Off The Clock

A Lyric Agency Novel

FF Sapphic Escort/Client Romance

by Aurora North

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Length: 46,000 words

Tropes: Escort/Client, Hidden Identity, Transactional to Real, Touch Starved, Slow Burn, Forbidden Romance, Age Gap (33/37), Grief Recovery, Wealthy Client/Working Girl, Praise as Devotion

She was the most expensive girlfriend money could buy. Until she wasn’t.

Camille Laurent is the top earner at The Lyric — a discreet, invitation-only Manhattan agency specializing in girlfriend-experience services for high-net-worth women. She has, in nine years, never broken a single one of her own rules: no client more than eight sessions, no real name, no off-the-clock contact, no client at her apartment, and never, ever, come for real.

Avery Sloan is a thirty-seven-year-old hedge fund managing director with a partnership vote in twelve weeks, a publicly imploded engagement, and a body she hasn’t let anyone touch in over a year. She books a weekend escort for her best friend’s wedding upstate. What she gets is a flawless professional in a slip dress at the Carlyle who can read a room like she reads a balance sheet.

Avery doesn’t want the slip dress.

Avery doesn’t want the script.

Avery wants the woman underneath.

What follows is the slow, scorching, devastating undoing of two women who should have known better — a wedding in Rhinebeck, a bath at three a.m. with a hand that knows exactly what it’s doing, eight standing Wednesdays that turn into a Thursday off the books, a hidden name said into a pillow, a photograph in a folder, an agency’s arithmetic, a sister with eleven thousand dollars and an opinion, and one quiet hedge-fund executive who has decided, against any reasonable expectation, that she would rather have a small life with the right woman than a corner office with the wrong one.

The lie is that this is a transaction.

The truth is that neither of them, by the end, can afford to keep paying for what they want.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ FF sapphic slow-burn with a sex worker / wealthy client power dynamic
✅ Touch-starved professional women who have not been allowed to want anything in over a year
✅ Hidden identity that becomes the central act of intimacy in the book
✅ Manhattan old money, Carlyle hotels, charcoal coats, vintage Cartiers, Hudson Valley estates
✅ A morally complicated agency mother figure who is, somehow, not the villain
✅ The kind of dirty talk that is, technically, just a woman telling another woman stay with me
✅ Sisters, assistants, and brothers who carry the people they love without ever quite saying so
✅ Choosing a small ordinary life over the chair you’ve been climbing toward your whole life
✅ HEA absolutely guaranteed — registry-office wedding, Hudson Valley honeymoon, the horse

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⚠️ Content Warning

This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, oral, fingering, strap-on play, praise dynamics, performance-of-orgasm-as-emotional-armor, real orgasms as emotional surrender), strong language, sex work as a profession depicted with care and without moralizing, on-page coercive financial structures (NDA, brokerage in escrow, threatened photograph as leverage), grief over a dead parent, recent public infidelity by an ex-fiancée, brief on-page contemplation of disordered drinking, and one very specific recurring conversation about money. Intended for readers 18+. HEA absolutely guaranteed.

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Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One

Cam’s POV — Manhattan, present day

The trick to a good lie is starting with something true.

I learned that at nineteen, in the back of a town car on Sixth Avenue, with a man twice my age telling me his wife didn’t understand him. I told him that must be lonely. He believed me, because it was lonely, and because I meant it. The fact that I didn’t care about his loneliness specifically didn’t matter. The truth was in the room. He paid for two more hours.

Fourteen years later, I’m in a different town car, on a different avenue, and a woman named Genevieve is crying into a glass of Sancerre at the Carlyle while I hold her hand across the white tablecloth and tell her, of course you’re not too much, sweetheart, he just couldn’t keep up with you.

It’s true. He couldn’t.

It’s also a line I’ve used eleven times this year.

“You’re so good to me, Camille,” she whispers. Mascara at the corners of her eyes. Three-carat solitaire on her finger that she keeps turning. “I don’t know what I’d do without these dinners.”

“You’d be fine,” I tell her, and I squeeze her hand and let my thumb stroke the inside of her wrist, slow, the way I know puts her shoulders down. “You’d be fine, and you’d be beautiful, and someone would notice. Someone already does.”

She looks up at me through wet lashes and laughs, and the laugh has a wobble in it, and the wobble is the part I’m working for. The wobble is what brings her back next month. It’s not the sex. It’s never the sex with Genevieve. It’s the wobble — the moment she lets go of being the woman with the husband and the apartment on Park and the daughter at Brearley, and just exists for an hour as a person who is being looked at like she matters.

That’s what I sell.

Sex is included. Sex is the wrapper. The actual product is the look across the table.

“Camille,” she says.

“I’m here.”

“Will you come up?”

“If you want me to.”

She wants me to. I knew that before she asked. I knew it when she ordered the second glass instead of asking for the check. I order one more round anyway, because the rhythm of leaving with her too quickly would feel transactional, and the whole point is that she doesn’t have to feel it.

The whole point is that she gets to forget what I am for ninety more minutes.

She lives on the thirty-second floor of a building on Fifth that has a doorman who does not look at me. He’s been trained not to. Genevieve fumbles the key card twice and laughs at herself, and I catch her wrist and slide it through the reader for her, and she leans back against my chest in the elevator and exhales like she’s been holding it all night.

I let her.

I am six inches taller than her in these heels. I smell like the perfume she once told me reminded her of her grandmother’s garden in Provence. My lipstick is a shade called Discretion, which I find funny in a way I do not let show. My hair is curled the way she likes it. I am wearing a slip dress in champagne silk because she once said, two sessions ago, that her husband used to bring home women in red and she always knew, and I never once again that year wore red to her bookings.

Details.

The job is details.

In her bedroom I undress her slowly, the way a husband would have, twenty years ago, when he still wanted to. I kiss the back of her neck. I unzip her with one hand and catch the fabric with the other so it doesn’t pool wrong on the rug. I tell her she’s beautiful, and I mean a version of it — she is beautiful, in the specific way of women who have had enough money for long enough that their skin is a kind of currency. I tell her she’s wanted, and I let her feel my hands shake a little when I cup her breasts, because tonight Genevieve needs to feel like I want her, not the other way around.

The shaking is a choice. I’ve practiced it. I can do it on either hand.

She comes the first time on my fingers, against the wall by her dresser, with her face pressed into the side of my throat. She comes the second time on my mouth, in her bed, with her hands in my hair and a sound coming out of her like grief. I let her ride my face until her thighs go loose on either side of my head, and then I crawl up the bed and kiss her with her own taste still on my tongue, because she likes that, because most husbands won’t, because that’s a thing she gets here that she doesn’t get at home.

I don’t ask for anything back.

Genevieve never reciprocates. Genevieve is paying for ninety minutes of being the only woman in the world. The script does not include her getting on her knees for the help.

This is fine. This is what she ordered. The agency knows. I know. Margaux knows.

Afterward, I lie on top of the covers with her, in a robe she keeps for me in her guest closet, and stroke her hair while she dozes. At eleven forty-five I check the discreet platinum watch on the nightstand — hers, but the time is for me — and at eleven fifty I kiss her temple and whisper that I have to go before her driver gets confused. She makes a small sad noise. I tell her I’ll see her next month. She believes me, because I always do.

In the elevator down, alone, I check my phone.

Two missed calls from Margaux. One text:

New booking. Need you in my office at 9. Big one.

I look at myself in the mirrored elevator wall. My lipstick is gone. My hair is wrecked in the specific way that says recently fucked. My eyes, in the soft gold light, look like someone else’s eyes.

That’s the other trick.

The trick to a good lie is also that you have to come back, eventually, to whatever you actually are.

I just don’t do that part on the clock.

The agency takes up the top two floors of a townhouse on East Sixty-Third, between Park and Lex, with a brass plaque on the door that says LYRIC CONSULTING and a buzzer system that does not, unless you know better, suggest that anything is happening here at all.

Anything is, in fact, always happening here.

I come in at eight fifty-two, which is an unforgivable three minutes early by Margaux’s standards — we are not eager, Camille, we are inevitable — so I stop in the lobby coffee room and pour a cup I don’t want and read three pages of a magazine I’m not looking at, and at eight fifty-nine and forty seconds I take the stairs.

Margaux’s office is on the top floor, behind a door that doesn’t have her name on it. The door is paneled walnut, very quiet on its hinges, and behind it sits a woman who has been in this business since I was in pigtails, and who is currently watching me over the rim of a cappuccino like she’s deciding whether I’m late.

“Sit,” she says.

I sit.

Margaux Vance is sixty-one years old and looks forty-five and operates as if she is, internally, somewhere around eight hundred. Silver hair cut at her jaw. Skin that has been kept like a violin. A black cashmere turtleneck, which she wears in every season and which means absolutely nothing about the weather. A wedding ring she still wears, twelve years after a husband she does not discuss.

She founded The Lyric the year I was born.

She does not love me, but I am one of seven people in the world she does not actively dislike, and that, in this room, is everything.

“How was Genevieve?” she asks.

“Wobbly. She’ll book again before the month is out.”

“Good.”

“And tipped well.”

“They do.”

She slides a folder across the desk. Cream-colored, monogrammed, three pages thick. A new file. Margaux still does it on paper, even though we have a system that costs more annually than my apartment, because Margaux believes — correctly — that paper does not get hacked.

“Avery Sloan,” she says. “Thirty-seven. Sloan-Briggs Capital.”

I open the folder. Press headshot, clipped from a Bloomberg feature. A woman in a charcoal blazer with sandy-brown hair cut short and blunt, gray eyes looking just past the camera, mouth not quite smiling.

“Hedge fund?”

“Her father’s. She runs the Manhattan office. Brother in London. There’s a partnership vote in twelve weeks that will, if she takes it, make her the first woman to run that fund. Old money, old families, old assholes.”

“And she wants —”

“A weekend.” Margaux taps the second page with one lacquered nail. “Friday through Sunday. Wedding upstate, Saturday night, the bride is an old college friend, a great deal of the Manhattan finance world will be in the room. She wants a date she does not have to explain. She wants the date to be flawless. She wants no follow-up.”

“Single use.”

“That’s what she’s asking for. That’s not what we’re going to give her.”

I look up.

Margaux’s smile is a small, dry thing. “She’s never booked before. She’s gay, she’s recently single — public breakup, you’ll find it in a Google search she’s pretending didn’t happen — and she has more money than God and no time to date. She is, if I am reading this correctly, exactly the client who, properly handled, becomes a standing reservation for the next decade.”

“You want me to charm her.”

“I want you to ruin her for anyone else.”

I huff a laugh. “Subtle.”

“I have never in my life been subtle, Camille. I want her on a monthly. I want her thinking about you on Tuesday afternoons with her hand under her desk. I want her ex-fiancée to die a little every time she sees Avery’s Instagram. I want her to feel, by the end of this weekend, that she has been seen for the first time since whoever broke her heart broke it, and I want her to know she can get that feeling on retainer for the cost of approximately one of her quarterly bonuses.” She pauses. Sips. “Do you understand the assignment.”

“I understand the assignment.”

“Good. Vetting drink Thursday at the Carlyle, six p.m. Friday morning car service to Rhinebeck. You’ll be sharing the Beekman suite. I have already approved a wardrobe budget.”

She slides a black card across the desk.

I take it, because I always take it, because Margaux does not actually offer things, she places them, and you accept them, and you do not say thank you because Margaux does not require gratitude, only execution.

“One more thing.” She closes the folder. Folds her hands. “The notes from Vivian were unusual.”

“Unusual how.”

“She said the client was quiet.”

I wait.

“That word, Camille. Quiet. In our world, that word means watchful. It means a woman who has spent her whole life reading rooms and not being read. She will not be charmed the way Genevieve is charmed. She will see the dress, she will see the perfume, she will see the laugh. You will need to give her something she cannot get anywhere else, and you will need to make her feel that it is hers and only hers.”

“You want me to be real with her.”

The smile again. Smaller. “I want you to make her believe you’re being real with her. There is a difference. I trust you remember it.”

I hold her eyes.

“I remember it,” I say.

“Good girl.”

It is the only term of affection she has ever used with me, and she has used it perhaps four times in nine years, and every time it has meant don’t disappoint me.

I think, briefly, about what Margaux said. Quiet.

I think: I can work with quiet.

I have worked with worse.

A weekend. A wedding. A quiet woman with gray eyes who has never booked an escort before in her life, and who will, if I do my job, be booking me twelve times a year for the rest of her foreseeable future.

I think about the look in the Bloomberg photograph. The almost-smile. The slight not-quite of her, like she was somewhere else when the picture was taken.

I think: I can find her. I can find what she’s missing.

It’s what I do.

I am very good at what I do.

Three days from now, I will meet her.

Eight weeks from now, I will be in trouble.

But this morning, in my apartment, with the radiator clicking and the light coming in soft through my one good window, I do not know any of that yet.

This morning, I am only good at my job.

This morning, that is enough.

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The Long Meadow — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Six weeks after the registry-office wedding. October. The Hudson Valley estate. Cat is thirty-four. Sloan is thirty-eight. Sloan’s grandmother’s long counter is still where the architecture of this marriage moves. Sloan puts her on it for forty minutes. After dinner Cat returns the favor with the strap. The horse, somewhere in the meadow, is — in their shared mythology — the only witness. The hottest scene Aurora North has ever written.

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