Below is the complete list of Sara Cate’s Wilde Boys books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Wilde Boys Books
About Wilde Boys
Sara Cate’s Wilde Boys series is a two-book contemporary romance built around the wealthy Wilde family, the private island of Del Rey, and the emotional fallout from a tragedy that permanently altered the lives of everyone connected to it. More tightly continuous than many romance series that simply share a setting, the duet moves from one complicated relationship into another while keeping Nash Wilde at the center of the larger story. Grief, forbidden attraction, sexuality, secrecy, and unconventional relationships drive both novels.
Gravity begins with Zara York, a former ballet dancer still dealing with the death of her twin sister, who was killed alongside Preston Wilde. Two years after the accident, Preston’s father, Alistair Wilde, approaches Zara with an extraordinary proposition. His surviving son, Nash, has been spiraling since the tragedy, and Alistair offers Zara one million dollars to spend three months on Del Rey pretending to be Nash’s girlfriend.
The isolated setting quickly turns what sounds like a transactional arrangement into something far less controllable. Nash is angry, reckless, and carrying his own burden from what happened, while Alistair’s composed exterior conceals grief of a different kind. Zara becomes caught between father and son, creating a deliberately taboo love triangle in which attraction is tangled with mourning, resentment, guilt, and the unequal power created by wealth and circumstance.
Del Rey is particularly important to the character of the series. Its physical isolation strips away many of the social boundaries that would ordinarily separate the characters, allowing relationships to develop within an almost sealed environment. Cate uses that confinement to intensify both the sexual tension and the emotional instability surrounding the Wilde family. The result is less a conventional billionaire fantasy than an intentionally messy romance about damaged people crossing lines while trying to survive losses they have handled badly.
Free Fall takes the consequences of that first story and makes Nash the emotional focus. His experiences on Del Rey cannot simply be compartmentalized, and a later period in Amsterdam brings him into a transformative relationship with Ellis Prior, an older man who is also a friend of his father. Nash eventually retreats from that connection, but the questions it raises about his desires remain unresolved.
Years later, the story returns to Del Rey when ballerina Hanna Thurber arrives seeking an escape of her own. Her attraction to Nash develops quickly, but Ellis eventually reenters his life as well. Instead of reproducing the love triangle structure of Gravity, Free Fall develops into an MMF romance involving Nash, Hanna, and Ellis. That shift matters because Nash is no longer simply one side of another character’s dilemma; his second book requires him to confront parts of himself he has previously avoided.
Taken together, the Wilde Boys novels form a continuous exploration of one family’s aftermath rather than two loosely connected romances. The first book establishes the grief, secrets, and fractured relationships surrounding the Wildes, while the second allows Nash’s story to evolve beyond his role in Zara and Alistair’s relationship. Cate also expands the duet’s treatment of forbidden romance from an age-gap family complication into questions of bisexual desire, polyamorous connection, and emotional acceptance.
The two novels were later collected together as The Wilde Boys, reflecting how closely their narratives belong together. Despite each having its own romantic focus, the emotional history established in Gravity gives Free Fall much of its meaning. The duet is consequently one of Cate’s more compact interconnected works, using the same island, family, and unresolved tragedy to tell two distinct but inseparable stories about grief, desire, and relationships that refuse to fit conventional boundaries.