Her Favorite Regular
FF Sapphic Age-Gap Bartender Romance
by Aurora North
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Length: ~85,000 words
Tropes: Age Gap (36/25), Grumpy/Sunshine, Bi Awakening, Bartender Romance, Found Family, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn
She had one rule: no dating customers. The rule never stood a chance.
Mara King owns The Rail — a small, slightly divey, fiercely queer neighborhood bar where she pours drinks, keeps the peace, and never, ever sleeps with customers. Three years after having her heart gutted by a woman who called her “a phase I needed,” Mara has one rule, and she enforces it like scripture.
Then Jules Rivera walks in on a Wednesday night with mascara tracks and a broken heart, and Mara slides her a glass of water she didn’t ask for and says, “Hydration isn’t optional.” Jules laughs for the first time in weeks. She comes back the next Friday. And the next. And the next.
Jules is twenty-five, freshly out of a four-year relationship with a man who never saw her, and slowly realizing that the way she feels about her bartender’s hands has nothing to do with cocktail technique. Mara is thirty-six, tattooed, terrified, and falling for the one person her rule was designed to protect her from.
What starts as loaded glances and after-hours confessions becomes something neither of them can contain — a high-heat, praise-fueled romance that plays out on bar stools and in stockrooms and in the apartment upstairs where Mara’s walls come down one flannel at a time. But when Mara’s past walks through the door and Jules’s family enters the picture, they’ll have to decide: stay safe behind the bar, or risk everything for the person who makes the whole room feel like home.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Sapphic bartender romance with an 11-year age gap
✅ Grumpy bar owner x sunshine regular (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
✅ Bi awakening — her first woman, at a bar stool
✅ “No dating customers” rule that SHATTERS
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Found family — regulars, bartenders, and a jukebox
✅ Stockroom sex, bar-top sex, and praise that rewires your brain
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including oral sex, strap-on use, and praise kink dynamics), strong language, depictions of anxiety, bi-erasure trauma, a difficult coming-out conversation, and jealousy. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Last Call for Dignity
The parking lot of The Rail smelled like rain and someone else’s cigarette smoke, and Jules had been sitting in her car for twenty-two minutes, crying the kind of tears that didn’t even have the decency to be dramatic. No sobbing. No heaving. Just a steady, pathetic leak from both eyes while she stared at a neon sign that read OPEN in letters so old the O had burned out, so it just said PEN.
PEN. Like the universe was telling her to write a new chapter.
Or like a busted neon sign in a parking lot that no one had bothered to fix.
She wiped her face with the sleeve of her sweater and checked the mirror. Mascara streaks. Red eyes. The general look of a woman whose ex-boyfriend had just texted I left your yoga mat at your mom’s house like that was a normal sentence and not the saddest summary of four years she’d ever read.
She’d chosen this bar because it was seventeen minutes from her apartment and across town from every place Derek’s friends might be. She didn’t want to run into Kyle and his opinions. She didn’t want Brittany’s pity face. She didn’t want anyone who’d say but you guys were so good together because if one more person described four years of slow suffocation as “good,” she was going to start screaming in a pitch only dogs could hear.
The Rail looked like the kind of place that didn’t ask questions. Low-slung building, dark brick, no patio, no chalkboard A-frame on the sidewalk advertising craft cocktails or trivia night. Just a door and that half-dead neon and the faint thump of something that might have been music or might have been the building’s heartbeat.
Good enough.
Jules grabbed her bag, locked her car, and walked in like she belonged there, which was a skill she’d perfected in four years of attending Derek’s work functions and pretending she found insurance adjusting fascinating.
Inside, The Rail was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the thermostat.
The lighting was amber and low, the kind that forgave everything — bad skin, bad days, bad decisions. Christmas lights hung in loose swoops along the ceiling, year-round by the look of them, tangled around exposed pipes and a ceiling fan that turned so slowly it seemed philosophical about it. The bar itself was dark wood, scarred and glossy with decades of elbows and spilled drinks, lined with mismatched stools that looked like they’d been collected one at a time from different decades. A jukebox glowed in the corner, playing something with a bass line and a woman’s voice that sounded like whiskey tasted.
Behind the bar, a chalkboard listed the house rules in blocky handwriting:
1. Don’t be an asshole.
2. Tip your bartender.
3. No, she won’t give you her number.
Jules almost smiled. Almost.
The crowd was sparse for a Wednesday — a couple tucked into a corner booth, leaning into each other like the rest of the room didn’t exist. Two women at the pool table, one of them lining up a shot while the other watched her with an expression that had very little to do with billiards. A guy at the far end of the bar reading a paperback with a cracked spine, a half-finished pint beside him like punctuation.
And behind the bar, the bartender.
Jules saw her before anything else registered, the way you notice a bonfire before you notice the yard it’s in. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dark hair pulled half up, the rest falling past her jaw in a way that looked accidental and probably was. She was pouring a beer from the tap with one hand while tossing a bar towel over her shoulder with the other, and the motion was so fluid, so practiced, that Jules watched it the way she’d watch someone play an instrument — fascinated by the competence of it.
She wore a flannel with the sleeves rolled to her elbows, dark jeans, boots. No jewelry except a watch with a leather band. Her left arm was covered in ink from wrist to where the rolled sleeve hid the rest — something botanical, leaves and flowers rendered in black and gray with a precision that made Jules want to get closer just to read the details.
Her face was angular and serious, the kind of face that rested at don’t waste my time and probably softened only under specific, earned conditions. She handed off the beer, said something to the guy with the paperback that made him snort, and then her eyes swept the room the way a lighthouse sweeps the ocean — automatic, thorough, missing nothing.
They landed on Jules for half a second. Assessed. Moved on.
Jules felt something shift behind her ribs. Not attraction — she wasn’t in a state to feel attraction, she told herself, she was in a state to feel sorry for herself and drink cheap vodka — but recognition. Like her nervous system had clocked something her brain hadn’t caught up to yet.
She looks like she could solve every problem I have.
Which was a weird thing to think about a bartender. Jules filed it under “post-breakup brain damage” and walked to the bar.
She chose a stool near the middle, not too close to Paperback Guy, not too far from the taps. Set her bag on the hook underneath. Placed her hands flat on the bar like she was anchoring herself to something solid.
The bartender appeared in front of her without seeming to have moved. Just suddenly there, the way a bartender who’d been doing this for years could materialize and dematerialize like a very practical ghost.
The chapter continues in the full book…
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Closing Time — The Anniversary — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
One year after Jules walked into The Rail. The bar is closed. The sign is off. And Mara has plans for every surface in the building. Bar-top sex, blindfolds, and the filthiest, most tender anniversary scene you’ll ever read.
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