🔥 Bonus Chapter: The Real Vows

An exclusive bonus scene from Fake Wife, Real Heat by Aurora North

Join the Aurora North mailing list to get bonus chapters, new release alerts, and exclusive content.

Bonus Chapter: The Real Vows

Set three months after Fake Wife, Real Heat. Alyx and Riley’s wedding night. 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

Claire went seven minutes.

Not five, like Riley had stipulated. Not three, like Alyx had negotiated. Seven full minutes of a speech that started with “I was there before this was real” and ended with “I’m keeping both of you, and if either of you objects, remember that I teach middle school and I have no fear,” and somewhere in the middle she said something about the fake spreadsheet Alyx had made for their fake marriage and the entire garden erupted in laughter, and Alyx hid her face in Riley’s shoulder and Riley held her and laughed until she cried.

Nora hadn’t made it past the vows. She’d started crying when Riley walked down the aisle — a flagstone path through the garden of a small inn in the Hudson Valley, twenty minutes from the house where Alyx grew up — and she hadn’t stopped. She was crying now, at the reception, holding Dani’s hand because Dani was also crying and they’d bonded over mimosas at brunch six weeks ago and were now, apparently, co-mothers of the brides.

Dani’s toast had been shorter. She’d stood up, looked at Alyx, and said, “You made her wait. Don’t do it again. Welcome to the family.” Then she’d sat down and finished her champagne in one swallow and Alyx had nodded once, solemnly, like she was accepting a contract.

The reception was small — thirty people, a long table under string lights, the September air cool enough for the blazers and wraps everyone had brought. The food was good. The wine was better. Tom and Vivian had come, because of course they had, and Vivian had kissed both of them on the cheek and said, “This time I don’t have to pretend I believe it.”

It was perfect. It was so perfect that Riley kept touching her own ring — a slim gold band, simple, chosen by Alyx with the same precise attention she brought to material selection — just to make sure it was still there. Just to make sure this was happening. That she was standing in a garden in a white dress that Dani had helped her choose, married — actually married, legally, irrevocably, no spreadsheet required — to the woman who’d asked her to fake it nineteen months ago.

“Hey.”

Riley turned. Alyx was beside her, holding two glasses of champagne, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. She was in a tailored ivory suit — slim trousers, a fitted jacket, no blouse underneath, just the clean line of her collarbones and the gold chain Riley had given her that morning. She looked like a building designed by someone who believed in God: structurally perfect, luminous, built to make you stop and stare.

“Hey, wife,” Riley said.

“Hey, wife.” Alyx handed her a glass. Clinked it. “For real this time.”

“For real this time.”

They drank. Around them, the reception hummed — Claire arguing with Tom about something, Nora showing Dani photos of Alyx as a teenager, Helen Chen dancing with her husband to the acoustic guitarist Riley had hired because she’d wanted music that felt like warmth, not performance.

Alyx leaned close. Her mouth brushed Riley’s ear, and the contact — lips against the shell of her ear, breath warm on her neck — sent a shiver down Riley’s spine that had nothing to do with the September air.

“I want to leave,” Alyx whispered.

“We can’t leave our own reception.”

“We can. We’re the brides. We outrank everyone here.”

“Your mother will—”

“My mother has been drinking champagne with your best friend for two hours. She won’t notice we’re gone until breakfast.” Alyx’s hand found the small of Riley’s back. Her thumb pressed into the bare skin above the dress’s low back — a specific, deliberate pressure point that Riley’s body now associated with a very specific set of intentions. “Our room is upstairs. The door has a lock. And I have been watching you in that dress for six hours and I am losing my mind.”

Riley looked at her. Alyx’s eyes were dark, focused, the expression she wore when she’d made a decision and was not interested in negotiating. The expression that, nineteen months ago, had terrified Riley because it meant Alyx was in control. And now made Riley’s knees weak because it meant Alyx had decided to stop controlling and start wanting.

“Five minutes,” Riley said. “Let me say goodnight to your mom.”

“Three minutes.”

“Four.”

“Three and a half. Clock starts now.”

The room was on the second floor of the inn — a converted farmhouse with wide plank floors and exposed beams and a bed that was unnecessarily, gloriously large. Someone had left candles on the dresser. Someone had scattered rose petals on the sheets. Riley would have found it cheesy twenty-four hours ago. Right now, with the door locked and Alyx’s hands on her waist and the gold band on her finger catching the candlelight, it was the most beautiful room she’d ever seen.

They stood facing each other. The sounds of the reception drifted up through the floor — muffled laughter, the guitarist playing something slow, the distant clink of glasses. Up here, it was quiet. Just them. Just the candlelight and the bed and the space between them that had once been twelve inches of mattress at a corporate retreat and was now zero.

“Hi,” Riley said.

“Hi.”

“We’re married.”

“We are.”

“Like, actually married. Not fake married. Not arrangement married. Married married.”

“I signed the certificate. Claire notarized it. It’s legally binding.” Alyx’s hands were on Riley’s waist, her thumbs tracing slow arcs on the fabric of the dress. “You’re stuck with me.”

“I’ve been stuck with you since the burned pancakes.”

Alyx smiled. The real one — the unguarded, full, radiant smile that she gave nobody else, the one that transformed her face from architecture into art. “I love you.”

“I love you. Now take off the suit.”

Alyx laughed — the surprised, delighted laugh that Riley had spent nineteen months learning to produce and would spend the rest of her life chasing. “Romantic.”

“I’ve been romantic all day. I wrote vows that made thirty people cry. I held your hand through Claire’s seven-minute roast. I danced with your mother. I have been wearing this dress for six hours without underwear and you don’t even know that yet, so—”

Alyx’s hands stopped moving. Her eyes went wide. “You’re not wearing—”

“Surprise.” Riley leaned in. Kissed the corner of Alyx’s mouth. “Wedding present.”

The sound Alyx made was not a word. It was something pre-verbal, something from the part of her brain that predated architecture and risk assessment and the careful, measured control she’d spent decades building. Her hands tightened on Riley’s waist, and then they were moving — sliding down, following the curve of the dress over Riley’s hips, confirming through the thin fabric what Riley had just told her.

“You’ve been—” Alyx’s voice was strained. “All day. Through the ceremony. Through dinner. Through Claire’s speech—”

“All day.” Riley put her hands on Alyx’s chest. Slid them under the jacket, against the warm skin beneath. No blouse. Just Alyx, bare under the ivory linen. “Looks like neither of us was wearing much.”

“I was wearing a bra.”

“Take it off.”

Alyx shrugged the jacket off her shoulders. Let it fall. Reached behind herself and unclasped the bra — a simple, strapless thing that had been invisible under the jacket — and dropped it on top of the jacket. She stood in front of Riley in nothing but the trousers and the gold chain, the candlelight painting her collarbones, her small breasts, the lean definition of her arms.

Riley looked at her. Her wife. Her actual, legal, ring-wearing, vow-exchanging wife. The woman who’d asked her to pretend and ended up giving her everything real.

“You’re so beautiful,” Riley said, and her voice cracked, and she didn’t care, because this was the one place in the world where cracking was safe.

“Come here,” Alyx said, and pulled her in.

The kiss was slow. Deep. The kiss of two women who had all night and all the nights after and were done rushing, done performing, done pretending. Alyx’s hands found the zipper at the back of Riley’s dress — the real wedding dress zipper, not the retreat dress, not the black dress from the firm dinner, but the dress she’d chosen for this, for the real thing — and drew it down with the focused, reverent attention she’d given it nineteen months ago in a cabin on a lake.

The dress slid off Riley’s shoulders. Down her body. Pooled at her feet like water.

Alyx looked at her. Naked. No underwear, as promised. Just skin and freckles and the soft, warm body Alyx had mapped and memorized and loved in every configuration their bedroom could offer. But tonight was different. Tonight Riley was standing in candlelight on rose petals with a gold ring on her finger and nothing else, and Alyx’s face did the thing it always did when she was overwhelmed — the micro-fracture, the crack in the composure, the flash of raw, unmanaged emotion that was more intimate than any touch.

“Riley—” Alyx whispered.

“Don’t plan it.” Riley took Alyx’s face in her hands. Thumbs on her cheekbones. The grip Alyx had learned from Nora and Riley had learned from Alyx, the specific, structural hold that meant I see you completely. “Don’t think about it. Just be here. With me. Your wife.”

She kissed Alyx and walked her backward toward the bed. Alyx’s knees hit the mattress and she sat, and Riley straddled her lap — bare against Alyx’s trousers, the rough fabric against her thighs, the contrast of dressed and undressed producing a friction that made Riley’s breath stutter.

“These need to go,” Riley said, her fingers at Alyx’s waistband.

“You first.”

“I’m already naked.”

“Exactly. I want to look at you.”

“You can look at me while I take off your pants.”

Alyx laughed against Riley’s mouth, and the laughing-while-kissing was the thing, the specific, irreplaceable thing that made sex with Alyx different from sex with anyone else Riley had ever been with. The joy of it. The humor underneath the heat. The fact that they could be desperate and delighted at the same time, that wanting each other didn’t have to be solemn.

Riley unbuttoned Alyx’s trousers. Alyx lifted her hips. The trousers came off, then the underwear, and they were both bare, skin to skin, Riley in Alyx’s lap with her arms around Alyx’s neck and Alyx’s hands on her hips and the candles flickering and the gold bands catching the light on both their hands.

“I wrote something,” Alyx said.

“You wrote something?”

“Not in the vows. Something else. Something I was going to say tonight.” She pressed her forehead against Riley’s. Her hands moved on Riley’s hips — slow, deliberate, the touch that meant she was about to be brave. “I’ve been writing it for weeks. In my head. Not on paper. Not in a document.”

“No spreadsheet?”

“No spreadsheet.” Alyx kissed her chin. Her jaw. The pulse point below her ear. “I wanted to tell you what you are to me. Not in front of people. Just here. Just us.”

“Tell me.”

Alyx’s mouth moved down Riley’s neck. Between words, she kissed — each sentence punctuated by the press of lips against skin, the trail of warmth moving from throat to collarbone to chest.

“You are the warmest thing in my life.” A kiss to the hollow of her throat. “You are the person who taught me that needing someone isn’t a structural vulnerability.” A kiss to her collarbone. “You are the reason I hum in the kitchen.” A kiss to the slope of her breast. “And I am going to spend the rest of my life deserving you.”

Riley’s eyes were burning. Her hands were in Alyx’s hair. “Alyx—”

“Not done.” Alyx looked up at her. Dark eyes, bright with candlelight and tears she wasn’t fighting. “You asked me once what you were to me. In the cabin. On the trail. At the kitchen table. You kept asking and I kept not answering because I didn’t have the word.”

“You said ‘my person.’”

“I was wrong. You’re not my person. You’re my home.” Alyx’s voice cracked on the word, and the cracking was the most beautiful sound Riley had ever heard, because it meant the walls were down and the woman behind them was here. “You’re my home, Riley. You have been since the kitchen floor and the Thai food and the furniture that hadn’t arrived. Every room I’ve ever designed, every building I’ve ever built — none of them are home. You are. You’re the thing I come back to. You’re the architecture that holds everything else up.”

Riley kissed her. Not gently — fiercely, with the full force of a woman who’d just been handed the most honest thing another person had ever given her. She kissed Alyx and tasted salt — her tears, Alyx’s tears, both — and the kissing became touching, and the touching became urgent.

Alyx laid her back on the bed. The rose petals crushed under Riley’s shoulders, releasing a faint sweetness into the air. Alyx hovered above her, weight on her forearms, looking down at her with an expression of focused, tender intensity.

“I want to take my time,” Alyx said.

“We have all night.”

“I want longer than a night. I want years.”

“You have years. You have a lifetime. It’s on the certificate. Claire notarized it.” Riley pulled her down. “Now stop talking and put your mouth on me.”

Alyx put her mouth on her.

She started at Riley’s neck — the spot below her ear that made Riley’s toes curl, the tendon she traced with her tongue, the junction of neck and shoulder where she bit softly and felt Riley’s whole body respond. She moved down with devastating patience. Collarbone. Chest. She took Riley’s nipple into her mouth and Riley arched, gasping, her hands flying to Alyx’s hair.

“You’re so responsive,” Alyx murmured against her breast. “Every time. Like the first time.”

“It is the first time. First time as your wife.”

“Wife.” Alyx said the word against Riley’s skin like a prayer. She moved lower. Kissed the soft plane of Riley’s stomach. The jut of her hip. The freckles scattered across her pelvis that Alyx had once told her looked like a constellation she wanted to name.

She settled between Riley’s thighs. Looked up. The eye contact — the thing they’d fought for, the intimacy Alyx had learned to sustain instead of flee — was steady, warm, absolutely present.

“Hi, wife,” Alyx said from between her legs.

“Hi, wife. If you don’t put your mouth on me in the next three seconds, I’m annulling this marriage.”

Alyx grinned. Then she lowered her head and gave Riley exactly what she’d asked for.

The first stroke was slow, broad, a long, devastating sweep of her tongue that drew a moan from Riley’s chest. The moan was loud — louder than the cabin, louder than the hallway, louder than any sound Riley had made in any of their careful, measured, private encounters — because they were in an inn with thick walls and a locked door and she was done being quiet. She was done being restrained. She was married and she was naked on rose petals and her wife’s mouth was on her and she was going to be as loud as she wanted.

“Fuck,” Riley gasped. “Alyx — right there—”

Alyx was thorough. She was always thorough — it was her defining characteristic, the thing that made her extraordinary at everything she did — but tonight she was thorough in a way that felt different. Unhurried. Worshipful. Like she was trying to communicate something with her mouth that was bigger than sensation, deeper than pleasure.

She found the rhythm that made Riley’s thighs shake and held it. Steady, patient, the specific pressure and angle she’d learned over nineteen months of paying attention. She slid two fingers inside — slow, deep — and curled upward, and Riley’s back arched off the bed and her hand gripped the headboard and the sound she made was Alyx’s name, broken into syllables, scattered across the room like petals.

“Don’t stop — please — God, Alyx, don’t—”

Alyx didn’t stop. She held the rhythm, steady and relentless, her mouth and her hand working in concert, building the wave with the same patient precision she brought to every structure she built. She listened to Riley’s body the way she listened to buildings — for the stress points, the resonance, the specific frequencies that meant the structure was about to give.

Riley came hard. Harder than the cabin, harder than the hallway, harder than the Tuesday night kitchen counter or the childhood bedroom or the reconciliation couch. She came with her wife’s name on her lips and her wife’s ring on her finger and her wife’s mouth between her thighs, and the orgasm tore through her in waves that went on and on, each one pulling another sound from her throat, each one met with the gentle, steady pressure of Alyx’s mouth easing her through.

She was still trembling when Alyx crawled up her body and settled beside her, and the look on Alyx’s face — wet-mouthed, flushed, proud in the specific way of a woman who had just made her wife come on their wedding night and knew exactly how good she was at it — made Riley laugh.

“What?” Alyx said.

“You look smug.”

“I earned smug.”

“You earned everything.” Riley rolled on top of her. Pinned her wrists against the rose-petal-strewn sheets. “My turn.”

She didn’t make Alyx wait. She kissed down her body with purpose — her neck (the bite that made Alyx whimper), her breasts (the light touch on the left, the firm pressure on the right), her stomach (the scar from the fence, kissed every time, a ritual now). She reached Alyx’s thighs and settled between them and looked up, and the eye contact held.

“I love you,” Riley said. “I loved you before I knew what it was. I loved you when we were fake. I loved you when we were broken. I love you now, on our wedding night, in this room with the cheesy rose petals, and I’m going to love you tomorrow and every day after, and you’re never going to have to wonder if it’s real again.”

Alyx’s eyes were bright. Her lower lip trembled. She nodded — a small, tight nod, the nod of a woman who was holding herself together just enough to receive what was being given.

Riley lowered her mouth.

She took her time. Alyx liked it slow — liked the build, the anticipation, the gradual accumulation of sensation that turned her controlled, precise body into something liquid and trembling. Riley gave her that. Long, slow strokes. Circles that tightened incrementally. Her tongue finding and holding the exact pressure point that made Alyx’s hips roll and her breath go ragged.

She slid her fingers inside. One first, then two, curling, finding the spot she knew by heart now. She established a rhythm — her mouth steady, her fingers deep and deliberate — and watched Alyx’s face for the signs she’d memorized. The clench of her jaw. The flutter of her eyelids. The way her hands went from gripping the sheets to reaching for Riley’s hair, needing the contact, needing the connection.

“Riley—” Alyx’s voice was stripped. Raw. The voice she used only here, only in this context, only with Riley. “I’m — I can’t—”

“You can. Let go. I’ve got you.”

She increased the pace. Not dramatically — a slight acceleration, a fractional increase in pressure, the calibrated adjustment that she knew would push Alyx over the edge without rushing her past it. She held the rhythm and watched and waited, and when Alyx’s body locked — every muscle rigid, her breath seizing, her fingers twisting in Riley’s hair — Riley held steady and let her break.

Alyx came silently. She’d always been quieter than Riley — the controlled exterior expressing even in orgasm — but the silence was not absence. It was compression. Everything she felt contracted into the tight, trembling bow of her body, her back arching, her thighs clamping, her hand pressed over her own mouth not to muffle but to contain, as if the feeling was so big that releasing it as sound would shatter something.

Riley gentled her through the aftershocks. Soft mouth, soft hands, the slow withdrawal and the careful, tender kissing of her thighs, her hips, the soft skin of her stomach. She crawled up and lay beside Alyx and pulled her in, and Alyx pressed her face into Riley’s neck and shook, and the shaking was not just physical. It was the tremor of a woman who’d spent her whole life holding walls up and had finally, completely, set them down.

“I love you,” Alyx whispered against Riley’s throat. “I love you. I love you.”

“I know.” Riley stroked her hair. “I’ve always known.”

They lay tangled together. The candles burned low. The sounds of the reception had faded — the last guests gone, Claire’s voice distantly audible somewhere downstairs arguing with the guitarist about setlists. The inn was quiet. The night was quiet. The room was warm with candlelight and the specific, irreplaceable heat of two bodies pressed together with nothing between them.

After a while — ten minutes, twenty, long enough for heartbeats to slow and breath to even and the sweat to cool on their skin — Alyx moved.

“Again,” she said.

Riley laughed. “Already?”

“It’s our wedding night.” Alyx rolled on top of her. Settled between Riley’s legs. The contact — center to center, skin to skin — made them both gasp. “I have a lot of time to make up for.”

“You don’t owe me—”

“I do. Nineteen months of not saying it. Three days of silence. One terrible night where you slept in your old room and I sat on our bed and stared at the wall.” Alyx’s forehead pressed against Riley’s. “Let me make it up to you.”

“You already have. A thousand times.”

“A thousand and one, then.”

She moved against Riley. A slow grind, deliberate, their bodies sliding together with the easy, wet friction of two women who’d already made each other come and were building toward it again. Riley’s legs wrapped around Alyx’s waist, pulling her closer, and the angle shifted, and the friction hit exactly right, and Riley moaned — loud, unashamed, her voice filling the room.

They moved together. Not the choreographed, efficient rhythm of practiced lovers. Not the frantic urgency of early desire. Something else. Something married. The deep, rolling, synchronized pace of two people who had memorized each other’s rhythms and could ride them the way a musician rode a melody — with improvisation, with confidence, with the knowledge that the song would land wherever they took it.

Alyx’s hand slid between them. Her fingers found Riley and worked her while they moved together — circling, pressing, the specific technique she’d mastered through months of devoted study. Riley’s hand mirrored hers, reaching between them, finding Alyx, and they touched each other simultaneously while their bodies moved in the slow, grinding rhythm that built the wave from the inside out.

“Together,” Riley breathed. “Like the first time.”

“Which first time?”

“The real first time. In the cabin. When you said you couldn’t pretend anymore.”

Alyx kissed her. Deep, open, her tongue sliding against Riley’s with the same rhythm their bodies were keeping. She said against Riley’s mouth, in the space between breaths: “I’m not pretending. I never was. Not with you. Not once.”

Riley came first. By seconds — a shuddering, full-body wave that pulled Alyx over with it, their bodies locking together, their mouths pressed together swallowing each other’s sounds, their hands still moving between them as the shared orgasm rolled through both of them like a tide.

It was slower this time. Deeper. The kind of climax that wasn’t a peak but a plateau — a sustained, humming release that went on and on, each wave smaller than the last, tapering into the warm, liquid stillness of two bodies that had given each other everything and were resting in the aftermath.

They lay still. Breathing. Holding. The candles had burned to stubs, the room dimming toward darkness. Riley could feel Alyx’s heartbeat against her chest — steady now, slow, the rhythm of a woman at peace.

“Hey, Alyx?”

“Hmm.”

“Remember when you made me burned pancakes?”

“They weren’t that burned.”

“They were charcoal. The smoke alarm went off.”

“The smoke alarm is sensitive.”

“I fell in love with you that morning. I stood in the bathroom and pressed my hand over my mouth and tried not to cry because you’d remembered something I mentioned once, three weeks earlier, and you’d gotten up early to make it for me, and they were terrible and you didn’t care because you were trying.” Riley’s voice was soft. “You were trying so hard. And that was the moment. Not the retreat. Not the cabin. Not the kiss on the couch. A Sunday morning and burned pancakes and a woman who was trying.”

Alyx tightened her arms around Riley. Pressed her lips against Riley’s hair. “I’ll make you pancakes every Sunday for the rest of your life.”

“They’ll be terrible.”

“Every single time.”

“Promise?”

“I promise on the burned pancakes. I promise on the bonfire photo. I promise on every fake kiss that was real and every real kiss that changed my life.” The same words she’d said in the apartment, on the coffee table, with shaking hands. The words that had become their private scripture — repeated, returned to, reliable.

Riley smiled against Alyx’s chest. Closed her eyes. Drew a shape on Alyx’s bare shoulder with her fingertip — a house, a chimney, a curl of smoke.

“What are you drawing?” Alyx murmured.

“Our house. The one with the big kitchen.”

“And the studio with north-facing light.”

“And Frank.”

“Frank the three-legged dog.”

“Frank the three-legged dog who you’re going to love more than you love me.”

“Impossible.” Alyx kissed her temple. “Nobody gets loved more than you. Not even Frank.”

Riley laughed. The laugh was quiet, warm, the specific frequency of a woman who was exactly where she wanted to be — in a bed with rose petals and candle stubs and the woman she’d married, the woman she’d faked for and fought for and waited for and won.

Outside, the Hudson Valley was dark and still. The garden was empty. The string lights were off. Claire had gone to bed. Nora was sleeping in the room down the hall. Dani had taken the last bottle of champagne and disappeared to a couch somewhere. The world was quiet and done and the only thing left was this room and this bed and this woman and this life.

Not fake. Not performed. Not an arrangement.

Just home.

Just them.

Just real.

Thank you for reading! If you loved Alyx and Riley’s story, please consider leaving a review.

← Back to Fake Wife, Real Heat