Rage Quit
Sapphic Contemporary Romance
by Aurora North
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Snowed In, Rivals to Lovers, Competence Kink, Touch Starved, Grumpy/Sunshine
She trashed my game on a livestream watched by half a million people. Now we’re snowed into one cabin with one bed, one deadline, and a project neither of us can finish alone.
Mara Ellison is sixteen days from a board vote that could cost twenty-six people their jobs. The only thing standing between her indie studio and disaster is a flawless game demo, built in total isolation at her remote Adirondack cabin. Unfortunately, the cabin has been double-booked.
Sloane Park is the brutally honest indie developer who publicly shredded Mara’s last game, and she needs the cabin’s equipment to finish her own showcase demo. Snowed in, sharing one bedroom, and racing separate deadlines, the two rivals strike a temporary truce.
Then Sloane finds Mara’s secret prototype. Helping Mara finish it could save the studio. Letting Mara close enough to touch her could ruin everything. And when their creative partnership becomes something hotter, messier, and painfully real, both women must decide whether love is another risk to manage — or the only thing worth rebuilding from scratch.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Enemies to lovers with real professional stakes
✅ Snowed-in cabin, one bed, nowhere to run
✅ Game developers who argue like foreplay
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, seven full scenes
✅ Competence kink and touch-starved heroines
✅ Creative partnership becomes emotional partnership
✅ Two queer women who keep their careers AND each other
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains graphic explicit sexual content (FF scenes), strong language, workplace conflict, panic attacks, emotional manipulation themes, and corporate pressure. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: The Last Sixteen Days
Mara
The fluorescent light above seat seven had been flickering for forty-three minutes. Mara had been counting because it was easier than counting the ways this meeting could end her company.
She stood at the head of the glass table while eight board members sat, which was a power move she’d learned from a TED talk she’d never admit to watching. Standing said confidence. Standing said vision. Standing said she hadn’t slept more than four hours in a row since October and sitting down might actually kill her.
“The vertical slice will demonstrate proof of concept for narrative-driven gameplay in the premium indie space.” She advanced the slide. Clean. Confident. Northstar Interactive blue. “We’re targeting a fifteen-minute playable experience that showcases the core emotional loop of The Last Lightkeeper—”
“Emotional loop,” Ingrid Shaw repeated from seat three, the way someone might repeat the phrase intestinal parasite. The board chair had a talent for turning two words into a performance review. “Mara, the studio’s last ’emotional loop’ lost us eleven percent of our projected Q3 revenue.”
“Asterfall’s underperformance was driven by publisher-mandated changes to the final act, which I documented extensively in the post-mortem—”
“Which the publisher disputes.”
“Publishers dispute gravity if it affects their margins.”
A flicker of amusement from Dev at the far end of the table. Nobody else moved.
Ingrid folded her hands. She had beautiful hands, Mara noticed. The kind of hands that had never been jammed into the back of a server rack at three in the morning because the build was crashing and your lead programmer was in the ER with kidney stones. Elegant, unscratched, certain.
“Here’s what we’re looking at,” Ingrid said, and Mara recognized the tone. The one that preceded the knife. “Northstar has a runway of approximately four months at current burn rate. We have twenty-six full-time employees whose salaries represent seventy-one percent of operating costs. The IP portfolio has appreciated significantly, and we’ve received preliminary acquisition interest from two publishers and one platform holder.”
The room got very still. Mara kept her face exactly where it was.
“You want to sell.”
“I want options. The board wants options. What you’re proposing—” Ingrid gestured at the screen with one of those pristine hands. “—is a moonshot on a narrative game in a market that has consistently undervalued narrative games. Without a proven multiplayer component, without a monetization strategy beyond initial purchase, and without a release window that aligns with any major retail cycle.”
“The Aurora Game Showcase is in sixteen days. If I deliver a vertical slice that generates publisher interest—”
“Sixteen days.”
“Yes.”
Ingrid looked at her the way you look at a dog that keeps bringing you the same dead bird. Not with cruelty. With the exhausted patience of someone who has stopped expecting a different outcome.
“Sixteen days to build a playable demo compelling enough to attract a publishing deal that would render acquisition discussions unnecessary.”
“That’s what I’m proposing.”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Save Point — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon. Set three months after the epilogue: Mara and Sloane return to Black Spruce Cabin for a long weekend. No deadlines. No board meetings. Just the rug, the wood stove, and the woman who taught her that the signal was worth sending. Their hottest, most playful, most uninhibited scene yet.
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