Backhanded Compliments
Sapphic Tennis Romance
by Aurora North
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Enemies with Benefits, Tennis Romance, Forced Proximity, Secret Relationship, Body Worship
They spent six years studying each other’s bodies. The winner finally gets to decide what happens next.
For six years, Imani Brooks and Celeste Navarro have traded trophies, rankings, and insults across the professional tennis circuit. The world thinks they hate each other. The world has never seen them alone.
One rain delay. One argument beneath the stadium. One kiss neither woman is willing to regret.
Celeste proposes a wager: whenever they face each other, the winner decides what happens after the match. Imani agrees because defeating Celeste has always been her favorite thing.
But victory becomes complicated when their private arrangement turns intimate, jealousy escapes the court, and Imani discovers Celeste is hiding an injury that could end her career. Celeste wants one final championship. Imani wants the woman beneath the smile, the headlines, and the perfect serve.
Because nobody knows your weaknesses like your greatest rival. And nobody can break your heart quite as thoroughly.
You’ll love this if you enjoy:
✅ Championship tennis rivals with scorching chemistry
✅ Enemies with benefits and a winner-takes-all wager
✅ Femme/femme athletic glamour and body worship
✅ Public hostility hiding private obsession
✅ Graphic, explicit, emotionally devastating heat (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, sports injury (shoulder), reference to past emotionally abusive relationship, and parental abandonment themes. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Imani
The Crown Championships smelled like fresh-cut grass and old money.
I stood at the entrance to the players’ tunnel and breathed it in — that particular combination of manicured lawn, expensive perfume, and the faint mineral bite of London rain that hadn’t quite arrived yet…
“That almost sounded convincing, Brooks.”
The voice came from the doorway…
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Match Point — A scene TOO HOT for retailers
Celeste wins the exhibition match. The new wager is invoked. Silk restraints, devastating patience, and the most explicit scene in the series.
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