Description

About Last Call for the Ice Queen

She runs the hotel like a Swiss watch. The new consultant just took it off her wrist.

Ten weeks. One dead bar. One rule: not in the hotel.

Natalie Price is forty-five, the operations director of the Bellwether Hotel, and the reason three hundred people check their cuffs when she walks into a room. They call her the Ice Queen. It’s printed on a mug. She signed the purchase order. She also built the Lantern Room, the most beautiful lobby bar in the city, and last night it took in four hundred and twelve dollars.

Simone Brooks is thirty-three, owns the loudest little bar on Carver Street, and has been hired over Natalie’s head to fix it. She knows every regular by name. She checks the rim of every glass with her thumb. She takes Natalie’s room apart in fifteen minutes, kindly, and tells her: Nobody stays where they’re only allowed to look.

Natalie does this properly. She signs herself off Simone’s contract before she lets herself be kissed. Then she writes terms. Term six: not in the hotel.

It lasts ten hours.

Because the woman who decides everything for everyone has never once been asked what she wants, and Simone doesn’t pour until somebody orders. Last call, Price. Tell me what you want.

A blizzard, one bed and a bar full of stranded strangers later, it isn’t a fling. But Simone is about to open a second bar that will take every evening she has for nine months, and Natalie, who has never been able to tell being loved from being needed, does the worst thing a careful woman can do. She drafts a contract instead of asking a question.

Last Call for the Ice Queen is a high-heat sapphic age-gap workplace romance with an ice queen who learns to ask, a bartender who never begs, a watch that comes off, dual first-person POV, no cheating, and an HEA guaranteed.

Why readers will love it

An ice queen operations director, forty-five, who has never let anyone take her apart, and the bartender twelve years younger who makes her ask for it out loud
“I don’t pour till somebody orders. Last call, Price. Tell me what you want.”
A recusal signed before the first kiss, six written terms, and “not in the hotel” lasting exactly ten hours
A blizzard, five hundred stranded guests, a punch-bowl bar and an on-call suite with one bed
An office with the blinds down, a liquor room with a lock, and a marble bar top after closing
Two women who both switch: “Good girl” for the woman who runs the building, “No jokes” for the one who talks through everything
A real third-act mistake, a real apology, and three words that only count if nobody asked for them

Audiobook edition details

Format: Digital audiobook, digitally narrated (not an ebook or paperback). Please listen to the sample before purchasing. Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno. Audience: Adults 18+.

Content notes

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including oral, fingering, a strap-on, edging and orgasm control, light restraint, light spanking and hair-pulling, semi-public workplace scenes, praise and dominance), strong language, and alcohol in a bar setting. Also includes a consultant and client workplace relationship (with a formal recusal), a twelve-year age gap between adults, a past controlling relationship with financial exploitation (off-page), a parentified childhood and family money stress, and a temporary breakup. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

Read Chapter One free · Prefer to read? See the ebook edition · More books by Aurora North