TENDING HER GARDEN
A Sapphic Age-Gap Romance • by Aurora North
📖 Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Age Gap, Ice Queen/Sunshine, Forced Proximity, Touch Starved, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Power Exchange, Class Difference, Slow Burn
She’s the Ice Queen who’s forgotten how to feel. She’s the gardener who sees through every wall. Eight weeks. One garden. A love that changes everything.
Elena Rostova built her empire on control. As one of Montecito’s most powerful venture capitalists, she’s spent seven years behind walls of her own making—ever since the woman she trusted destroyed everything. Her estate is a showpiece. Her garden is a graveyard. And her heart is a locked door she has no intention of opening.
Maya Brooks has dirt under her nails and dreams bigger than her bank account. When the ice queen of Montecito hires her to transform a dead garden into something worthy of the season’s biggest charity gala, Maya knows she should keep her head down and do the job. But Elena isn’t what she expected—beneath the frost is a woman so touch-starved, so desperately lonely, that Maya can’t help wanting to crack her open.
What starts as loaded glances and accidental touches becomes something neither of them can control. Elena hasn’t let anyone close in years. Maya has a history of falling for people who need saving. And when a jealous neighbor threatens to destroy everything Elena has built, they’ll have to decide if what’s growing between them is worth the risk.
The garden was supposed to be a transaction. Instead, it became a love story.
🔥 Exclusive Bonus Content
Want more Elena and Maya? Get an exclusive bonus chapter that’s too hot for Amazon — set one year after the epilogue, featuring their anniversary celebration in the jasmine pergola. Champagne, candlelight, and a night that proves some fires only burn hotter with time.
⚠️ Content Warning
This book contains explicit FF sexual content including multiple intimate scenes with power exchange dynamics. Additional content includes: betrayal trauma recovery, panic attacks, social anxiety, emotional manipulation by secondary characters, and discussion of past toxic relationships. All relationships are fully consensual between adults.
Reader discretion advised. This book is intended for mature audiences only.
Read Chapter One Free
Click to Expand Chapter One
The garden was dying, and Elena Rostova didn’t care.
She stood on the terrace of her Montecito estate, coffee growing cold in her hands, and surveyed the wreckage of what had once been her pride. The roses had withered months ago. The jasmine pergola was a skeleton of brown vines. Even the lavender—supposedly unkillable—had given up the ghost sometime around February.
Seven years ago, this garden had been featured in Architectural Digest. Now it looked like a crime scene.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this book part of a series?
Tending Her Garden is a complete standalone novel with a guaranteed happily ever after. No cliffhangers, no need to read other books first. Elena and Maya get their full HEA by the final page.
How spicy is this book?
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno Heat. This is an explicit sapphic romance with multiple intimate scenes featuring praise kink, power exchange dynamics, and emotional intensity. The steam builds through the slow burn before igniting into scorching territory.
What’s the age gap?
Elena is 48, Maya is 28—a twenty-year age gap. The dynamic is explored thoughtfully, with both characters addressing it directly and finding it enhances rather than complicates their connection.
Is there a happily ever after?
Yes! Elena and Maya get their HEA. The book ends with them building a life together, publicly claimed, deeply in love. No cliffhangers, guaranteed happy ending.
More from Aurora North
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The walls were thin. The excuses were thinner.
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She said 'good girl' and I forgot my own name.
Her New Roommate
She built walls to keep the cold out. She was the warmth that got in.