Cottagecore with Benefits

Sapphic Small-Town Romance
by Aurora North

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Bi Awakening, Praise Kink, Small Town, Slow Burn, Found Family, Cottagecore

Soft life. Hard-won love. And nothing about the heat is soft at all.

Sophie Kim is done being excellent. After a burnout-fueled breakdown ends her corporate career, she inherits a crumbling lakeside inn from her late aunt — and with it, the chance to build a life that doesn’t require a parking-garage crying schedule.

Riley Ortiz is done being left. The town’s only contractor — butch, capable, quietly devastating in a tool belt — has watched too many city visitors romanticize her small-town life and then leave when the charm wears off. She’s not about to let another one in.

But when Sophie hires Riley to renovate the inn, twelve weeks of forced proximity, shared labor, and increasingly non-accidental touches turn a professional arrangement into something neither of them can deny. Sophie discovers that Riley’s praise — “good job,” “you’re a natural,” “that’s perfect” — hits her somewhere no spreadsheet can reach. Riley discovers that Sophie’s attention — specific, genuine, relentless — is the first thing that’s made her believe she could be someone’s destination instead of their pit stop.

They christen every room they finish. They fall in love over sawdust and coffee and the specific intimacy of building something together with your hands. But when a six-figure job offer and a lucrative property sale threaten to pull Sophie back to the city, Riley has to decide if she can trust someone to stay — and Sophie has to decide if a soft life is worth the risk of a broken heart.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Butch/femme sapphic romance with scorching heat
✅ Forced proximity + grumpy/sunshine
✅ Praise kink that escalates from innocent to devastating
✅ Cottagecore aesthetic with filthy behind-closed-doors energy
✅ Found family in a small lakeside town
✅ A heroine who learns to want out loud and a love interest who learns to be chosen
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, praise kink, depictions of burnout, panic attacks, and family conflict around sexual orientation. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Inheritance Tax

The podcast host was explaining, in the soothing tones of a man who’d never had a real job, that burnout was actually a gift.

“It’s your body’s way of telling you to slow down,” he said. “To listen. To recalibrate your relationship with productivity.”

Sophie Kim jabbed the power button on her car stereo so hard she chipped her thumbnail.

“Fuck your recalibration,” she muttered.

The two-lane road stretched ahead through a tunnel of late-June maples, dappled light strobing across her windshield in a way that was probably beautiful if you weren’t white-knuckling the steering wheel of a Honda Civic packed to the ceiling with everything you owned. Which wasn’t much anymore. Two suitcases. A laptop bag. A box of kitchen things she’d panic-bought at Target because it suddenly seemed important to own a garlic press. A dead succulent she couldn’t bring herself to throw away because Amir had given it to her and abandoning it felt like a metaphor she wasn’t ready to examine.

The GPS said fourteen minutes to Havenwood Lake.

Fourteen minutes to either the biggest mistake of her life or the first good decision she’d made in a decade.

Sophie had been running the math on this for three weeks — ever since the lawyer’s call — and she still couldn’t make the numbers tell her what to do. The property was assessed at $148,000, which sounded like money until you factored in back taxes, deferred maintenance, and the fact that the “lakeside inn” her Aunt June had left her hadn’t operated as an actual inn in over three years. The smart move was to sell.

The smart move was exactly what her mother expected her to do.

Which was, if Sophie was being honest, the primary reason she hadn’t done it yet.

She turned off the county highway onto a narrower road. The trees thickened. Through gaps in the canopy, she caught flashes of water — flat and silver under the overcast sky. The lake. She remembered it bigger from childhood, but then she’d been eight years old and everything had been bigger then: the water, the trees, her aunt’s laugh, the number of days in a summer.

Aunt June.

Sophie’s throat tightened the way it did every time she let herself think about it directly. June Kim-Novak — her father’s older sister, the family eccentric, the one who’d left Seoul at twenty-two and never looked back. Who’d married a folk musician, opened an inn in the middle of nowhere, and lived a life that Sophie’s mother described as “unstructured” in the same tone she might say “criminal.”

June had been dead for nine months. Pancreatic cancer, fast and merciless. Sophie hadn’t known she was sick until the hospice call, because June hadn’t told anyone, because that was June — fiercely private, stubbornly self-sufficient, unwilling to be a burden even when being a burden was the most human thing you could do.

She’d quit the next day. Her boss had called it “dramatic.” Her mother had called it “a phase.” Her therapist had called it “long overdue” and suggested that Sophie do something radical with the space it created.

Then the lawyer had called about the inn.

The road curved and dropped, and suddenly the lake was right there — wide and still, ringed by dark pines. And on the shore, set back from the water behind a stand of birch trees, was the Lakeshore House.

Sophie pulled into the gravel drive and turned off the engine.

The inn was beautiful. That was the first thing. A three-story Victorian with a wrap-around porch, tall windows, a stone chimney, and a gambrel roof. The birches framed it like a painting. The dock stretched out into the water, weathered to silver.

The inn was also, clearly, falling apart.

Sophie got out of the car. The air hit her first. Cool, damp, green — so different from the recycled climate-control of every space she’d inhabited for the past six years that it felt like breathing a different substance entirely.

She walked through room by room. Water stains on ceilings. Wallpaper curling. Beds stripped to bare mattresses. In one room, a family of mice had built a nest in the dresser drawer.

On the dresser in June’s apartment, Sophie found the guest book. A clothbound journal, forest green, with “The Lakeshore House” embossed in faded gold. Pages of entries from guests over the years. And tucked between the last written page and the blank ones: a note card in June’s handwriting.

“The house will tell you what it needs. Listen.”

Sophie pressed the note card to her chest and sat on June’s bed and cried.

She went back to the car, grabbed her phone, and called Amir.

“It’s a wreck. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. It’s either a money pit or a fresh start and I genuinely cannot tell which.”

“Babe,” Amir said. “Those are the same thing.”

In town, she found Flour & Filament — a café that sold baked goods and craft supplies as if those were a natural combination. Behind the counter: Mia Castillo, who recognized her instantly, hugged her before Sophie could react, and within ten minutes had given her a muffin, a list of emergency contacts, and one critical recommendation:

“Call Riley Ortiz. She’s the only contractor within forty miles who won’t rob you blind, and she’s good.”

Sophie drove back to the inn at dusk. The lake was doing something absurd with the light — turning the water to hammered copper. She sat on the dock, feet dangling, and for the first time in months, the band around her chest loosened. Just slightly.

Her phone buzzed. An email from her former boss: “Whenever you’re ready to come back to reality.”

Sophie stared at the email. Then she stared at the lake.

She did not reply.

She watched the stars come out over the lake, one by one, until the sky was more light than dark and the world was very quiet and very large and she was, for the first time in as long as she could remember, not in a hurry to be anywhere else.

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