Free with Kindle Unlimited
Book Details
Pairing: FF
Heat: 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 Inferno (5/5)
Length: 98,000 words
Series: Hawthorn Falls #1
Available: Kindle Unlimited
Tropes
Age Gap ● Praise Kink ● Boss/Employee ● Small Town ● Found Family ● Forced Proximity ● Hurt/Comfort ● Slow Burn ● Mentor/Protégée ● Grumpy/Sunshine
She walked into Marisol’s bakery with flour-dusted freckles, a fake résumé, and exactly enough charm to make a 48-year-old widow forget she’d sworn off pretty things.
Marisol Vega is forty-eight, widowed, and done with mistakes. She runs the only bakery in Hawthorn Falls the way her mother ran it before her — with silver at her temples, a chef’s jacket on her shoulders, and absolutely no patience for trouble. She has not let herself want anything for seven years.
Sienna Lane is twenty-four, blonde, freckled, and on the run. She has a fake résumé, a borrowed knife roll, and a story about Manhattan she will not tell. She walks into Marisol’s bakery on a cold Wednesday in October looking for a job. Marisol clocks the lie in twelve seconds. She hires her anyway.
What starts as a kitchen apprenticeship becomes the slowest, hottest, most carefully-tended fall either woman has ever taken — with one chef’s jacket on a hook, a freezer full of laminated dough, a small queer found family pulling around them, and a corporate bakery chain trying to take the building out from under them by spring.
The Baker’s Good Girl is a 98,000-word age-gap sapphic romance set in small-town Vermont. Heat 5/5. Praise kink, hurt/comfort, slow burn, found family, and a HEA that lands with the wedding ring on the right finger. KU exclusive. First in the Hawthorn Falls series.
You’ll love this if you enjoy:
- ✓ Slow-burn age-gap sapphic romance where the older woman is competent, kind, and absolutely undone by the younger one
- ✓ Praise kink written as the antidote to a younger woman’s history of having her work stolen
- ✓ Small-town queer found family — retired English teachers, lesbian pastors, ex-Marine neighbors with golden retrievers
- ✓ Boss/employee with consent handled with care, not slop
- ✓ Corporate-villain stakes that resolve with a magazine cover, an Eater investigation, and a slate sign over a doorway
- ✓ A patisserie, written by someone who clearly understands lamination
- ✓ Wedding epilogue in a back garden in August, with a Pastor named Ruth and a dog named Biscuit
Content Warnings
This is an explicit, high-heat romance for adult readers (18+).
- Explicit on-page sex (FF, age-gap, praise kink, light bondage with apron ties, strap-on, light impact play with check-ins, light D/s dynamics)
- On-page consent and aftercare throughout
- Past trauma referenced: stolen creative work, professional retaliation, blackballing, a manipulative ex-employer (off-page, no on-page violence)
- Brief mention of past suicidal ideation (one paragraph, framed as a year-ago thought, not graphic)
- Grief and loss of a parent (off-page, processed through memory)
- Corporate harassment and intimidation (cease-and-desist, faked health-inspection, sabotage)
- Brief alcohol use in social settings
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Flour on the Intake Form
The ovens came on at four, and by four forty-seven I had a tray of croissants turning gold and a bad feeling in my chest that hadn’t named itself yet.
Thirty years in this kitchen, and I could still tell a good morning from a bad one by the smell of the first bake. Good mornings smelled like butter and patience. Bad mornings smelled like butter and something else — something burnt at the edges before the oven had any right to be burning anything. This morning smelled like butter and the phone I hadn’t answered.
Eli had called at three-fifty, which meant Eli had been awake since three-thirty, which meant Eli had decided something he wasn’t going to unsettle on. My godfather was eighty years old and built like a closed fist. When he made up his mind, the universe generally saved itself the trouble of arguing.
I pulled the croissants out with my bare hand and the oven mitt I’d forgotten I wasn’t wearing, and I swore in two languages, and then I set the tray down and picked up the phone.
He answered on the first ring.
“I figured you were busy.”
“I was burning my hand.”
“Good morning, m’ija.”
“Eli.”
A pause. On his end, the sound of a kettle. He still used the stovetop one my mother had given him forty-two years ago. It whistled through the phone like a far-off train.
“I signed with Cedarbrook yesterday.”
I set the bench scraper down very carefully on the steel counter, because if I kept hold of it I was going to do something stupid with it.
“When do you move.”
“Monday.”
“Tres días, Eli.”
“Cuatro. Today doesn’t count.”
“Today absolutely counts.”
“Today I’m still here.”
I closed my eyes. The walk-in compressor kicked on behind me, a low steady hum I’d had a relationship with longer than I’d had with my ex-husband. Through the front windows the sky had started the slow bleed from black to bruise. Main Street was empty. The one traffic light blinked amber. Somewhere on the river road, a plow was being started against a forecast that wouldn’t earn its keep for another three weeks.
“The building,” I said.
“I know.”
“You told them.”
“I told my lawyer. He told them. He had to, m’ija, it’s in the will, you know how this goes.”
“Ninety days.”
“Ninety days from Monday.”
I did the math I’d done a hundred times in the past twenty years and had, apparently, done wrong every single time, because it had always ended with Eli dying peacefully in the apartment above the hardware store and me sobbing into a pie crust and buying the building outright with whatever miserable inheritance was left. It had not, in any of my rehearsals, ended with Eli hale as a bull and moving to Cedarbrook Assisted Living Community of His Own Free Will to play bridge with a woman named Rosa.
“Is it Rosa.”
“It’s partly Rosa.”
“Increíble.“
“Pues, she’s good at cards.”
“I bet she is.”
The kettle reached him. He took it off the heat. I heard the pour, the saucer, the one sugar he always pretended was half. Eli had outlived two wives and a doctor. I was not going to talk him out of a woman who beat him at bridge.
“I’ll match,” I said.
“You’ll try.”
“I’ll match, Eli.”
“You’ll try, m’ija.” His voice had gone gentle, which was always how I knew I was losing. “I’m giving you first right. I’m giving you ninety days. I’m not giving you a miracle. If someone comes in above what you can raise, you and I are going to sit down and talk about what the building is worth to you and what it’s worth to me, and we are going to be honest with each other, and we are going to do the thing your mother would have done, which is keep the lights on and not set ourselves on fire for pride.”
“She would have set herself on fire for pride.”
“She absolutely would have. And I would have stood in the doorway with a bucket.” He paused. “Don’t burn yourself on pride, m’ija. Also don’t burn yourself on the oven. That’s two different things.”
“The oven was already done. I was careless.”
“Mm.“
He let the silence work. Eli could conduct silence the way other men conducted choirs.
“I have an interview at ten,” I said finally.
“The knife-roll girl.”
“How do you know about the knife-roll girl.”
“Hal told Dottie, Dottie told Pastor Ruth, Pastor Ruth told me over the fence yesterday afternoon. A young lady checked into The Birch with a duffel and a knife roll and no return ticket.”
“Jesus Christ, Eli.”
“Small town, m’ija.”
“I’m aware of the size of the town.”
“Hire her.”
“I haven’t met her.”
“Hire her anyway. You need help. I’m done sleeping in that apartment. You’re going to need somebody in the shop who can fold a croissant while you and I go to war with a chain bakery.”
“There’s no chain bakery.”
“There will be.”
I didn’t answer that. Eli had been reading the Wall Street Journal in a rocking chair for thirty-five years and he had never once been wrong about the direction of weather.
“Go teach her to fold,” he said. “Call me Sunday. Bring me one of the apple turnovers when you do.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, preciosa. Don’t drop the pan.”
He hung up.
I stood in my kitchen with a slightly blistered hand and a tray of croissants that had, miraculously, come out perfectly, and I watched the first gray ease into the windows over the espresso bar, and I thought: ninety days.
Then I thought: knife roll.
Then I went and got the ice.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want the After-Hours Bonus Chapter?
The Morning After the Soft Opening — what happened upstairs at three a.m. on the night of the wedding. Four orgasms, ice from the walk-in, and a Spanish lesson Sienna will not soon forget. Too hot for retail. Free on this site.
More from Aurora North
Browse the full Aurora North catalog of high-heat sapphic romances.
Her Intern’s Protocol
She's the most feared VP in the building. I'm the intern who can't stop breaking her rules.
Good Girl Next Door
She moved next door. She moved mountains.
Through the Lens
She hired a photographer and caught feelings instead of the bouquet.
Bed & Breakfast & Benefits
She came to sell the B&B. She slept with the handywoman instead.
Practice Girlfriend
She just wanted to practice dating. She didn't plan on catching feelings for the teacher.
Bridesmaid’s Best Mistake
She was supposed to keep the bride out of trouble. She slept with her sister instead.
Never Miss a Release
Get bonus chapters, early covers, and new release alerts straight to your inbox.