My Ex’s Mother Has Better Taste
Sapphic Age-Gap Romance
by Aurora North
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Ex’s Mother, Age Gap, Silver Fox, Body Worship, Praise Kink, Secret Affair, Forbidden Romance
Her ex said she was too loud, too tattooed, and too unpredictable. Her ex’s silver-haired mother thinks she’s exactly enough.
Romilly “Romy” Cade knows exactly why her relationship ended. Her girlfriend wanted excitement in private and perfection in public. Romy was desirable enough for late nights but never the woman Delphine intended to bring into the family permanently.
Three weeks after the breakup, Romy arrives at the family’s Manhattan townhouse to return a box of belongings. Delphine isn’t home. Her mother is.
Severine Marchand is fifty, silver-haired, impeccably dressed, and more intimidating than anyone Romy has ever met. She’s also recently divorced, privately bisexual, and selling the historic townhouse — dismantling the last evidence of a family organized around appearances.
Romy has always believed Severine disapproved of her. She was wrong. One kiss in the library becomes one night, then a weekend, then a secret affair conducted between silk sheets and antique mirrors. But when Delphine returns with a new fiancée and discovers the truth, Severine panics — and asks Romy to disappear.
Romy refuses. She will not be hidden again.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Ex’s mother sapphic romance with 20-year age gap
✅ Silver fox / elegant older heroine who falls first
✅ Tattooed younger heroine who refuses to be hidden
✅ Mature body worship + praise kink (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Secret affair in a Manhattan townhouse
✅ Public declaration of love at the perfect moment
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including mature body worship), strong language, family conflict, themes of bisexual erasure and internalized shame. Features a 30/50 age gap. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One
The box weighed nothing. That was the part I couldn’t stop thinking about — eighteen months reduced to eleven pounds of belongings that fit inside a liquor-store carton I’d found behind the dumpster at my studio.
I stood on the sidewalk outside Marchand House and stared up at the façade. Five stories of limestone respectability on the Upper East Side, the kind of building that made you instinctively check whether your shoes were clean.
Three weeks since the breakup. I should have mailed the box. But the watch bothered me. It was too valuable to mail, too personal to leave with a stranger, and too beautiful to sit in my closet while I waited for Delphine to remember it existed.
I climbed the steps and rang the bell.
The door opened, and every plan I’d made disintegrated.
Severine Marchand stood in the doorway in a black silk blouse with the top two buttons undone, grey trousers that looked like they cost more than my rent, and bare feet on the marble threshold. Her reading glasses were pushed up into the silver-streaked mass of her hair.
I had never seen her barefoot.
The bare feet changed everything. They made her human in a way that her boardroom armor never allowed.
“Ms. Cade.” Her voice was careful. Not cold — Severine was never cold. She was precise, which people confused with frigid until they realized precision required more effort than warmth. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
She turned and walked inside without waiting for my answer, bare feet silent on marble, and I followed her because apparently that was what I did around Marchand women — I followed, even when every rational instinct told me the front door was right there and I should use it.
The library was the only room in Marchand House where I’d ever felt something other than monitored. Dark wood paneling, a rolling ladder, green velvet furniture that had seen enough seasons to develop the kind of softness that couldn’t be manufactured.
“Sit down,” she said, and poured two glasses of whiskey without asking whether I wanted one.
Severine opened the box. She lifted the pocket watch from the tissue paper I’d wrapped it in. Her hands went still.
“Solange Louisa Marchand. My grandmother. Not Delphine’s.”
“She told you it was hers?”
“She was lying.” Severine set the watch down with a care that bordered on tenderness. “She took something that wasn’t hers and presented it as though she had a right to it.”
Severine handed me my drink. Our fingers didn’t touch, but the near miss had the kind of electricity that made me aware of the distance between her skin and mine.
“How is the studio?” she asked.
“You remember the studio?”
“Cade Revival. You have a senior conservator named Brontë, and the last time I saw your work, you were restoring a Victorian card table with a replacement marquetry panel that you’d matched so precisely I couldn’t find the seam.” She took a sip of whiskey. “I remember a great deal about your work, Ms. Cade.”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Original Finish — A scene TOO HOT for retailers
On Severine’s fifty-second birthday, Romy finishes restoring the Marchand cabinet and installs a brass plaque that says everything both women have been afraid to put into words. What happens afterward, against the polished walnut, is the most intimate scene in the series — only available here.
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