Nicole McLaughlin Books in Order

If you want a fun wedding-venue series: Maybe I Do → Maybe This Time → Maybe for You.
If you prefer military heroes and working heroines: All I Ask → Along Came Us → Should've Been You → Only With You.
If you just want one book to try her style: Maybe I Do or All I Ask are great standalones that still introduce her larger worlds.

Nicole McLaughlin writes small-town contemporary romances where work, family, and friendship are as central as the love story. Many of her books unfold in and around Kansas City, following characters who pour drinks, run businesses, or put on uniforms long before they ever fall into bed. She likes to show what love looks like between people with real schedules and obligations, not just sweeping gestures.

Her path to writing started early. At eight years old she typed out what she proudly called her first full length book, six pages about the birth of her baby sister. She only finished because her mom promised a Rick Astley cassette if she saw the story through. The tape has long since disappeared, but the lesson that stories are worth finishing stuck.

Today she lives in a small town outside Kansas City with her husband and three sons.

When she is not at the keyboard, Nicole works as a wedding and portrait photographer, and that experience shows up everywhere in her fiction. The Whiskey and Weddings series grows from the details she knows by heart, from flower deliveries and nervous families to the way vendors lean on one another during a long season. In books like Maybe I Do, Maybe This Time, and Maybe for You, a boutique distillery called The Stag doubles as workplace, community hub, and the backdrop for second chances.

Her Man Enough novels step away from the altar and into the lives of a National Guard unit and the people connected to them. Stories such as All I Ask, Along Came Us, Should've Been You, and Only With You mix uniforms with day jobs, showing soldiers who own landscaping companies, run gyms, tend cattle, or cook for their friends. The conflicts are grounded in everyday realities like money, health, trauma, and family expectations.

Before writing under her own name, Nicole also published the Hearts and Crafts series as Nicole Michaels, following creative women who turn online lifestyle skills into real-world businesses. Books like Start Me Up and Draw Me Close share the same focus on work, friendship, and community ties that runs through her later series.

Across all of her work she comes back to a few familiar threads. Her heroines are usually competent at something concrete, whether that is running a camera, managing a company, or raising younger siblings on too little sleep. Her heroes often carry visible or invisible scars and have to learn that being strong can include asking for help. Together they navigate found families, complicated pasts, and the awkward, tender conversations that come with trying again.

The tone stays warm, a little bit steamy, and more interested in honest emotion than in perfectly polished people.

If you pick up one of her books, you can expect sharp dialogue, a vivid sense of place, and plenty of small human moments tucked between the bigger romantic beats. And if she is not behind the camera or deep in a draft, there is a good chance she is in the kitchen, trying a new recipe while a historical drama or documentary plays in the background.