Fake Wife, Real Heat

Sapphic Fake Marriage Romance
by Aurora North

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Fake Marriage, Roommates to Lovers, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Domesticity Kink

They said “for appearances.” Then the appearances got very, very real.

Alyx Monroe is six weeks from making partner at a prestigious architecture firm. One problem: she told a white lie about being in a relationship, and now there’s a four-day couples’ retreat where she needs to produce a wife. Fast.

Riley Hart is her roommate of eighteen months. She’s a freelance illustrator who works from home, knows Alyx’s routines, coffee order, and sleep habits. She’s also been quietly in love with Alyx for most of that time and has never said a word.

When Alyx asks Riley to play her wife for the retreat, Riley says yes before the sentence is finished. She tells herself it’s a favor. She knows it’s not.

The retreat goes too well. The partners love Riley. The lie extends — a firm dinner, a client event, a holiday party. They start sleeping in the same bed because it’s “easier.” They start kissing goodbye because it’s “habit.” They start having sex because the tension became physically unbearable and the excuses ran out.

Now they’re living a marriage that doesn’t exist on paper but does in every other way, and the only thing more terrifying than getting caught is admitting the truth: they don’t want to stop.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Sapphic fake marriage that becomes devastatingly real
✅ Roommates to lovers with one bed and mutual pining
✅ “She’s not my wife” to “She’s my wife” energy
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Domesticity as foreplay — the dishes, the cooking, the Tuesday nights
✅ A heroine who builds walls and a love interest who takes them down
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, workplace power dynamics, and depictions of anxiety and emotional avoidance. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: The Lie That Grew Legs

The email arrived at 4:47 PM on a Tuesday, which was exactly the kind of time slot the universe reserved for delivering problems that couldn’t be solved before the end of the workday.

Alyx read it twice. Then a third time, slower, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less catastrophic.

Hi Alyx! Just confirming your cabin assignment for the Calloway Crest Retreat (Sept 12–15). You and your partner are in Birch Cabin — king bed, lake view, absolutely gorgeous. The couples’ wine tasting is Thursday evening and the partner brunch is Sunday morning. Dress code is smart casual. Can’t wait to finally meet your other half! — Lisa, on behalf of Vivian Whitfield

Your other half.

Alyx closed her laptop, pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, and contemplated the series of increasingly stupid decisions that had delivered her to this exact moment.

Eight months ago. A firm happy hour at that overpriced whiskey bar in Midtown. Three bourbons in, Jordan Pace had leaned across the table with that particular smile she weaponized in client meetings and said, loud enough for Vivian and both founding partners to hear, “Alyx, do you actually do anything besides work? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you mention a single human being you spend time with voluntarily.”

It had landed the way Jordan intended it to — light, teasing, with a razor blade tucked inside the joke. The partners had laughed. Vivian had tilted her head in that thoughtful way that meant she was filing something away for future reference.

Alyx, bourbon-brave and stung, had said, “I’m seeing someone, actually.”

That was it. Four words. She hadn’t offered a name, a gender, a single identifying detail. But she also hadn’t corrected anyone when the assumptions started filling themselves in. When Vivian mentioned over coffee that she hoped Alyx would bring her partner to the holiday party. When a junior associate asked if her “girlfriend” was the woman in the photo on her desk — which was Riley, her roommate, in a candid shot from a rooftop barbecue, laughing with her head thrown back and the sunset catching her hair.

Alyx had said, “That’s her,” because it was easier than the truth, and because the truth was that she went home to an empty bedroom every night and the closest thing she had to a relationship was the woman on the other side of the wall who sang off-key in the shower and left watercolor-stained mugs on every flat surface in their apartment.

The lie had grown the way lies do when you stop feeding them but forget to kill them. Quietly. Passively. Like ivy on a wall — decorative until you realized it had gotten into the foundation.

And now she needed to produce a wife in ten days.

Alyx opened her laptop again and stared at the email. Birch Cabin. King bed. Lake view. The retreat was four days at a converted estate in the Hudson Valley, designed to feel like a luxurious getaway while functioning as an extended evaluation of who the firm’s partners actually were when you stripped away the office. Vivian had started the tradition fifteen years ago, back when Whitfield & Calloway was small enough to fit in a single cabin. Now it was a whole production — thirty people, catered meals, structured bonding activities that sounded optional and absolutely were not.

Alyx needed this retreat to go well. The partnership vote was six weeks out. She’d spent three years building a portfolio that spoke for itself — residential designs that had won regional awards, a client retention rate that made the other senior associates look careless, a reputation for clean, innovative work that clients specifically requested. On paper, she was the obvious choice.

But Whitfield & Calloway didn’t promote on paper. They promoted on fit. On the ineffable sense that someone was a whole person — grounded, stable, the kind of architect you’d trust with a thirty-year client relationship because they clearly had the emotional infrastructure to sustain one. Vivian had said it directly at last year’s review: “We don’t just want brilliant designers. We want people who’ve built lives worth protecting. That ambition translates.”

So: a wife. She needed a wife.

Alyx ran through the options with the same methodical precision she applied to structural load calculations, and every single one collapsed under scrutiny.

She could say her partner was sick. Believable once, suspicious for four days. She could claim a last-minute breakup — but then she’d be the woman who got dumped right before the partnership vote, and pity was worse than suspicion. She could hire someone. An actress, a friend of a friend, a professional faker. But the partners had seen photos of her apartment. She’d hosted a small work dinner last spring, and Riley had been visibly living there — her art supplies on the desk, her jacket on the hook, her name on the mail. If Alyx showed up with a stranger, someone would notice the disconnect.

Which left the obvious option. The one she’d been circling for twenty minutes without letting herself land on it.

Riley.

Riley, who already knew her coffee order (black, one sugar, and don’t talk to her before the first cup). Riley, who knew that she rearranged furniture when she was stressed and went silent when she was angry and cried exactly once a year, on her father’s birthday, behind a locked bathroom door. Riley, who had lived with her for eighteen months and knew the topography of her daily life better than anyone Alyx had dated in the last decade.

Riley, who was not her wife. Not her girlfriend. Not anything except her roommate and, if Alyx was being honest with herself — which she made a point of avoiding — the person she most looked forward to seeing at the end of every day.

That was a problem for later. Right now she needed a solution for September 12th.

Alyx closed her laptop, gathered her things, and left the office at 5:15, which was early enough to earn a raised eyebrow from Jordan on her way out.

“Hot date?” Jordan called.

“Something like that,” Alyx said, and didn’t look back.

The apartment smelled like garlic and turpentine, which was either a sign that Riley was cooking or that she’d gotten paint thinner near the stove again. Both had happened before.

Alyx dropped her keys in the bowl by the door — a ceramic thing Riley had made in a pottery class and painted with tiny, slightly lopsided stars — and stood in the entryway for a moment, listening. Music from the living room, something acoustic and warm. The soft scratch of pencil on paper. A faint humming that never quite found the melody.

She rounded the corner and there was Riley, cross-legged at her desk in the corner of the living room, bent over a half-finished illustration with her headphones around her neck and a pencil behind each ear. She was wearing an oversized cream sweatshirt with a smear of cerulean paint on the left cuff, leggings that had seen better days, and the kind of thick wool socks that made her look like a cozy, rumpled painting of someone who’d never once worried about making partner at anything.

Alyx watched her for a beat too long. The way Riley’s brow furrowed when she was concentrating. The way she chewed her lower lip, leaving it pink and slightly swollen. The way the late afternoon light caught the auburn in her hair and turned it copper.

Stop it.

“Hey,” Alyx said.

Riley looked up. The furrow smoothed into a grin that was unreasonably warm for a Tuesday. “Hey. You’re early. Who died?”

“No one died.”

“Then who’s about to? You have your murder-planning face on.” Riley pulled the pencils from behind her ears and set them down, giving Alyx her full attention. That was the thing about Riley — when she looked at you, she looked at you. No half-measures. No split focus. It was flattering and slightly terrifying.

“I don’t have a murder-planning face.”

“You absolutely do. It’s the same face you make when the delivery guy forgets the extra soy sauce. Calm, focused, lethally disappointed.” Riley unfolded from her desk chair with the boneless grace of someone who hadn’t been sitting in an ergonomic office setup for nine hours. “Tea?”

“Please.”

Riley padded to the kitchen without being asked anything else. She knew. She always knew — the difference between Alyx’s I-need-wine stress and her I-need-tea stress, the difference between her I-want-to-talk silence and her please-don’t-ask silence. It was the accumulated fluency of shared space, eighteen months of parallel living that had built its own language without either of them noticing.

Alyx followed her into the kitchen and leaned against the counter while Riley filled the kettle. Their kitchen was small — a galley layout in a pre-war Brooklyn building, barely enough counter space for two people to stand side by side without their elbows touching. They’d learned the choreography months ago. Riley at the stove, Alyx at the counter, a negotiated dance of reaching and passing and the occasional hip-check when someone was in the way.

“So,” Riley said, dropping a tea bag into Alyx’s favorite mug — the plain white one, no handle, because Alyx had opinions about mug handles that Riley found endlessly amusing. “What’s the crisis?”

Alyx had rehearsed this. On the subway, in the elevator, in the forty-five seconds between the front door and the kitchen. She’d drafted three different versions of the ask, each one more clinical and professional than the last, each one designed to make this sound like a reasonable, transactional favor between adults.

What came out was: “I need you to pretend to be my wife for a work retreat.”

Riley’s hand stopped halfway to the sugar bowl. She stood very still for exactly two seconds — Alyx counted — and then turned around with an expression that was doing something complicated between shock, amusement, and something else Alyx couldn’t identify.

“I’m sorry,” Riley said. “You need me to what?”

“It’s a four-day retreat. Hudson Valley. The partners bring their spouses and significant others. I may have… implied, several months ago, that I was in a relationship. And people may have… assumed that relationship was with you. Based on photographic evidence and the fact that you live here.”

Riley blinked. “Photographic evidence.”

“The rooftop photo. On my desk.”

“The one where I’m laughing at the pigeon that stole Greg’s hot dog?”

“That’s the one.”

Riley pressed her lips together. Alyx could see her fighting something — a laugh, a question, some reaction she was deliberately containing. The kettle started to hiss behind her.

“Let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly,” Riley said, turning to pour the water with an absolutely infuriating composure. “You told your colleagues you had a girlfriend. They assumed it was me. You didn’t correct them. And now you need me to show up at a fancy retreat and pretend to be your wife for four days so you don’t blow your shot at a partnership you’ve been working toward for three years.”

“That’s… accurate, yes.”

Riley handed her the tea. Their fingers brushed on the mug. Alyx pretended not to notice.

“What kind of wife?” Riley asked.

Alyx frowned. “What do you mean, what kind?”

“I mean, what’s my vibe? Trophy wife? Supportive wife? Mildly resentful wife who drinks too much at dinner and makes pointed comments about your work schedule?” Riley leaned against the opposite counter and crossed her arms, and the grin that spread across her face was slow, delighted, and deeply dangerous. “I need to know my character.”

“This isn’t a game, Riley.”

“Oh, it’s absolutely a game. It’s the most interesting thing you’ve said to me in eighteen months of cohabitation, and I’m including the time you explained load-bearing walls for forty-five minutes after two glasses of Pinot.”

“That was relevant. You wanted to hang a shelf.”

“I wanted to hang a small shelf. You treated it like a structural crisis.” Riley took a sip from her own mug — a lumpy handmade thing glazed in uneven teal that she’d found at a flea market and loved with an intensity Alyx found inexplicable and oddly charming. “So. Fake wife. Four days. King bed, I assume?”

Alyx’s jaw tightened. “There’s one bed. I can sleep on the floor.”

“You’re not sleeping on the floor. You have that thing with your back.” Riley waved a hand. “We’ve shared a couch during movie nights. A king bed is basically two separate zip codes. It’ll be fine.”

“You’re saying yes?”

“I said yes thirty seconds ago. Keep up, Monroe.”

She had. Alyx realized, replaying the conversation, that Riley had never actually hesitated. The questions, the teasing, the character-vibe bit — it was all performance. She’d said yes the moment Alyx asked. Maybe before.

That should have been reassuring. Instead, it sat in Alyx’s chest like a question she didn’t know how to ask.

“There are logistics,” Alyx said, reaching for the safer ground of planning. “We need a backstory. How we got together, how long we’ve been dating, who said I love you first, that kind of thing. I’ll put together a document—”

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“You’re going to make a spreadsheet for our fake marriage.”

“A shared document. With talking points. So our stories are consistent.”

Riley set her mug down and looked at Alyx with an expression of pure, radiant delight. “Alyx Monroe. You are the most unhinged woman I have ever met, and I’ve met a lot of women.”

“This is a serious professional situation.”

“You’re faking a marriage to get a promotion and your first move is project management. This is the best day of my life.”

“You’re enjoying this way too much.”

“I’m enjoying this exactly the right amount.” Riley pushed off the counter and walked past Alyx toward the living room, close enough that her shoulder brushed Alyx’s arm. The contact was casual, meaningless, the kind of incidental touch that happened twelve times a day in a small apartment between two people who’d long since stopped maintaining buffer zones.

Alyx felt it in her spine.

She followed Riley to the couch, where Riley had already dropped into her usual corner and was pulling a throw blanket over her legs. Alyx sat on the other end — her usual spot — and Riley immediately swung her legs across Alyx’s lap. Also usual. They’d sat like this a hundred times. Two hundred. It was the default configuration. Riley’s socked feet against Alyx’s thigh, Alyx’s hand resting absently on Riley’s ankle, the television on or off, the evening stretching out in comfortable domestic routine.

Normal. Completely normal.

Except that Alyx was now hyperaware of every point of contact. The weight of Riley’s calves across her legs. The warmth radiating through the blanket. The way Riley’s foot flexed when she shifted, toes pressing briefly against Alyx’s thigh in a way that sent a thread of heat somewhere it absolutely should not go.

“Okay,” Riley said, pulling out her phone and opening the notes app with the enthusiasm of someone planning a heist. “Backstory. We need a meet-cute. Obviously we can’t say Craigslist roommate ad—”

“Obviously.”

“—so we say we met through mutual friends. That’s boring enough to be believable. We hit it off, started dating about… a year ago? That gives us enough time to be serious but not so long that anyone’s suspicious we haven’t gotten married yet.”

“We are married. Fake married.”

“Right. So. When did we get married?”

“Courthouse,” Alyx said automatically. “Small ceremony. We’re private people.”

Riley raised an eyebrow. “I’m not a private person. I once told a barista my entire romantic history because she looked like she was having a bad day.”

“In this scenario, you are a person who respects my preference for privacy.”

“Sounds fake.”

“It’s all fake, Riley.”

Riley grinned. “Touché.” She typed something. “Courthouse wedding, six months ago. Small. Just a few friends. We didn’t make a big deal of it because — why?”

“Because the relationship was already serious and the paperwork felt like a formality.”

Riley looked up from her phone. The grin was still there, but underneath it was something quieter. Something that looked almost like tenderness. “That’s actually romantic, Alyx.”

“It’s strategic.”

“Sure.” Riley went back to typing. “Who said I love you first?”

The question landed in the space between them like a dropped glass. Alyx opened her mouth, closed it, and realized she didn’t have a prepared answer for this one. Her document — the one she was definitely going to make, despite Riley’s mockery — had a blank cell next to this entry.

“You did,” Riley said, not looking up. “I said it first. That’s more believable. You’re not a first-move person.”

“I asked you to fake-marry me. That’s literally a first move.”

“That’s a crisis-management move. Different category.” Riley’s thumbs moved across her screen. “I said I love you first. You panicked, then said it back three days later in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation, probably about architecture. That tracks.”

It did track. It tracked so well that Alyx felt slightly exposed, like Riley had just described something that hadn’t happened yet.

“Fine,” Alyx said. “You said it first.”

“I always do,” Riley said lightly, and Alyx was almost certain she imagined the slight catch in her voice.

They spent the next hour on the couch, building their fake marriage piece by piece. Favorite restaurants, shared hobbies, vacation preferences, how they split chores (accurately, because the truth was easier to remember). Riley was good at this — she wove real details into the fiction with an ease that was either impressive or alarming. Their first date was the night Riley actually moved in, when they’d ordered Thai food and sat on the kitchen floor because the furniture hadn’t arrived yet. Their song was the one Riley always hummed while she worked, even though she never got the melody right. Their biggest fight was about the thermostat, which was real, and had been resolved by Riley buying a second blanket, which was also real.

Every fabricated detail was built on something true, and Alyx couldn’t tell if that made the lie more stable or more dangerous.

“One more thing,” Riley said, setting her phone down. The room had gotten dark around them, the only light the glow of the kitchen spilling through the doorway. Neither of them had moved to turn on a lamp. “The physical stuff. We’ll need to be convincing.”

Alyx’s hand, still resting on Riley’s ankle, went very still. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, married couples touch each other. Casually, constantly. Hand on the back, arm around the waist, kiss hello, kiss goodbye.” Riley ticked them off on her fingers like a grocery list. “We already do some of that. But we’ll need to be… more deliberate about it. More consistent.”

“Right. Yes. Deliberate.”

“We should probably practice.”

The word practice hung in the air between them. Riley’s expression was open, casual, the kind of breezy suggestion she might make about trying a new restaurant or rearranging the furniture. But her eyes, in the low light, were steady and watchful and not casual at all.

“We can practice at the retreat,” Alyx said, and she hated how thin her voice sounded. “In context.”

“If we fumble the first kiss in front of your boss, the whole thing falls apart.”

She was right. She was annoyingly, tactically right, and Alyx knew it, and Riley knew she knew it, and the knowing sat between them like a lit match over a pool of gasoline.

“Tomorrow,” Alyx said. “We’ll rehearse tomorrow.”

Riley held her gaze for one beat. Two. Then she smiled — warm, easy, a little crooked — and said, “Tomorrow.”

She swung her legs off Alyx’s lap and stood, stretching in a way that lifted the hem of her sweatshirt and exposed a strip of pale stomach that Alyx absolutely did not look at. Except she did. She looked, and then she looked away too fast, and the looking-away was louder than the looking.

“Goodnight, wife,” Riley said from the hallway, and disappeared into her bedroom.

Alyx sat on the couch in the dark for a long time after that. She could hear Riley through the wall — the creak of the bed, the rustle of sheets, the soft ping of her phone as she texted someone. Probably Dani, her best friend. Probably telling her everything.

Alyx pressed her palm flat against the couch cushion where Riley’s legs had been. It was still warm.

She was in trouble.

She’d known it before she asked, if she was honest. Known it the way you know a building’s weight distribution is off before you run the numbers — a gut sense, a structural intuition, a feeling in the bones of the thing. She’d asked Riley because Riley was the logical choice. Because Riley already knew her life. Because Riley would be convincing.

But underneath all those rational, defensible reasons was a truth Alyx could feel pressing against the inside of her ribs: she’d asked Riley because she wanted to.

She wanted Riley’s hand in hers. Wanted Riley beside her at dinner, laughing, charming, making everyone fall in love with her the way she made everyone fall in love with her. Wanted to call her my wife and feel the words in her mouth and pretend, for four days, that the best thing in her life wasn’t a lie she’d built out of loneliness and bourbon and a throwaway comment at a happy hour.

This is a professional arrangement, she told herself, standing up, turning off the kitchen light, walking to her own bedroom on the other side of the wall from Riley’s. This is strategic. Transactional. Controlled.

She brushed her teeth. She washed her face. She got into bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the old building settle around her, and through the wall she heard Riley laugh softly at something on her phone, and the sound went through Alyx like a current.

You’re in trouble, she thought again.

And then, quieter, in the part of her brain she kept locked and dark and carefully unexamined: You’ve been in trouble for months.

She rolled onto her side, pulled the covers up, and didn’t sleep for a very long time.

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It’s three months later. Claire is officiating. Nora is crying. And the second the reception ends, Alyx and Riley christen the honeymoon suite with the door locked, the dress on the floor, and every promise they ever made to each other written on skin. The hottest, most emotional scene in the series — and it’s yours free.

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