Space Books in Order

The Space series is built around one couple, Drake and Lacey, but the books never keep them in one emotional or physical place for long. What begins as a Chicago new adult romance keeps opening outward into bigger questions about ambition, class, family, and identity. If you like relationship-centered series that let the couple stay together while life changes around them, this one does that well.

The Space Between starts with a collision that should not really happen. Drake comes from money and politics. Lacey is a Chicago singer with opera dreams and a much harder road behind her. Their chemistry is immediate, but the point of the book is not just attraction. It is the problem of what happens when two people from sharply different worlds see something true in each other before either life is ready to make room for it.

Chicago gives the first book its pulse.

That matters because Smith uses the city as more than scenery. The fundraiser world Drake moves through and the spaces where he meets Lacey are part of the tension, not just the backdrop. The relationship is always carrying questions about class, safety, expectation, and who gets to dream without apology. Lacey's music gives the series another strong thread. Her voice and ambition are not side details. They are the reason later books can test the romance in ways that feel earned.

In The Dividing Line, the story moves to Paris, and the atmosphere changes with it. Drake is no longer the guy who seems to have every advantage. Lacey's opera career is taking off, and he is the one wondering whether he has put his own future on hold. That shift makes the second book less about falling in love and more about staying in love when success does not arrive evenly. It is a smart continuation because it lets both characters be generous, selfish, scared, and hopeful in turn.

Drake's Destiny takes the emotional center somewhere even deeper. The novella follows Drake and Lacey to South Korea as Drake looks for his birth mother and tries to make peace with the part of his story that never felt finished. Told through Lacey's eyes, it turns the series toward adoption, belonging, and the difference between being loved and fully knowing where you came from. That gives the trilogy a satisfying shape. It begins with desire, grows through shared adult choices, and lands on identity.

Music and motion carry these books.

So does tenderness. The tone is emotional, steamy, and often a little wistful, especially when Drake and Lacey are trying to choose each other without pretending the world around them is simple. Read this series for the city-to-city sweep, for Lacey's artistic drive, and for Drake's ongoing search to become more than the life that was planned for him. It is romance, yes, but it is also very much about finding room to breathe between love, history, and the future.