Books Like Priest by Sierra Simone: 17 Forbidden Romances to Read Next (2026)
Books like Priest by Sierra Simone have a short list of qualifications: a vow that matters, a desire that wrecks it, guilt that is part of the heat instead of an obstacle to it, and sex written with the same intensity as a prayer. 2026 has been a big year for the Priest world. Bloom Books put Midnight Mass back out as a standalone paperback in March, and on August 11 Simone released Devil, an all-new standalone in the Priest universe about Birdie Cooper, a woman who lost her church over one kiss, and Ryan Bell, the younger man who never got over her. If Father Tyler Bell and Poppy Danforth sent you hunting for more, here are 17 books sorted by angle: the rest of the Bell family, Simone’s other sacred-and-profane books, forbidden romance from the authors Priest readers trust, and a queer pick with a clergyman at its center. Heat on every one. Then the Inferno-heat church and forbidden romances from our own shelf.
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What Makes Priest Work
Priest (2015) is narrated by Tyler Bell as his confession. He’s the young priest sent to St. Margaret’s in Weston, Missouri, a parish still recovering from the arrest of the man who held the job before him, and his own family carries a wound a priest caused. Poppy Danforth wanders into his confessional, a Dartmouth graduate from money who walked away from her family and the man who decided she was too sexual to marry. She confesses. He listens. The rest of the book is a man who believes every word of his vows breaking them anyway, in the church, with the guilt rendered as vividly as the sex. That’s the formula readalikes need: a real moral line, a hero or heroine who takes it seriously, power that runs both ways, and explicit scenes that move the story instead of interrupting it. Priest is erotic romance first and contemporary romance second. It is very explicit, it uses religious imagery on purpose, and it ends in an HEA. If any of that is a dealbreaker, read the content notes before you start. Our romance spice levels guide explains the chili scale below.
The Rest of the Priest Series
Midnight Mass by Sierra Simone
The sequel novella. Years after Tyler leaves the priesthood for Poppy, he is still fighting with guilt and faith, and their marriage starts to crack under it. Short, dark and very hot, it’s the book that proves Priest’s HEA wasn’t the end of the question. Bloom Books reissued it in March 2026 as a 160-page paperback.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Midnight Mass on Amazon →
Sinner by Sierra Simone
Tyler’s brother Sean Bell has no faith left. Zenny is his best friend’s little sister, twenty-one and weeks away from taking her vows as a nun, and she wants to experience the world before she gives it up. Sean agrees to show her. The roles flip from Priest: the believer is the woman, the cynic is the man, and the forbidden line is her vocation instead of his.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Sinner on Amazon →
Saint by Sierra Simone
Aiden Bell left his boyfriend Elijah to become a monk. Years later Elijah turns up at the abbey engaged to someone else, and a road trip across Europe forces Aiden to decide what his vows are worth. The MM book in the series and, for a lot of readers, the best one: all of Priest’s sacred-and-profane tension, plus second-chance grief.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Saint on Amazon →
Devil by Sierra Simone
The 2026 book, out August 11 from Bloom Books. Seven years ago one moment of weakness cost Birdie Cooper her job, her church and her only friend. Now she works nights at a gas station to care for her sister and has stopped making the art that used to keep her alive. Ryan Bell never got over the shy lecturer from his senior year who vanished after their only kiss, and then he finds a statue of Lucifer carved in his likeness. His offer: be his in every way for one year, and he’ll pay for her sister’s care for as long as she lives. An older heroine, a younger morally gray hero, a bargain and the Bell family name. It’s a standalone, so you can read it first.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Devil on Amazon →
More Sierra Simone: Sacred, Profane and Very Explicit
Sanguine by Sierra Simone
A 2020 novella that answers the question “what if Priest had a vampire in it.” Bastien is a vampire trying to enjoy a vacation, and the priest hunting him becomes the man he can’t stop wanting. Short, gothic and MM, and the purest distillation of Simone’s favorite theme: holiness and hunger in the same room.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Sanguine on Amazon →
The Conquering of Tate the Pious by Sierra Simone
Medieval, and the most direct heir to Priest in Simone’s catalog. Tate is the abbess of Far Hope Abbey, and a Norman warlord has come to take it. Her choice is whether to surrender herself to protect her women. The third Far Hope story (after The Chasing of Eleanor Vane and The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind), and a full role reversal: this time the vow belongs to her.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See The Conquering of Tate the Pious on Amazon →
American Queen by Sierra Simone
Camelot in Washington. Greer Galloway, granddaughter of a former vice president, is drawn back into the orbit of President Ash Colchester and his best friend, Vice President Embry Moore, two men who love each other as much as they love her. The New Camelot trilogy trades the church for the White House, keeps the devotion, the power exchange and the ache, and builds to a triad.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See American Queen on Amazon →
A Lesson in Thorns by Sierra Simone
Librarian Proserpina Markham returns to Thornchapel, the remote estate where she spent childhood summers, and to Auden Guest, the boy she never forgot. The house has old pagan secrets, the friends gathered there have their own, and the four-book Thornchapel series turns ritual into erotic romance the way Priest turns the Mass into one. Literary, kinky and immersive.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See A Lesson in Thorns on Amazon →
Salt in the Wound by Sierra Simone
Isolde Laurence is betrothed to Mark Trevena, a dangerous club owner, and agrees to “practice” being his bride. The first book of the Lyonesse quartet, a modern Tristan and Isolde that brings in Mark’s bodyguard Tristan in book two and the Church as a player later on. The series is complete, finishing with Bitter Burn in 2025, so you can binge it.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Salt in the Wound on Amazon →
Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl by Sierra Simone
The 2026 launch of Simone’s Academic Affairs series. Rookie lecturer Maddie Kowalczk has a one-night stand, and then meets her new boss, Bram Loe. A workplace forbidden romance with Simone’s trademark praise and power, for readers who want the “you are absolutely not allowed” tension without the clerical collar.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl on Amazon →
Forbidden Romance Books Like Priest
Praise by Sara Cate
After a bad breakup, Charlie Underwood goes to collect her rental deposit from her ex’s father, Emerson Grant, and ends up working for him. Emerson co-owns the Salacious Players’ Club, and the book is built around what his approval does to a woman who was emotionally starved by her last relationship. The book most Priest readers pick up next, and the closest in its use of praise as the engine of the heat. Our Birthday Girl vs. Praise guide compares it with the next pick.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Praise on Amazon →
Mercy by Sara Cate
Maggie Anderson co-owns a sex club and thinks she’s its only vanilla member, until a kink quiz tells her she’s a Domme and an app matches her with Beau Grant, her friend’s son and twelve years younger. The fourth Salacious Players’ Club book flips Priest’s power dynamic: an older woman learning to take control, and a younger man who wants her to.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
See Mercy on Amazon →
Birthday Girl by Penelope Douglas
Jordan is nineteen when she and her boyfriend move into his father’s house. Pike is thirty-eight. The shared home, the family loyalty and the slow burn of two people pretending not to notice each other made this the forbidden romance BookTok still argues about. Less religious guilt, more domestic guilt, and the same sense that every touch costs something. Our books like Birthday Girl and Credence list goes further down this road.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See Birthday Girl on Amazon →
Tempt by Melanie Harlow
She spends one night with a mystery man, then finds out who he is: the father of the groom at her ex’s wedding. Harlow writes older heroes with a tenderness that keeps the age gap from feeling cheap, and the forbidden family connection gives it the same “we cannot be seen” tension Tyler and Poppy live in.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See Tempt on Amazon →
Welcome to the Dark Side by Giana Darling
Zeus Garro is the president of a motorcycle club, and he has known Lou Lou since she was a child. Once she’s an adult, the attraction between them is the most forbidden thing in their world. Darker and angstier than Priest, with the same conviction that wanting someone you shouldn’t is worth whatever it costs. Check the content notes before you start.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See Welcome to the Dark Side on Amazon →
The Kiss Thief by L.J. Shen
A young woman from a powerful family is forced to marry an older man who happens to be her father’s enemy. Shen’s books run on cruelty that turns into devotion, and this one has the same sacred-object quality Simone gives Poppy: a heroine treated as a prize who refuses to stay one. Dark, dramatic and a fast read.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See The Kiss Thief on Amazon →
A Queer Clergy Romance for Priest Readers
Never After by Alexis Hall
One of Alexis Hall’s 2026 standalones. Micha Dashwood is ill and destitute in London, caught up in sex work and opium, when Reverend Thomas Mandeville, a grieving clergyman, takes him in. If Saint is your favorite Bell book, this is the next stop: a man of God, a man the world has written off and a love neither of them is supposed to be allowed. Expect mature themes.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Never After on Amazon →
Read Next: Hotter Picks From Fractal Enigma
Simone proved that the church, the collar and the confession can carry a romance. Our shelf takes that and keeps going: a pastor and the man the church told he was a sin, a pastor’s wife who finally walks out of the parsonage, and two age-gap romances where the “no” is family. All Inferno, all with a guaranteed HEA.
Pastor’s Prize — Chase Power
The closest thing to Priest we have published, and it’s MM. Ten years ago the church told Noah Pierce that being gay was a sin. He believed them, left Millfield and nearly didn’t survive Pittsburgh. Now he’s back, broke, sleeping in his childhood attic, and the new pastor is the one man in town who looks at him like he’s worth saving, and then like something else entirely. The back pew, the confessional kneeler, a rosary that isn’t used for prayer, and a slow burn that ends on its knees.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Forbidden Romance, Praise Kink, Age Gap, Authority Figure, Small-Town Secrets, Secret Relationship, Closeted, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort
Start reading Pastor’s Prize →
The Older Brother Clause — Isla Wilde
She dated the charming younger brother. She should have chosen the dangerous older one. Five years after Stellan Wren warned her his brother couldn’t be trusted, Tamsin takes a restoration contract at her ex’s family estate and finds the cold, formidable older brother has spent every one of those years wanting her. MF, a 29/43 age gap, a secret affair under the family roof and a hero who fell first. Free with Kindle Unlimited.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Ex’s Older Brother, Age Gap, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Secret Affair, Possessive Hero, Forbidden Romance, Slow Burn, He Fell First
Start reading The Older Brother Clause →
The Pastor’s Wife Is Leaving — Blair Lennox
Priest from the other side of the pulpit. For years Bethany watched the bar across the street from the parsonage. The night she leaves with a suitcase and a grocery bag of shoes, the woman who owns it unlocks the door, pours her a whiskey she doesn’t know how to drink and hands her the key to the apartment upstairs. A sapphic small-town romance about a good woman who has never once been allowed to want anything, a landlord with rules and a first time that comes late and all at once.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Bi Awakening, Later-in-Life First Time, Landlord/Tenant, Small Town, Secret Relationship, Mutual Pining, Rules Arrangement, Praise Kink
Start reading The Pastor’s Wife Is Leaving →
Wrong Daddy — Jace Wilder
Leo Brennan is twenty-three, freshly dumped and looking for a bad decision. A masked hookup app gives him Silas Vance, forty-eight, newly divorced and radiating control. Then Leo finds out who Silas is: his ex-boyfriend’s father. One night of revenge turns into an arrangement neither of them can quit, and the forbidden line is family, the way it is in Birthday Girl. MM, daddy kink, praise and a secret that can’t stay one. Free with Kindle Unlimited.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Age Gap, Daddy Kink, Secret Relationship, Grumpy/Sunshine, Praise Kink, Hurt/Comfort, Forbidden Romance
For more older-partner forbidden romance across every pairing, see our best age gap romance books guide.
FAQ: Books Like Priest
Do you need to read the Priest series in order?
Read Priest before Midnight Mass, since the novella continues Tyler and Poppy’s story. Sinner, Saint and Devil each follow a different Bell and work as standalones, though the family threads land harder in publication order.
Which book should I read first after Priest?
Sinner if you want more of the Bells and more religious tension, Saint if you want MM, Praise if you want the praise-and-power dynamic outside Simone’s world. Devil is the newest and needs no prior reading.
How spicy is Priest?
Very. It’s erotic romance with frequent, graphic scenes, several of them in the church, and it uses religious language and imagery on purpose. Five chilis on our scale. Readers sensitive to sacrilege or to the backstory of clergy abuse referenced in the book should check content notes first.
Is Priest being made into a movie or TV show?
There’s no adaptation we can confirm. The Priest news in 2026 is on the page: the Bloom Books reissues and the new standalone Devil, released August 11.
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