Her Favorite Bad Influence

Sapphic Contemporary Romance
by Aurora North

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Sexual Awakening, Opposites Attract, Good Girl Corruption, Forbidden Romance, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Secret Relationship

She hired a fixer to save her image. She didn’t expect the woman fixing her life to become the first person who ever encouraged her to ruin it.

Evelyn Hart has spent her entire life being the perfect senator’s daughter. Perfect smile. Perfect posture. Perfect lie.

When a compromising photo threatens the campaign, her family hires Sabrina Vale — DC’s sharpest crisis manager — to clean up Evelyn’s image.

But Bri doesn’t see a PR disaster. She sees a woman suffocating under a lifetime of expectations. And instead of teaching Evelyn to perform better, Bri starts teaching her to stop performing altogether.

One rule becomes ten broken ones. One touch becomes a craving Evelyn can’t control. And the woman hired to protect the family’s reputation becomes the most dangerous thing in Evelyn’s carefully managed life.

Because Bri isn’t just fixing her image. She’s dismantling it.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Repressed good girl × shameless bad influence sapphic romance
✅ Sexual awakening with a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing
✅ Political daughter + PR fixer with explosive chemistry
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Praise kink, corruption kink, and power exchange
✅ A heroine who learns to stop performing and start wanting
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, family pressure and emotional manipulation, closeted identity stress, and depictions of anxiety. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: The Photo

The study smelled like leather and old money, which was fitting because everything about Senator Richard Hart’s life smelled like leather and old money, right down to the daughter currently sitting in the wingback chair trying not to vomit on the Persian rug.

Evelyn crossed her ankles. Uncrossed them. Folded her hands in her lap the way her mother had taught her at fourteen — left over right, thumbs tucked, posture that said composed even when her insides were liquefying. She focused on a point just past her father’s left shoulder where a framed photo hung on the wall: the Hart family at the Governor’s Mansion Christmas reception, 2019. Everyone smiling. Everyone performing. Everyone exactly where they were supposed to be.

“—circulating on at least three political gossip sites as of this morning,” Doug Mercer was saying, pacing in front of the bookshelves like a man whose stock portfolio had just caught fire. He was her father’s chief of staff, had been for nine years, and he treated every minor PR hiccup like a four-alarm crisis. To be fair, this one might actually warrant it. “The photo itself is ambiguous enough, but the location isn’t. Anyone who Googles the name of that bar is going to get a very specific result.”

“It’s a bar,” Evelyn said. Her voice came out flat, controlled. Good. “People go to bars.”

“People go to that bar for a reason, Evelyn.” Her mother’s voice sliced through the room from the settee by the window, where Catherine Hart sat with her legs crossed and her reading glasses perched on her nose like she was reviewing a disappointing quarterly report instead of her daughter’s public downfall. “Don’t insult our intelligence.”

Evelyn’s jaw tightened. She could feel the muscle jumping under her skin and knew her mother could see it too. Catherine saw everything. It was her most devastating talent — an X-ray eye for weakness, paired with the surgical precision to exploit it at exactly the wrong moment.

“A friend invited me,” Evelyn said. The lie slid out smooth as silk, the way lies always did when you’d been practicing them since childhood. “I didn’t check the Yelp reviews before I walked in.”

“Which friend?” Catherine asked.

“Lena. From Georgetown.”

“Lena Park? She’s in Singapore.”

Fuck.

“A different Lena.”

“How many Lenas do you know?”

“Catherine.” Her father’s voice, low and tired, from behind the mahogany desk that had belonged to his father and his father’s father, because nothing in this family was ever just a piece of furniture. “That’s not the point.”

“The point,” Doug said, stopping mid-pace to face Evelyn with the expression of a man who wanted to be sympathetic but had a campaign to run, “is that we’re eight weeks from Election Day. The Senator is polling within the margin of error against a challenger who would love nothing more than a culture war distraction. And his daughter was photographed leaving a lesbian bar in Dupont Circle looking like—”

“Looking like what?” Evelyn asked.

Doug hesitated. He had the decency to look uncomfortable, at least. “Disheveled.”

Evelyn almost laughed. Disheveled. She’d been wearing a cashmere sweater and slacks. Her hair had been down — that was the dishevelment. Her hair, which she usually wore in a chignon so tight it gave her headaches, had been loose around her shoulders because she’d taken it down in the car on the way there as a tiny, pathetic act of rebellion. And some photographer with a telephoto lens and a blog had turned that into evidence.

“I went to a bar,” she said again, slower this time, enunciating each word like she was speaking to someone very young or very stupid. “I had one drink. I spoke to no one. I left. If that’s a scandal, then this campaign has bigger problems than me.”

The silence that followed was the particular kind of silence that only existed in her father’s study — the kind that meant everyone was thinking something they wouldn’t say out loud, and that the something was about Evelyn, and that it wasn’t flattering.

Senator Hart leaned back in his chair. He was a handsome man at sixty-two, silver-templed and square-jawed, the kind of face that photographed well on yard signs and inspired confidence in donors. He looked at his daughter the way he looked at a briefing that contained bad news he’d been expecting: with a calm, measured disappointment that was somehow worse than anger.

“Doug is bringing in outside help,” he said.

Evelyn blinked. “What kind of outside help?”

“A consultant. Crisis management, media strategy, image rehabilitation.” Doug pulled out his phone, scrolling. “Sabrina Vale. She runs a boutique firm in the District. She’s handled situations like this for—”

“I don’t need a handler.”

“Nobody’s calling it that,” her father said.

“It’s exactly what you’re calling it. You’re hiring a babysitter because your adult daughter went to a bar.”

“We’re hiring a professional,” Catherine said, standing from the settee with the fluid grace of a woman who’d been a Miss Virginia finalist in 1987 and had never stopped moving like one, “because our adult daughter has been increasingly erratic for two years and we’re tired of pretending it’s not a pattern.”

The words landed like a slap. Evelyn felt them in her chest — a hot, tight compression that she recognized as the precursor to either tears or rage, both of which were unacceptable in this room. She chose neither. She chose the third option, the one she’d been choosing since she was old enough to understand that Harts didn’t make scenes. She went blank.

“Fine,” she said. “When does she start?”

Doug looked relieved. Her father looked tired. Her mother looked satisfied, which was the expression Evelyn hated most because it meant Catherine believed she’d won, and she had, and they both knew it.

“Monday,” Doug said. “I’ll send you her brief.”

“Wonderful.” Evelyn stood, smoothing the front of her skirt — a gesture so automatic she barely registered it anymore, just her hands performing the constant maintenance of looking acceptable. “If we’re done, I have work to finish.”

She made it out of the study, down the hallway with its parade of family portraits and framed commendations, up the stairs to the second floor, and into her childhood bedroom before she let the mask crack.

She closed the door. Leaned against it. Pressed her palms flat against the wood and breathed.

The room was exactly as it had been since she was eighteen: cream walls, a four-poster bed with a duvet her mother had picked, bookshelves lined with the right titles in the right order. It looked like a page from a Pottery Barn catalog — tasteful, impersonal, designed to impress houseguests rather than comfort the person who actually slept there.

This room had never been hers. This house had never been hers. This life had never been hers.

Evelyn sat on the edge of the bed and pulled out her phone. The photo was easy to find — the blog had a tacky name, Capitol Confessions or something equally stupid, and the headline read: HART’S DAUGHTER SPOTTED AT DC’S HOTTEST SAPPHIC NIGHTSPOT — WHAT’S THE SENATOR’S GIRL LOOKING FOR?

She stared at the image. It was grainy, taken from across the street with a long lens, and it showed a woman in dark slacks and a cream cashmere sweater stepping out of a doorway beneath a rainbow flag. Her hair was down. Her face was turned slightly away from the camera, but the angle caught her profile — the straight nose, the sharp jaw, the pearl studs she wore even to a bar because she didn’t own earrings that weren’t pearl studs.

She didn’t look scandalous. She didn’t look “disheveled.” She looked like a woman leaving a building, which was exactly what she’d been doing.

Except.

Evelyn zoomed in. There was something in her expression that the grainy photo almost hid but didn’t quite. A softness around the mouth. A slight unfocus in the eyes. She looked, if she was being honest with herself — which she almost never was — like a woman who had just seen something that rearranged her.

She closed her eyes. The bar came back to her in fragments: warm amber light, music she didn’t recognize, the smell of citrus cocktails and perfume.

And then.

The corner booth.

Two women. One dark-haired, one blonde, leaning into each other with the easy intimacy of people who’d been doing this for a while.

Oh.

Oh, that’s what it’s supposed to feel like.

Monday. The fixer would be here Monday.

Evelyn closed her eyes and tried very hard not to think about women kissing in corner booths.

She failed.

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The Introduction — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Evelyn and Bri’s first morning in the apartment that’s officially theirs. New couch. White sheets. Tulips on the counter. And the kind of shameless, celebratory, filthy-tender sex that two women have when they’ve stopped hiding and started living.

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