Below is the complete list of Tessa Bailey’s Broke and Beautiful books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Broke and Beautiful Books in Publication Order
About Broke and Beautiful
Tessa Bailey’s Broke and Beautiful series belongs to an earlier phase of her career, but it already shows many of the qualities that later made her one of the most recognizable names in contemporary romance. These books are fast, flirtatious, emotionally direct, and built around the collision between swagger and vulnerability that Bailey handles especially well. The setup is simple and effective: three young women sharing an apartment in New York City, each getting her own romance while the series gradually builds a connected world around friendship, financial instability, and the messiness of wanting more from life than survival.
That shared-apartment framework is what gives the series its identity. The books are linked less by one overarching external plot than by proximity, overlap, and emotional continuity. Each novel focuses on a different heroine and her central romance, but the women’s friendship creates the connective tissue. Bailey uses that structure well. It allows each book to stand on its own as a complete romance while still giving the series a sense of accumulation. Side characters do not vanish once one couple gets together; they remain part of the texture of the next story. That is one of the main reasons publication order works best. You can read an individual title alone, but the emotional handoffs are more satisfying when followed in sequence.
The series begins with Chase Me, followed by Need Me and Make Me, and the order matters because Bailey is building a little ecosystem rather than three unrelated love stories under one label. The tone is contemporary, urban, and high-energy, but underneath the chemistry there is a clear interest in instability: unstable jobs, unstable housing, unstable expectations about adulthood and success. That does not make the books bleak. Quite the opposite. Part of their appeal is the way Bailey turns financial and emotional uncertainty into momentum. Her characters may be broke, but they are not passive. They push, react, flirt, fight, improvise, and fall hard.
This series also helps show how Bailey’s writing evolved before the bigger mainstream breakthrough that came later with books like It Happened One Summer. Broke and Beautiful is smaller in scale than some of her later hit series, but it is already recognizably hers. The banter is bold, the attraction is immediate, and the heroes tend to project confidence before revealing a more complicated emotional core. Bailey has long been good at writing men who seem overpowering at first glance but become compelling through devotion, protectiveness, and emotional surrender. That pattern is visible here too, even in these earlier books.
Another reason the series is worth reading in order is tonal calibration. The apartment-sharing premise gives the books a lively, communal feeling, but Bailey varies the pairings enough that the romances do not blur together. Each heroine has her own pressure points, and each relationship leans into different tensions, even while staying inside the same broad promise of heat, humor, and payoff. The continuity comes from voice and world rather than repetition.
For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about Broke and Beautiful is as an early connected trilogy that captures Bailey before her blockbuster phase but with her core instincts already firmly in place. It is not a sprawling romance universe or a heavily serialized saga. It is a tight, character-centered trio built on friendship, desire, and the fantasy that even in a life held together by rent money and chaos, love can still arrive with force. Read in publication order, the series feels fuller, funnier, and more emotionally coherent, because the shared world is part of the pleasure.