Contemporary Romance
Greta
Larkin
I write filthy books about women who have been told their turn is over.
The Golden HourBooks one to four
Yes, Ma’am
Out now·Kindle Unlimited
For ten years they called her indispensable. Not one of them ever called her beautiful.
Melissa Claiborne gave twenty years to a marriage. Then she gave ten more to raising her daughter alone, after her husband and her best friend took that marriage from her on the same Thursday afternoon.
Now she is fifty. Her daughter is three time zones away. And she is the most capable person in a building where the man in charge has called her my girl out front since 2015.
Then her boss’s son walks in.
Jake Ashford is twenty five, fresh out of an MBA program, and so completely undone by her that she has to look away first. He is her employer’s son. He is five years older than her daughter. He is the single worst idea she has ever had.
He is also the first person in eleven years who looked at her and saw a woman instead of a filing system.
Melissa Claiborne is finished being useful. Now she is going to find out what she is actually worth.
Read on Kindle Unlimited Book two is out
Heat level: scorching. Explicit, unapologetic, and not remotely for the faint of heart.
Hers to Keep is a Why Choose trilogy and it builds across the three books.
Book one is Melissa and Jake. One man, on her terms, start to finish. The other two arrive in books two and three, and by the end she does not choose between them, because she is not going to be asked to.
New
Hers to Keep · Book TwoTake a Number
Out now·Kindle Unlimited
They put a price on her. She typed it in herself.
Melissa Claiborne spent ten years being the most capable person in a building where nobody thought to ask her opinion. Then, in one autumn, she stopped asking permission.
Now there are three of them. Her boss’s son, who has been hers since a parking garage and has finally stopped being careful about it. The carpenter rebuilding her kitchen, who wants nothing from her at all, and who is the most dangerous of the three for exactly that reason. And the man behind a bar with no name on the door, who asks her one question at a time and then waits for the answer, which nobody in fifty years has ever done.
Then a holding company in Chicago offers to buy the firm, and the form that decides what she is worth lands on her desk, because she is faster at paperwork than her boss is.
It asks which people leaving would break the company. She fills it in honestly, because she always does. The answer is fifty-five percent her.
They are not buying an agency. They are buying her.
Yes, Ma’am was her learning to ask.
Take a Number is her learning she does not have to.
Read on Kindle Unlimited Tell me when book three lands
Heat level: scorching. Explicit, unapologetic, and not remotely for the faint of heart.
Book two is where it opens up. Three men, separately and once together, and every one of them knows he is not the only one. Book three finishes the trilogy.
Another Series
The Golden Hour · Book OneWatch Your Mouth
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Her husband left her for a woman half her age. Three years later she hired one.
Margo Freeman is fifty four and she owns the best wine bar on this stretch of Lake Michigan. She can read a dining room from the doorway. She has not been touched by another person in three years and five months, and she has been magnificent about it, in public, every single day.
Then her cook walks out mid service on the last Saturday of the season, and eleven days later a twenty nine year old from a two star kitchen in Chicago stands in her dining room and tells her that her wine list is a coward’s list.
He is right. That is the problem with Jesse Kovach. He is right out loud, in daylight, in front of people, and it has already cost him one career.
She hires him because she has nobody else. She keeps him for reasons she will not say out loud for two months.
Margo has spent her whole life being the most reasonable person in the room. She is about to find out what she is like when she stops.
Read on Kindle Unlimited Book two is out
Heat level: scorching. Explicit, unapologetic, and absolutely not for the faint of heart.
The Golden Hour is six standalone novellas about six women in one small Michigan town, every one of them past fifty, every one with her own happy ending. This one is Margo and Jesse. One relationship, twenty five years apart, start to finish.
Take Your Time
Out now·Kindle Unlimited
She said she couldn’t. She was nineteen. She has had thirty eight years to think about it.
Diane Miller was married at twenty two and widowed at fifty five, and in between she never once touched anybody else.
She spent her whole working life in an emergency room and she is still the best thing that can happen to you on the worst day of yours. Give her a dying stranger on a sidewalk and she is magnificent. Give her a Tuesday afternoon in an empty house and she does not know where to put her hands.
Then Reed Kane comes home to bury his mother. He is fifty eight. He has spent thirty six years on the freighters, and he is the boy who sat at her mother’s curb one August with a car and asked her to come with him. She said she couldn’t. She has never told a living soul that she thinks about it.
He stays through the summer to empty a house that does not need a summer, and neither of them says one word about why.
Neither of them is in any kind of practice. And every morning, in a room over a garage, this man asks her what she wants.
That is the part she cannot do.
Not the wanting. The saying.
Read on Kindle Unlimited Book three
Heat level: scorching. Explicit, unhurried, and written for grown women.
This one is Diane and Reed. Both of them in their fifties, both of them out of practice, and the book is honest about what that is actually like. Complete story, no cliffhanger.
Not a Word
Out now·Kindle Unlimited
He is thirty four. She has the keys to everything.
Rosie Kittredge has run the high school in Alder Bay for nine years, and in a town of two thousand people that makes her the most looked at woman in it.
She is very good at the job. She knows every child in that building by name, which ones eat and which ones say they already did. She is the one the pastor calls when a family will not talk to him. She is the one who goes and sits with a mother on the worst night of her life.
Nobody has ever asked her who she tells.
Then somebody buys the old lakeside theater, and it is Eli Pike.
He is thirty four. She taught him when he was fifteen, the year she picked up a phone and said a true thing about his father that took his family apart. She was right to do it. Nobody in Alder Bay has ever known it was her, which is exactly why they think she is the safe one to put in a room with a Pike.
He knows. He has known since he was nineteen. And he is not angry with her, and that turns out to be the worst thing anybody has ever done to her.
What follows is one winter in a town where a woman like Rosie has no cover at all. Five months of it, and snow that keeps a record of everything, and a Friday table of five women who all work out what is happening and not one of them says a word.
Being wanted means being decided about.
She is the one who decides in every room she has ever been in.
Read on Kindle Unlimited Book four is out
Heat level: scorching. Explicit, unhurried, and written for grown women.
This one is Rosie and Eli. She is fifty one and she runs the school. He is thirty four and he is the wrong surname. Complete story, no cliffhanger.
New
The Golden Hour · Book FourTry Me
Out now·Kindle Unlimited
He is the only man she has ever read wrong.
Kelly Richardson has been a divorce attorney in Petoskey for thirty years. She spends the first hour with every new client trying to talk her out of it, which makes her the good kind, and she is almost never wrong about anybody.
Then she spends six months across a table from Arthur Locke.
He represents the husband. He stalls, he will not hand anything over, and in a deposition in May he takes a position so bad that Kelly tells him, in front of a court reporter, that no honest man could take it. He does not argue. He does not explain. He sits there and lets her.
In November a meeting in Gaylord runs late, a storm comes down off the lake, and the road closes behind them. One lodge, one furnace, three nights, and the only man in thirty years she cannot get a read on.
She knows the rule. They are on opposite sides of a live case, and Kelly has never in her life done a thing her own evidence told her not to do.
There is something he is not telling her.
He would rather lose her than say it.
Read on Kindle Unlimited Tell me when book five lands
Heat level: scorching. Explicit, unhurried, and written for grown women.
This one is Kelly and Art. She is fifty five and she takes marriages apart for a living. He is fifty six and he is on the other side. Complete story, no cliffhanger.
Free story
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The last Friday of the season, and a man at the end of the bar has decided the girl working it is the reason he came in. She has four hours of her shift left and she cannot leave.
Five women at a table take it apart in eleven minutes without one of them raising her voice, and he goes home believing he made some friends and had a nice night.
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gretalarkin@proton.meQuestions, reviews, complaints about the ending, or an argument about which one of them she should have picked. I read everything myself. Or use the form.
Or find me on X at @GretaLarkin99.
About
I am interested in the specific moment a woman stops being useful and starts being a person, and in the fact that this moment almost never arrives at a convenient age.
My heroines are in their forties, fifties, and beyond. They are funny, they are tired, they are not sorry, and they are not finished.
I live in the Midwest, keep unreasonable hours, and would like everyone to know that the second burner on my own stove has not worked since 2019.