room.
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5. Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake
Delilah Green, a broke photographer, comes back to Bright Falls to shoot the wedding of the stepsister who never defended her, and falls for Claire Sutherland, the bride’s best friend.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: A wedding week as the whole container. The rehearsals, the fittings, the forced group activities, everybody trapped in the same small town being polite — it is the best use of a wedding as pressure in contemporary sapphic romance.
How it differs: Strangers rather than former friends, and the old wound is with the stepsister rather than the love interest. A small town instead of a city.
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6. D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia C. Higgins
Two strangers are cast on a reality show called Instant I Do. Six weeks to convince their families they are engaged, then a wedding, then a hundred thousand dollars if the families believed it.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: If Margot’s job was the appeal — the venues, the timelines, the performance of a perfect day — this is a whole novel inside the wedding industry, and the funniest one there is.
How it differs: No second chance, no former friends, and no history. The forced proximity is a television format rather than a spare room.
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7. No Rings Attached by Rachel Lacey
Lia Harris manages a bookstore in New York and has been telling her mother about a girlfriend who does not exist. Her brother’s wedding in London is three weeks away. A friend produces Grace Poston, and one weekend of pretending becomes a longer trip.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: A family wedding as a deadline, and a trip that will not let either woman get any distance from the other. The escalating-proximity structure is the same as sharing a flat, just with less furniture.
How it differs: Fake dating rather than second chance. Nobody here has history, and the tone is warmer and lower-stakes than Bellefleur’s.
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8. Playing with Matches by Georgia Beers
Cori Stratton’s candle shop is weeks from eviction. Her ex is getting married at the Brennan family’s bed and breakfast, and Cori would rather not attend alone. Liz Brennan, her landlord’s daughter, agrees to help.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: An ex’s wedding is a very specific kind of hell, and this book stays inside it for a week. If it was the social choreography of weddings you enjoyed — who is seated where, who is watching — this is that at close range.
How it differs: Fake dating, small-town, and no shared history between the leads. There is no Libro.fm edition and we could not find a heat rating we trust.
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9. In the Event of Love by Courtney Kae
Morgan Ross is a Los Angeles event planner whose career detonates in public. She retreats to Fern Falls, the town she left at eighteen, and finds the family Christmas-tree farm in trouble and Rachel Reed — still the person Morgan hurt worst — running it.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: The closest second chance on the list. Two people with a specific injury between them, thrown together by circumstance, with an event to run while they work it out. Morgan is even in Margot’s profession.
How it differs: A small town at Christmas rather than a Seattle flat, and they were more than friends before — the history is romantic rather than a single unspoken night.
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10. Youngblood by Sasha Laurens
Kat Finn has spent years telling herself she is over Taylor Sanger. They were inseparable as children, before Taylor’s family money and Kat’s financial-aid status pulled them apart. Now they are roommates at the same elite school, refusing to discuss any of it.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: Former best friends made to share a room, in alternating chapters where each is comprehensively wrong about the other. The forced proximity and the unspoken history are exactly Margot and Olivia’s problem, at seventeen.
How it differs: There are vampires. It is a young-adult boarding-school gothic, much darker in tone, closed door, and there is no wedding. No Bookshop print edition.
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11. Late Bloomer by Mazey Eddings
Opal Devlin wins the lottery and buys a flower farm she has never seen. She arrives to find Pepper Boden already living there, furious, and legally entitled to be. Neither of them leaves.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: The most literal forced proximity here. Two women with competing legal claims to one house, neither able to make the other go. If the spare-room arrangement was the engine for you, this is the version where nobody can even threaten to move out.
How it differs: Strangers rather than former friends, no wedding, and a much heavier book — chronic illness, neurodivergence and grief all carry weight alongside the romance.
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12. Accidental Honeymoon by Miranda MacLeod
Monica, a wedding blogger, hires handywoman Ray to pose as her girlfriend for a visit to her dying grandmother. The performance works so well that the grandmother rewrites her will: the vineyard goes to the two of them, if they marry.
Why a Count Your Lucky Stars reader wants it: Weddings as a job and a wedding as the trap, with two women locked into a performance that keeps escalating. The screwball register is close to Bellefleur’s at her most farcical.
How it differs: No second chance and no shared history. The heat is much lower — reviewers report a single explicit scene — and there is no Libro.fm edition.
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If You Only Read One
For the second chance: In the Event of Love. Two people, one old injury, and an event to run while they work it out.
For the friendship: On the Same Page. A decade of it, in dual timeline, with the caveat that it is much less explicit.
For the forced proximity: Late Bloomer. One house, two legal claims, nobody leaving.
For the weddings: Delilah Green Doesn’t Care for the week, D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding for the industry.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Bellefleur books are sapphic?
Two of the three. Written in the Stars and Count Your Lucky Stars both have two women at the centre. Hang the Moon, the middle book, is a male-female romance about Darcy’s brother Brendon, though the friend group is all still there. The Fiancée Farce is a separate standalone with a different sapphic couple.
Are there other sapphic romances about former best friends?
On the Same Page is the purest version — a decade of friendship in dual timeline. Youngblood gives you childhood friends split by class and then forced to share a room. In the Event of Love is the closest on the specific injury of having hurt someone and having to come back.
Which of these are actually set at a wedding?
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care (a stepsister’s, and the whole book takes place across the week), D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding (a televised one), No Rings Attached (a brother’s, in London) and Playing with Matches (an ex’s, which is its own particular misery).
Which one is closest on heat?
Those Who Wait and The Fiancée Farce both run hotter than Count Your Lucky Stars. Most of the rest sit at about the same level. The two to know about are On the Same Page, which is considerably more fade-to-black, and Youngblood, which is young adult and closed door.
What if none of these is quite right?
Tell us the book, not the trope. Our Books Like directory takes a title and routes you to the closest read-alike list we have — and if we have not written that one yet, it points you at the trope pages that get nearest and records what you searched for, so it gets built next.
Looking for read-alikes for a different book? Browse the full Books Like directory — search any sapphic title and we will point you at the closest match we have.