Below is the complete list of Shantel Tessier’s Dare books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Dare Books
About Dare
Shantel Tessier’s Dare series is a dark-romance trilogy built around a wealthy, violent social circle whose members call themselves sharks and treat secrecy, manipulation, loyalty, and revenge as parts of an ongoing game. Beginning with I Dare You, the books move through interconnected relationships in which attraction is inseparable from danger. Cole Reynolds, Austin Lowes, Deke Biggs, Becky Holt, and the people surrounding them remain important across the trilogy, making the series considerably more continuous than a set of independent romances.
I Dare You introduces Austin Lowes after she moves to live with her emotionally distant father. She expects to endure only a few more months before gaining enough independence to leave, but her arrival brings her into Cole Reynolds’s orbit. Cole belongs to a privileged group of young men accustomed to power and to treating dares as something far more serious than harmless entertainment.
Austin refuses to respond to Cole with the fear or obedience he expects. Their hostility quickly becomes part of a larger game involving secrets, dangerous challenges, and people whose relationships are shaped by events Austin does not yet understand. Cole initially approaches her as someone to manipulate, but his growing attachment complicates plans already involving deception and violence. The novel establishes a world where almost everyone knows more than they admit and where becoming emotionally important to someone can make a person more vulnerable rather than safer.
I Promise You continues Cole and Austin’s storyline rather than resetting the series around a completely separate couple. By this point, what began as a game has produced consequences that neither can dismiss. Cole’s feelings for Austin have changed, but he is still concealing information capable of damaging their relationship and altering her understanding of the people around them.
The sequel expands the importance of the sharks as a group. Their loyalty to one another is intense, but it operates through its own rules and often justifies behavior that would be unacceptable outside their circle. Tessier uses those alliances to complicate the romance: loving Cole also means Austin must decide how much of his world she can accept and whether devotion has value when it is accompanied by control, secrecy, and violence.
If You Dare shifts the central romantic focus to Deke Biggs and Becky Holt. Their relationship already carries considerable history, resentment, and concealed information from the earlier books. Becky was once the person Deke loved, but discovering that she had hidden important truths transforms that attachment into a desire for revenge.
Their story develops while a new threat disrupts the group’s assumption that they control the game. Deke may be comfortable intimidating other people, but he is no longer the only person willing to manipulate circumstances for personal ends. Becky consequently becomes caught between Deke’s anger, her own secrets, and another player prepared to exploit the divisions among them.
The trilogy is firmly intended for adult readers. Its romances are deliberately transgressive and include coercive behavior, violence, threats, criminal activity, sexual content, and extreme power imbalances. The relationships should therefore be understood within the conventions of dark romance rather than conventional contemporary romance.
Tessier later released the Dare Series Collection, which gathers I Dare You, I Promise You, and If You Dare together with bonus material. It is an omnibus rather than a separate fourth storyline. The three original novels form the complete central arc, moving from Cole and Austin’s dangerous introduction through the wider consequences of the sharks’ secrets and finally into Deke and Becky’s much more hostile reckoning with the past.