She’s the Boss: CEO Heroines in Romance
When I was reading Bianca Mori’s One Night at the Penthouse Suite, one of the things that I loved was how unusual it is to read a billionaire romance where the billionaire is the heroine. And Cora Ciacho’s CEO position isn’t wallpaper: she spends the book actively making business decisions and fighting with her board to remain the executive, while trying to negotiate being a higher-earner and from a different class background to her boyfriend, Stephen Cruz.
This read got me thinking: in Romancelandia, heroine attorneys, heroine LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers), and heroine physicians abound, but heroines in the corporate and business world are harder to find. And when a book type is hard to find, it inspires me to make a tag for it. Everyone, say hello to the businesswoman romance heroine tag!
What counts as a businesswoman? Certainly heroines in the corporate world would qualify, whether they are CEOs, VPs, managers, or lower-level employees looking to move up. They can also own and operate their own small businesses. But I’m restricting this tag to stories which explore, in detail, the business aspect of the heroine’s career. If the heroine, say, owns an art gallery, but the entire book is about her joining up with the hero to investigate a forgery, this isn’t the right tag. If she works at a large corporation, but as a programmer, an engineer, or in R&D, she might be a better fit for our STEM Heroine list.
Here are some heroines I’ve identified that fit this list in books which AAR’s reviewers gave DIKs.
Manhunting by Jennifer Crusie
Kate Svensen has a successful career at a management consulting firm and makes oodles of money, but she’s often bored working at her father’s firm and she’s terribly lonely. Kate has given up on love after breaking off three different engagements to losers who were only after her money. Despite this she still wants a husband – a successful, brainy, hardworking man whom she can build an empire with. In desperation she allows her best friend to talk her into creating a plan to snare a man and finds herself at a single’s golf resort where she meets a new string of losers – and Jake.
The Chocolate Thief by Laura Florand
Chocolate executive Cade Corey tries with increasing desperation to persuade Parisian chocolatier Sylvain Marquis to let her use his name on mass-produced upscale chocolates, eventually going so far as to break into his laboratoire. It is molded into the stuff of unexpected, delicious romance.
Tapping the Billionaire by Max Monroe
Kline Brooks is a thirty-four year old billionaire who is suddenly and inexplicably bowled over by his sassy Director of Marketing, Georgia Cummings. Although she’s worked for him for two years, he’s never noticed her sexually, and he’s gobsmacked when he suddenly does.
Match Me If You Can by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
The primary heroine, Annabelle Granger, inherits her grandmother’s senior-citizens matchmaking service, but the real businesswoman to watch here is Portia Powers. This secondary heroine-slash-villain and boss from hell steals every scene she’s in – especially a sexy, wordless rendezvous with the hero’s buddy.
An Heiress to Remember by Maya Rodale
Thirty-six-year-old Beatrice Goodwin returns home to Manhattan in a cloud of scandal, having recently divorced an English duke. Beatrice has no intention of finding another husband. Instead, she dreams of saving her family’s department store, a business her brother is currently running into the ground. Returning Goodwin’s to its former glory means surpassing the success of Wes Dalton’s wildly profitable store, which is located just across the street. The issue is that while Beatrice once loved Wes more than she thought possible, since she turned her back on him in favor of a duke, Wes has been plotting revenge…
Lady Derring Takes a Lover by Julie Anne Long
After being left almost destitute by her perfidious husband, Delilah, Lady Derring, decides to gamble on opening her own business: a boutique boarding house. What’s unexpected is that she takes her husband’s former mistress as her business partner. What’s even more unexpected: that an appealing naval officer, Tristan Hardy, takes rooms with Delilah. He’s looking for smugglers, but could he be finding love instead?
What businesswoman heroines do you love? What kind of businesses would you like to see more of in romance novels?
~ Caroline Russomanno
Brazen and the Beast by Sarah MacLean has an heiress with a shipping company, which she runs.
I read a Jeffe Kennedy erotica recently, Five Golden Rings, that has a Fortune 500 CEO as the protagonist. At the end, she is still a Fortune 500 CEO.
I hate when authors right books where a woman in a high-stress position hates her job and then gives it all up to run her husband’s small company. I think there was a Tessa Bailey book where this was the case.
Sherry Thomas has a lot of heroines who are also businesswomen. In the One in My Heart, the heroine is a professor but also an inventor, holding several patents. Even in her Lady Sherlock series, Charlotte is running her own business.
And Courtney Milan’s The Duke Who Didn’t has a heroine who is turning her father’s sauce into an empire (though she’s just at the start).
All of these are so good! When questions like this pop up, I immediately go blank- even though I have read about half of them. Thank you for the reminders.
Marriage of Inconvenience by Penny Reid. Heroine is heir to a pharmaceutical company and struggles to take over the role. I love the hero, Dan, in this one.
In My Lord and Spymaster by Joanna Bourne, the heroine is the daughter of the owner of a shipping company who basically runs it for him unacknowledged.
I adore Jess, in My Lord and Spymaster. Bourne’s heroines are always so wonderfully in charge of themselves.
Jess is my favorite! I love that she not only runs the company, but created the accounting system they use.
She’s also a first rate lock cracker and “second story man” or woman.
There is SOME historical novel where the heroine owns an outfitter – a company which sets you up with equipment for expeditions. It could be Courtney Milan? Anybody recognize this?
Are you thinking of Justine in The Black Hawk by Joanna Bourne? It is her second career after being a spy.
YES! That’s why I couldn’t find it by checking Milan’s backlist!!!
Back in Historical Romances, there’s Never Lie to a Lady by Liz Carlyle whose heroine hands on runs a shipping company. Loved the baby’s nursery in the office designed by Kemble at the end. And (a favorite) Three Weeks with Lady X by Eloisa James whose heroine is an involved-in-every-aspect interior designer…and maybe a lifestyle coach :-)… and is funding her own dowry. Hey! It beats cupcakes.
Three Weeks with Lady X is one of my favorite James!
Oh! Tagging this one reminded me of The Duke I Tempted by Scarlett Peckham, with the heroine encountering the hero when she’s hired for her plant expertise.
Grace Burrowes introduces a female bank auditor in the Rogues to Riches (Wentworth) books. Eleanora Hatfield gets her own book in Forever and a Duke.
Sophie Weston’s Harlequin Presents title Executive Lady sounds like it would be a good fit here. The business is glass manufacturing, but the romance plot pretty much takes over. Challenge, another HP, features an architect. There’s a little more business evident, but it diminishes as the book progresses. Yesterday’s Mirror, also HP, features a woman running the U.K. branch of her father’s company and dealing with a lot of very personal corporate infighting and personal boundary setting.
Weston, like Jayne Ann Krentz, enjoys writing about successful women. I will note that Krentz, a former librarian, has several books featuring librarians (OT — including a male librarian in Ghost Hunter).
A sort-of businesswoman is the writer of a soap opera who originated the concept for the show. The plot of Again forces her to confront some ways in which she is mismanaging the business. The book is by the wonderful Kathleen Gilles Seidel, mentioned elsewhere here in regard to After All These Years and its paint-store owner. She also wrote Don’t Forget to Smile, about a former beauty pageant contestant who runs a bar in very rural Oregon.
Thank you for mentioning Sophie Weston – I like her heroines – yes, she does executive ladies fairly well. I do not remember in which book the work takes a more central role, and where it is just a well drawn part of a character, and the romance takes over.
Oh, I forgot Weston’s More Than a Millionaire. It is a Harlequin Romance in which Lady Abigail is working in a PR firm and holding her own. I think I felt her work was more visible in the plot than in some of the other books, but then publicity issues are also a plot driver in relation to the stepmother and the hero.
Rebel King and Queen Move by Kennedy Ryan . . . Two different MCs but women who found and run their own image management firm.
I wonder if Laura Lee Guhrke, Secret Desires of a Gentleman qualifies. It’s a sweet (pun intended) historical romance, in which the heroine opens her own bakery. I loved reading her various experimentations with new recipes and enjoyed the way that she ran circles around the stuffy hero. Ravishing Heiress has been mentioned, it’s a great book which focuses on how a marriage is very much a partnership. The hero and heroine frequently had to put their heads together to figure out new strategies for their company.
I love that book. Maria and Phillip are divine together.
How has Liberating Lacey not been mentioned yet??? Lacey is a commercial mortgage broker, she’s very good at her job and makes more money than her ex-husband (a social climbing lawyer) and her new boyfriend (a very hot cop). There’s a scene where she and Hunter go through her business stuff and it is awesome.
Love Irresistibly by Julie James has a lawyer heroine, but she’s in a business role (general counsel for a restaurant group who also does business development).
The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly is not a romance but does have romantic elements. It’s set in the late 19th century, and the heroine Fiona starts and runs a massively successful tea business. I think Donnelly was inspired at least to some extent by Emma Harte of A Woman of Substance.
Although a lot of us love Anne Calhoun, I just discovered that Liberating Lacey isn’t in our DB!
I’m not a huge fan of corporate culture in real life or fiction and much prefer reading about scrappy small business owners. As mentioned in this post, Lady Derring Takes a Lover is a great historical romance with an entrepreneurial heroine. I’d also like to add a few more:
1) The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, a FF HR, features not one small business owner heroine but two! Agatha is a widowed print shop owner and her soon-to-be love interest, Penelope, is a beekeeper. Awesome!
2) A Duke in Disguise by Cat Sebastian features a Regency engraver heroine who is a bit prickly, and the cinnamon roll hero is her apprentice. I really could have done without the whole secret dukedom plot, but maybe Sebastian had to play that trope in order to get an MF Regency published. I would have loved the story a lot more if it was a slice of life narrative centering around the challenges of being an engraver having to navigate censorship issues or something.
3) I am totally cheating here because I haven’t read it yet, but the heroine in A Marriage of Equals owns a coffee shop in Regency England. So stoked to read this when my library hold comes in.
4) Jumping over to SF romance, the heroine of Happy Snak owns a restaurant in an alien food court and because of being in the wrong place at the wrong time gets wrangled into being the guardian of a deceased alien’s spirit. She has a business to run, dang it! She doesn’t have time for this spiritual woo-woo stuff! (That’s basically the plot, and it’s a lot of fun.)
One HR with an entrepreneurial heroine I thought I’d like but didn’t was A Shopkeeper for the Earl of Westram. It started off pretty good- how could an antique shop owner dealing in erotic curios not grab my attention?- but it fell into that trap of the Regency heroine having to travel hither and yon without a chaperone because dang it, the heroine has to do something! Plus, the love scenes were rather dull, generic, and cliché for my taste.
What would I like to see more of? How about some heroines who own unusual or nontraditional businesses? I understand the limitations of HR, but CR tends to be a bit confined when it comes to female business owners. Note the preponderance of food, hospitality, and boutique-type businesses (at least according to my cursory observations). A couple of years ago, I met a woman who owned a fencing business (not the illegal kind!!! The kind of fences you put around a house or barn.). When I rang the bell, she came in from the back wearing a plaid shirt and jeans and said, “Sorry, I just got off of the forklift.” She was really nice, businesslike, and all-around awesome. Looking back I think, “Wow! Where’s that woman’s romance story? Sign me up!”
The heroine of After All These Years by Kathleen Gilles Seidel owns the paint store. It’s purely a practical choice, and I love it as a small-town career after reading so many women who own gourmet cupcakieries in mountain towns of 500 residents.
Awesome example! Someday, I’ll have to check it out.
Lol! That’s exactly what I meant by my last paragraph. I have absolutely no problem with cupcake shops, but I sometimes wonder if authors choose these types of businesses because they have a more feminine vibe than running a paint store, fence business, window shade repair (I know a woman and her husband in this line too!), or anything that might involve driving a forklift, getting up on a roof, or *gasp* sweating. Like you said, it’s a practical choice often driven by necessity. Sometimes, it’s because corporate offices give a lot of people a case of the hives. Regardless of the reason, don’t women in grungy work clothes deserve some romance after hours too? :-)
That was kind of my reaction to the department-store-heiress plot. It seems to me now — 10, 35, 50 years on after reading various books with that plot or a variation — to be acquiescing to a gendered idea of which areas of commerce are acceptable for women. If you had asked for my thoughts when I was in my 20s, I would probably have said that it stands to reason women understand shopping and fashion. And a store setting does provide opportunities for lots of interaction with secondary characters in a way that a lot of siloed corporate offices don’t.
I know I have read books in which the heroines ran garages or built buildings or kept the farm or estate going. But their jobs tended to be secondary to the plot even if the businesses were plot-point fulcrums.
Different strokes… I like those big corporate sharks, as long as they can also feature big mean strong sharkettes.
on 3) the business is a minor (well written) part of this excellent book – the heroine can and does run off to do stuff and does not seem to hampered by keeping her shop open. I loved the book, but would not put it in this category. YMMV
JAK is one of the first authors to spring to mind for this, though as already mentioned, most are small businesses. I think Perfect Partners is the one where a heroine with a background in academia inherits a large company & then has to fight the manager to be taken seriously.
A series by four authors features billionaire heroines, though I can’t recall how many of them are active in businesses:
The Price of Scandal (2019) Score, Lucy
The Mogul and the Muscle (2019) Kingsley, Claire
Wild Open Hearts (2019) Nolan, Kathryn
Crazy for Loving You (2019) Grant, Pippa
One more………in 1991 Susan Elizabeth Phillips wrote Hot Shot about a woman and two men who founded a Silicon Valley tech firm. Very hands on. Enya Young gave this one a B+ For some reason- too dry, no gentle humor, too technical – I couldn’t get into this one. I was disappointed because it was SEP and that left an impression.
It’s not her most readable and yet I think it’s one of the best fiction books about what early Silicon Valley felt like.
That is how I remember it too, very good on early Silicon Valley, meh on the actual story in it.
It’s also women’s fiction and not romance which is different than her other works.
Back in the early 2000’s Carly Phillips wrote a series- Hot Zone- about a sports PR firm run by a fellow and his three nieces. All three seemed to have well defined active managerial roles within the firm. I think each story had a problem solved by a different skill set. However, they weren’t reviewed very highly. B-
Since there are nearly 15,000 reviews in our DB, I can’t tag everything, but I try to do anything that’s B and above, so this would fit!
Caroline, LOL. I actually hunted this down through your tag list!! Tags to Find Books You Love…..it was under “Sports Romance” Granted, it was on p.15 but I was darn determined.
SEP’s It Had To Be You has a woman who runs an NFL team, Rachel Gibson’s True Love and Other Disasters has a woman who runs an NHL team. Make Me Stay by Rebecca Brooks has a CEO heroine. In Season of the Wolf, by the fabulous Maria Vale, the heroine is the Alpha and leader of her pack and the company they have.
Here’s a few other books with heroines running a business: Meredith Bancroft is VP of her family’s department store in Paradise by Judith McNaught. There are several scenes with the heroine in the boardroom battling the board of directors. In Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas, Millie helps run her family’s canning factory along with her husband. Finally, Mrs. Treadles in Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series runs the family business. The latest book in the series deals with how the male employees won’t accept a female boss and how Mrs. Treadles deals with the employee’s disrespect and takes control of the company.
Oh, good ones! I can’t believe I forgot Ravishing the Heiress – I always love the sequence where they take the Board of Directors for a ride!
Millie is not the only businesswoman in the Fitzhugh trilogy – Helena in Tempting the Bride runs a publishing house.
Gigi from Private Arrangements is business-oriented as well, but I don’t think it’s the focus of the book.
And Charlotte in the Lady Sherlock series is running her detective business!
Good topic!
I most like women in complex corporations, and in government in senior positions. Really the role reversal from the CEO, or just a bit lower. or both being at a senior level. I enjoy equals, and role reversals in that setting.
And it mattering, not just a background as an irrelevant info that has no impact on the story.
Ainsley Paton does such women well. I do not remember specific titles.
Kelly Hunter has a few in her older series. The Spy who Tamed me is the best example, IMO.
There are not too many I like – mostly, the romance happens and the heroine drops everything for that, which I hate, so I may even stop reading, or skimming the rest, and cannot offer many examples. I forget those books.
For me, a HEA for such a woman includes a realistic way for her to continue using her skills in the complex arena she has mastered, and this is rarely done without some major deus ex Machina plotting (a sudden inheritance, she gets to rule a new “queendom” that allows them to be together, hero and she join forces though the whole conflict up to now would block that…) which irritates me no end. There are few cases where I actually believe that she will be happy farming, or sailing around the world forever, and / or growing babies, or doing macramé…
yes, JAK does businesswomen well, I like her books for that. It is just not my favorite type of business, small one person businesses are fine, I just do not love them.
LOL! :-)
For me, an ideal HEA for a businesswoman would be for her and her love interest to join forces. I know a real-life example of a building contractor’s daughter who married the son of an awning company. They still run their respective family businesses, but have doubled their network, so to speak. It’s a win-win for both of them as neither one has to give up or throw away their dreams. Take note, romance writers!
The first book that popped into my head was Sarah Darlington’s BUT FIRST COFFEE, which neatly inverts the CEO-employee trope. The heroine is the CEO of a chain of specialty coffee shops. The hero is her best barista. There’s some corporate intrigue thrown into the mix too.
Lush Money by Angelina M. Lopez definitely qualifies: it has a self-made billionaire heroine
Just added! Good one!
Quite a few of the heroines in Jayne Ann Krentz books run their own businesses (in Absolutely, Positively a tea and spice business, in Trust Me a catering business, etc.) In Miranda Neville’s The Wild Marquess the heroine has a bookshop with expertise in antique books.