Soft Launch, Hard Feelings
A High-Heat Sapphic Best-Friends-to-Lovers Rom-Com
by Aurora North
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Fake Dating, Bi Awakening, One Bed, Mutual Pining, Forced Proximity, Secret Relationship, Praise Kink, Workplace Romance
The chemistry is sponsored. The feelings are not.
Marlowe Keats knows exactly what her followers want.
They definitely don’t need to know that her latest boyfriend-for-content vanished five minutes before a sponsored livestream.
When her best friend and creative director Sable Whitcomb steps into frame, their easy teasing sends the internet into a frenzy. One sponsor mistakenly calls them a couple. A million viewers decide they’ve witnessed the world’s most obvious girlfriend soft launch.
The deal: six weeks of staged ambiguity. One luxury couples retreat. Enough money to buy their creative freedom.
Sable has loved Marlowe for years. She knows accepting is a terrible idea. Marlowe knows she’s straight — except for the fantasies, the jealousy, the way Sable’s hands feel on her waist, and the private rehearsal kiss neither woman can stop repeating.
Soon their fake dates lead to very real locked doors. But the more profitable their almost-relationship becomes, the more everyone wants to control its ending.
Sable refuses to be edited out of her own love story.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Best friends to lovers with years of pining and one devastating first kiss
✅ Bisexual awakening that’s messy, real, and earned
✅ Fake dating that becomes very, very real behind locked doors
✅ Influencer × woman behind the camera
✅ One bed at a luxury couples retreat
✅ Graphic, explicit, emotional heat (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
✅ Creator-economy comedy, agency politics, and a found-family production team
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including toy use, harness play, restraint, mirror use, and praise kink), strong language, online harassment, agency manipulation, parasocial entitlement, bisexual-awakening themes, temporary breakup, and depictions of professional gaslighting. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Going Live
Forty-three minutes until we go live, and my boyfriend is stuck in an airport bar in Atlanta.
Not my real boyfriend. I don’t have one of those. I have Bennett Cole, six-two, jawline by God, abs by commitment, who charges three thousand dollars per sponsored appearance and once told me with a straight face that his love language is “brand alignment.”
“Cancel the stream.” Sable doesn’t look up from the light she’s adjusting. Sable Whitcomb does not panic. Sable Whitcomb adjusts the f-stop and waits for everyone else to catch up.
“I can’t cancel a forty-thousand-dollar segment because Bennett is weather-dependent.”
“Your entire brand is weather-dependent. You filmed a sunrise routine in a hurricane.”
“And it outperformed the whole quarter, so maybe my instincts are worth trusting.”
She finally looks at me. Gray-green eyes, patient and sharp, framed by dark auburn hair pulled into her work knot. The leather camera harness crosses her chest like armor. She looks like she was sent by a very stylish military to occupy my kitchen.
“Your instincts are excellent,” she says. “Your plan is missing a person.”
“Then help me.”
I watch her hands make precise adjustments. Sable’s hands have been in my content for five years. I’ve never thought about why that detail makes my stomach tighten.
Well. I’ve never let myself think about it.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
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Raw Footage — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Sable’s Iceland documentary wraps early. She comes home to find Marlowe shooting content alone in the studio — badly. What begins as a playful creative-direction lesson turns into the filthiest reunion their studio has ever seen.
More from Aurora North
Browse all Aurora North books.
The Straight and Narrow Escape
She was supposed to marry the perfect man. Her driver was only supposed to get her to the altar.
Practice Makes Girlfriends
She asked for practice. Her best friend wants permanence.
The Lesbian Clause
She put fake dating in the contract. No one said anything about falling in love.
The Hot Neighbor Problem
She complained about the noise. Then she became it.
Soft Launch, Hard Feelings
The chemistry is sponsored. The feelings are not.
Practice Makes Perfectly Gay
The Match Point Series
Her forehand was elite. Her heterosexuality needed work.
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