10 of the Best Smut Books to Give As Gifts

Ah, the intoxicating combination of athletic achievement and bedroom antics; who could be immune from its charms? In Emily Rath’s Jacksonville Rays series, which includes Pucking Around, Pucking Wild, and Pucking Sweet, a new professional hockey team in Florida is the locus for lots of fun flirtation. Book one centers on Rachel, a sports-medicine practitioner trying to sort out her attraction to two of the team’s players plus their surly equipment manager. It doesn’t spoil the happy ending to say that the boys choose sharing over rivalry, and two even fall in love with each other. Jumbo-size mattresses are acquired to contain the filthy but sweet activities that ensue. Books two and three (a fourth is in the works) continue in this vein, introducing new heroines and new players who work through rivalries and misunderstandings to reach athletic, sweaty, multi-partner happy endings.

Oh, no, the new Duke of Stanhope must marry and become respectable, due to some (waves hands) business with his siblings. He turns to debutante Lady Selina Ravenscroft for help finding a match, but might these pals not turn out to be perfect matches for each other instead? I’ll leave the answer up to your imagination. Anyway, it all takes place in the same socially strictured, secret-letter-heavy, empire-waisted world that your friend is already comfortable with.

Okay, this one might be a bit of a stretch, but if your friend likes spending time thinking about planets far from our own where basic survival is a bit of a hassle, she’ll enjoy the many scenes of hunting, gathering, and basic-shelter-finding in these incredibly horny books about some women who were sold into space-sex slavery by evil aliens, only to find themselves stranded on a world populated by good aliens, all of whom are handsome and muscular and tall and … horned and tailed and covered in soft blue fur. Plus, there’s a whole thing about how you can only survive on their planet by being implanted with a parasitic worm, and it’s really saying something when I say that this does not get in the way of the hotness one bit. As a bonus, there are 21 books in this series, so if your friend likes it, she can stay on the Ice Planet for a good long time.

Three adult siblings at romantic crossroads all unite at their larger-than-life mom’s picturesque house in the country. But while they think they’re escaping the crushes and twisty relationships that led them up North, fate has other plans in mind. “A queer Christmas rom-com — very funny and sexy,” says our SEO editor Alexia LaFata. She recommends it for anyone who loves spending the holidays in the Catskills (or wishes they could).

I think we can all agree that the Fourth Wing books, while full of impressive world-building and scenes of battle and conflict, simply do not have enough sex in them. The sex they do have is really hot (a slow burn that lasts almost an entire book will help in that department), but there needs to be more of it. Well, that’s not a problem in Yarros’s earlier series, which concerns the romances of a group of military men enrolled in flight school or about to be deployed to war, and their sometimes tormented but always satisfying pairings with the women who are meant to be with them forever. It’s a very patriotic, war-focused milieu, which might help explain why Yarros’s breakout romantasy series is so focused on the rules and regulations of a military academy. If nothing else, these books will help tide over a Yarros fan until Onyx Storm (the third book in her Empyrean series) comes out on January 21.

This is a great pick for any reader who loves magic, fated destinies, and Viking hunks. Our heroine is plucky Freya, who must undergo rigorous training in order to fulfill the fate she has inherited along with a drop of goddess’s blood, which makes her inviolable to any attack. Besides the literal battles she must fight, she must also wage war against her growing attraction to her sworn protector Bjorn, who is also her ex-stepson, but that’s really neither here nor there. “There’s insane tension between the main love interests and a crazy cliffhanger ending,” says my colleague Reilly McGavern. “Thank God the second one comes out in May!”

“Despite her misgivings, former gymnast Avery Abrams agrees to help coach a new Olympic hopeful after having to drop out of the Games herself seven years prior,” writes my Strategist colleague Ashley Wolfgang. “Only problem? She has to see her ex-best-friend and teammate who ended up marrying their coach.” She loves the book because of its Stick It–like rivalry. (The spice level, she notes, hovers somewhere around “Drew Barrymore getting her first kiss at the baseball game.”)

Once you get over the initial “wait … WHAT??” factor, it’s hard not to fall for the charm of this very explicit yet mostly traditional rom-com set in a world where humans live alongside various mythical creatures, including shy, sexy, comically well-endowed minotaurs. Broke former grad student Violet doesn’t know quite what to expect when she takes a job at the titular milking farm, but it turns out that minotaurs’ copious ejaculate not only clogs their drains but is also an important component in human ED meds. So they have to be … yes, milked … in a clinical setting devoid of romance until, inevitably, Violet crosses the professional line with one particularly well-dressed, shiny-maned client. They agree to date outside the farm, and he’s a perfect gentleman. But will Violet be able to handle their differences in the bedroom? By the time Violet and Rourke consummate their scalding-hot crush, the reader will have had time to come around to the idea of interspecies intimacy.