Girlfriend on Retainer
A Sapphic Age-Gap Arrangement Romance
by Aurora North
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Fake Dating, Age Gap (46/30), Ice Queen, Paid Arrangement, Praise Kink, Power Exchange, Touch Starved
She hired the perfect girlfriend. She forgot to negotiate an ending.
Sloane Mercer can manage ten thousand employees, forty-three luxury hotels, and a boardroom full of relatives waiting for her to fail. What she cannot manage is the viral video that has turned her into America’s favorite heartless billionaire.
Her advisers say she needs warmth. Stability. A convincing personal life. She needs a girlfriend.
Adria Solis is a professional companion who is polished, perceptive, and expensive enough to make even Sloane hesitate. For eight weeks, Adria will attend six events, charm Sloane’s investors, and look at her as though the ice queen of Mercer House is the only woman in the room. Private services are not included.
But after one staged kiss leaves Sloane desperate for something that feels dangerously real, she asks Adria to name her price. Soon, public affection becomes private surrender. A professional retainer becomes an exclusive arrangement. And the woman Sloane hired to make her appear lovable becomes the only person capable of seeing how badly she wants to be loved.
Adria’s time can be purchased. Her heart cannot. And when their contract becomes public, Sloane must decide whether protecting her empire is worth losing the first woman who ever stayed after the clock ran out.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ A powerful silver-streaked ice queen who secretly craves surrender
✅ A younger professional companion who controls the negotiation
✅ Fake dating that becomes an explicit private arrangement
✅ Praise kink, light bondage, mirror play, and strap-on scenes
✅ Sex work handled without shame or rescue fantasies
✅ A commanding executive who pays for closeness because asking is too dangerous
✅ Wealth, luxury, hotels, penthouses, and black-tie events
✅ An HEA that preserves both women’s independence
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including praise kink, light bondage, blindfolds, strap-on play, mirror play, and power exchange), strong language, depictions of family emotional neglect, and public shaming of sex work. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
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Chapter One: The Ice Queen Goes Viral
I fired Richard Hale on a Tuesday, which was my first mistake. Not the firing itself — that was overdue by approximately six weeks and one fractured wrist — but the timing. Tuesdays at Mercer House meant full administrative staff, open office doors, and Richard’s assistant perched at her desk twelve feet from the glass partition that separated my corner office from the rest of the executive floor.
I didn’t know she was filming. I wouldn’t have cared if I had.
“Sit down, Richard.”
He was already sitting. People who know they’re about to be terminated develop a specific posture — shoulders rounded, weight forward, hands gripping whatever surface is nearest as though gravity might suddenly become optional. Richard gripped the arms of the Eames chair my mother had selected for this office twenty years ago and stared at the severance folder I’d placed on the desk between us.
“Sloane, if this is about the Prestwick suite —”
“Maria Gutierrez has worked housekeeping at this property for eleven years.” I kept my voice level. Volume was never necessary and rarely effective. “She told her shift supervisor that the step ladder on the fourteenth floor had a compromised hinge. Her supervisor flagged it to maintenance. Maintenance put in a work order. You canceled the work order because you needed the Prestwick suite turned in forty minutes for an early VIP arrival, and you didn’t want a maintenance crew blocking the service corridor.”
Richard’s mouth opened. I continued.
“Maria climbed a ladder you knew was defective because you prioritized a guest’s convenience over her safety. She fell. She fractured her wrist in two places. She’s forty-seven years old, she supports her mother and two teenagers, and she will be unable to work for a minimum of six weeks.”
“The ladder was — it was a judgment call. The hinge wasn’t —”
“Your access has been revoked.” I slid the folder three inches closer to him. “Severance terms are generous. You’ll receive twelve months’ salary, continuation of benefits, and a neutral reference. The only condition is that you sign the separation agreement before you leave this floor.”
The thing about firing someone is that it requires you to sit inside another person’s worst moment and refuse to flinch. Most executives delegate it to HR. I never had. If I was going to end someone’s career, I owed them the courtesy of doing it to their face.
Richard stared at the folder. His chin trembled. He was fifty-three, divorced, and this position was the most impressive line on his resume. I knew all of this.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said quietly.
“I made one,” I agreed. “I should have removed you after the staffing incident in March. Maria’s wrist is the consequence of my delay. I won’t compound it.”
He signed. He left.
His assistant, whose name was Kelsey and whose phone had been recording through the glass for approximately four minutes, uploaded the video to TikTok before Richard reached the lobby.
The edit was masterful, in a purely technical sense. Kelsey — or whoever she’d sent the footage to — had stripped every frame of context. Just a tall Black woman in an immaculate charcoal suit, sitting behind a polished desk, sliding a folder across the surface while a middle-aged white man’s expression crumbled like wet paper.
Four seconds of footage. No sound. A caption that read: POV: Your boss has ice in her veins.
It was everywhere by six o’clock. By eight, I’d been christened. The Ice Queen of Park Avenue.
What the video didn’t capture — what no camera had ever captured — was what it cost me to sit across from a man whose life I was dismantling and keep my voice from shaking. They saw ice. What I felt was the effort of not burning.
But that distinction was unmarketable, so I didn’t bother making it.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Room 6 — Anniversary Night — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
One year after the contracts end, Sloane books a room at the hotel below their apartment. A keycard. An emerald robe. A typed note that reads: Order what you actually want. What follows is their hotel-service fantasy revisited — blindfolds, praise, restraint, and the strap — with every ritual transformed by safety and joy.
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