Her First Bad Decision

Sapphic Age-Gap Romance
by Aurora North

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Age Gap, Boss’s Daughter, Forbidden Workplace, Bi-Awakening, Secret Relationship, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Ice Queen × Sunshine

The family business was supposed to teach her independence. Not how badly she wanted her mother’s right hand.

Tamsin Cade has spent her whole life being underestimated. As the youngest daughter of a luxury-hotel dynasty, she’s used to people seeing the surname before they see the MBA, the experience, or the plan to save her family’s iconic coastal resort from a private-equity takeover.

What she does not have is her mother’s trust. Or any ability to think straight around Nicolette Arbour.

Nix is the Cade family’s formidable chief of staff — controlled, devastating, and fourteen years older than Tamsin. She’s spent a decade running the empire from the inside and she knows exactly why falling for the boss’s twenty-six-year-old daughter would be the worst decision of her career.

Then one stormy night in a lighthouse changes everything.

As Tamsin fights to prove she deserves her name and Nix fights to keep the only life she’s built, they begin a secret summer affair that neither woman can afford. Tamsin is determined to prove this isn’t a phase. Nix is determined not to become a beautiful mistake in the life of a woman who’s always had somewhere safe to land.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Sapphic age-gap with a 14-year difference
✅ Boss’s daughter × ice queen chief of staff
✅ Forbidden workplace romance with real consequences
✅ Bi-awakening that’s visceral, physical, and earned
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Luxury East End resort setting with a found-family staff
✅ A heroine who earns her place and a love interest who learns to stay
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, workplace power dynamics, and themes of family pressure and self-discovery. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Back at Bellamy House

The last time I drove into Saint Aurelia, I was twenty-two and running away from everything the town represented. Now I was twenty-six, had an MBA, eighteen months of real hospitality work under someone else’s name, and the distinct feeling that the universe was laughing at me for coming back.

I turned down Ocean Road with the windows open and the radio too loud, because if I was going to have a panic attack, I preferred it with a soundtrack. Late June on the East End smelled the way it always did—salt air and money—and the afternoon light hit the hedgerows like it was trying to sell me a lifestyle I already owned.

Bellamy House sat at the end of a private drive lined with old elms, the kind of trees that looked like they’d been planted by someone who understood the long game. The resort sprawled across a bluff above the Atlantic—a century-old main house in white clapboard and dark shingles, a collection of guest cottages trailing down toward the beach, the spa and restaurant buildings tucked into the gardens like afterthoughts, though nothing about this property had ever been an afterthought. My great-great-grandmother had commissioned the original house. My mother had turned it into an empire. I had spent twenty years watching both of those facts be wielded like weapons.

I pulled into the staff lot instead of the family circle because I was making a point nobody had asked me to make, grabbed my bag, and walked into the lobby through the side entrance.

Bellamy House in high season was a living organism. The lobby hummed with the particular energy of a place that cost eight hundred dollars a night and still managed to feel like someone’s impossibly elegant home. White hydrangeas on the reception desk, the old brass key rack that hadn’t actually held keys in a decade but stayed because guests loved it, the sound of the ocean through propped-open French doors, the quiet competence of staff in cream linen uniforms moving through spaces designed to make money feel like taste.

I knew every inch of this building. I knew the stain on the second-floor landing that no amount of restoration could remove. I knew the trick to the stuck window in the library. I knew that the chef kept a bottle of bourbon behind the flour bins and that the housekeeping closet on the third floor had the best cell reception in the building.

I also knew that the woman behind the front desk—Rosa, who’d worked here for fifteen years and who’d let me eat contraband room-service desserts in her office when I was twelve—was watching me with an expression that landed somewhere between delight and worry.

“Tamsin Cade.” She came around the desk and hugged me like I hadn’t been gone four years. She smelled like the resort’s signature hand cream, the same scent that meant safety when I was small. “Look at you. All grown up and carrying your own luggage.”

“I’m making a statement.”

“You’re making your shoulders uneven. Give me that.” She took my garment bag and held me at arm’s length. “Your mother didn’t tell me you were coming until yesterday.”

“My mother didn’t tell me about the rotation until last week, so we’re all operating on her schedule.”

Rosa’s smile thinned at the edges. “She’s in the east office. She’s expecting you at four.” A pause. “Cottage Nine is made up for you.”

Cottage Nine. Not the family wing. Not even one of the premium guest cottages with the ocean views. Cottage Nine was charming and well-maintained and located behind the staff parking lot, which meant my mother had assigned me housing with the subtlety of a woman who ran a hospitality empire and understood the language of room assignments better than anyone alive.

You are not a guest. You are not family. You are on probation.

Message received.

I dropped my bags in Cottage Nine, which was, admittedly, beautiful—whitewashed walls, a bed that could drown a person in linen, a writing desk by the window that looked out over the herb garden—and texted my sister.

Tamsin: Cottage 9. Behind the dumpsters.

Sloane: It’s behind the herb garden. Stop being dramatic.

Tamsin: She could have put me in the pool house.

Sloane: She could have put you in the parking lot. Count your blessings and don’t be late.

I was not late. I was, in fact, four minutes early, which I considered a personal triumph given that I’d spent the drive rehearsing three different versions of a speech that all boiled down to please see me as a professional human being and not a tabloid headline from 2021.

My mother’s east office at Bellamy House was a room designed to make you feel like you were about to be evaluated by a woman who had never received a grade below an A in her life, which, as far as I knew, was accurate. Evelyn Cade sat behind a desk the color of dark honey with the Atlantic glittering behind her, wearing a navy silk blouse and the particular expression she reserved for conversations she intended to control from the first word.

She was fifty-eight and looked like what happened when good bones, excellent dermatology, and the sheer force of will met in a single body. Her hair was silver-blonde and always impeccable. Her posture made mine look like I’d been raised by wolves. I loved her in the complicated, exhausting way you love someone who has never once made you feel like you were enough.

“Sit down, Tamsin.”

I sat.

“You have your MBA. You have eighteen months of work experience at—” She glanced at a folder. “The Ashworth Collection in London. Under the name Tamsin Marsh.”

“Marsh was Gran’s maiden name.”

“I’m aware of your grandmother’s maiden name.” She closed the folder. “I’m also aware that you chose a false name because you believed you couldn’t succeed on your own merits if anyone knew who your family was.”

“I chose a different name because I wanted to learn the business without every hotel manager in Europe treating me like a shareholder’s daughter doing a gap year.”

“And did you learn?”

“I restructured their guest-experience program, increased their rebooking rate by fourteen percent, and got promoted twice. So yes.”

The faintest shift in her expression. Not impressed—Evelyn Cade did not do impressed—but recalibrated. She’d read the references. She wouldn’t have brought me here otherwise.

“Here is what I’m offering.” She folded her hands. “Twelve weeks. A full executive-development rotation at Bellamy House: operations, staffing, guest experience, events, finance. You will learn every department from the inside, not from a textbook. You will not use your surname to bypass a single decision. At the end of the rotation, you will present a strategic revitalization plan for the resort’s winter board meeting.”

She let that sit.

“If the plan is viable and the board approves it, you will be offered a director-level position at Cade and Crest. If it is not—” A pause that lasted exactly long enough to hurt. “You will pursue your career outside the family company.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say I’d already proven myself in London and this felt like an audition for a role I’d been rehearsing for my whole life. But I’d promised myself on the drive down that I would stop reacting to my mother’s tests like a teenager who’d been told she couldn’t go to prom.

“I accept.”

“I haven’t finished.” She reached for the phone on her desk. “I’ve assigned someone to coordinate your rotation. She will set your schedule, oversee your departmental placements, and evaluate your progress. She is the only person on this property I trust not to indulge you.”

She.

My mother pressed a button. “Nicolette, would you come in?”

I heard the door open behind me. I heard heels on hardwood—a measured, unhurried stride, the walk of someone who had never rushed to enter a room because every room waited for her. I turned in my chair.

Nicolette Arbour closed the door and crossed to stand beside my mother’s desk, and the first thing I thought was that I had somehow never actually seen her before.

I’d met her. Three, maybe four times over the past three years, at family charity events and company functions where I’d been too busy performing the role of Youngest Cade Daughter to pay attention to anyone who wasn’t handing me champagne or asking about London. I remembered a polished, reserved woman in dark clothing who spoke quietly and seemed to know exactly which room every crisis was happening in before anyone else did. I remembered thinking she was efficient. Professional. Forgettable, in the way people are when they’re so competent they become invisible.

She was not invisible now.

She was tall—five-eleven, maybe, in low heels—with a lean, strong build that her tailored charcoal suit did nothing to conceal and everything to frame. Dark hair pulled into a low knot that looked effortless and probably required architectural precision. Green-brown eyes that assessed me with the calm thoroughness of someone reading a balance sheet. High cheekbones. A mouth that managed to look austere and full at the same time, which should not have been possible and yet.

She was forty years old and she looked like the physical manifestation of authority, and I felt something shift in my chest that I did not immediately have a name for.

“Welcome back, Ms. Cade.” Her voice was low and measured and carried the particular weight of someone who chose every word like it cost money. “Your first shift begins at six.”

“Six,” I repeated, because apparently my MBA had not prepared me for basic numbers.

“A.M. We have a wedding party arriving at eight, and the operations team briefs at six-fifteen. I’ll have a schedule sent to your cottage by this evening.” She held a leather portfolio against her hip and did not smile. “Do you have any questions?”

I had several questions, none of which were appropriate for my mother’s office. Why do you smell like that? Is that perfume or just the way authority smells when it’s five-eleven and wearing a suit that fits like a second language? Have we actually met before, because I feel like I would have remembered this, and the fact that I didn’t is making me question my observational skills, which I had previously considered excellent.

“No questions,” I said. “I’ll be there at six.”

“Five forty-five would be better. The staff appreciate punctuality from leadership.”

She said leadership without irony or qualification, as if I were already someone worth being on time for. It was the most generous thing anyone had said to me in months, and she delivered it like a schedule correction.

“Five forty-five,” I said.

She nodded once—efficient, final—and left. The door closed behind her with a soft, definitive click that felt like punctuation on a sentence I hadn’t finished reading.

My mother was watching me.

“Nicolette has been with this company for twelve years,” she said, and her voice had the quality of a woman laying down rules that she expected to be self-evident. “She is the most capable operator I have ever worked with. She reports directly to me, and she is responsible for more of this company’s success than anyone in this family, including myself, is comfortable admitting.”

“I’m not going to make her job harder, Mom.”

“I’m sure you’ll try not to.” Evelyn picked up her pen, which was her version of a dismissal. “Five forty-five, Tamsin. Don’t make her wait.”

I walked back to Cottage Nine in the late-afternoon light with the salt breeze coming off the water and the resort humming around me—golf carts carrying luggage, a string quartet warming up somewhere near the terrace, the distant laughter of guests who had paid a great deal of money to feel like the world was beautiful and manageable.

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the herb garden through the window and tried to organize what I was feeling into categories that made professional sense.

I was nervous about the rotation. That was reasonable.

I was angry about Cottage Nine. That was petty but understandable.

I was determined to prove my mother wrong, or right, or whatever version of me she was waiting to see. That was old and familiar and exhausting.

And I was thinking about Nicolette Arbour’s hands. Specifically, the way her left hand had rested against the leather portfolio—long fingers, a single silver ring, nails trimmed short and clean—and the way my brain had catalogued that detail with the precision of someone who’d been trained in guest-experience observation and was now applying those skills to entirely the wrong subject.

I had been noticing women my entire life. I knew that. It was a thing I’d filed under “aesthetic appreciation” and “fashion awareness” and “I just really admire her confidence” and every other label that let me get through my twenties without examining why my longest relationship with a man had felt like something I was very good at performing.

Evan had been kind and handsome and exactly the kind of partner my mother approved of, and when I’d told him I was moving to London, I had felt relief so profound it should have been a confession. I told myself I was relieved to be independent. I told myself the relationship had simply run its course. I told myself that the fact I’d never once felt desperate for him—never lost sleep, never felt my chest crack open at the thought of losing him, never wanted anything so much it frightened me—was maturity. That I was simply not a person who felt things at that volume.

I was beginning to suspect I had been wrong about the volume.

Because the woman who had just told me to show up at five forty-five had been in my mother’s office for approximately ninety seconds, and in those ninety seconds my body had done something it had never done in four years with Evan or any of the pleasant, forgettable dates in London or the one ill-advised kiss with a colleague at a Christmas party that I’d written off as too much prosecco.

It had paid attention.

Not the way I paid attention to a beautiful building or a well-designed room or a woman in a magazine. This was different. This was cellular. This was the volume turned up to a frequency I didn’t have a name for yet, and it was still reverberating in my chest like the aftershock of something I hadn’t felt hit.

I picked up my phone and stared at it and put it down.

I was here to save Bellamy House. I was here to earn a career. I was here to prove to my mother and my siblings and every investor who had ever looked at me like a charming liability that Tamsin Cade was more than a surname and a set of cheekbones.

I was not here to develop an inconvenient fixation on my mother’s chief of staff.

I set my alarm for five-fifteen, turned off the light, and lay in the dark listening to the ocean through the open window, trying to think about financial projections and departmental rotations and strategic revitalization and anything other than the exact pitch of Nicolette Arbour’s voice saying Ms. Cade like it was a door she had decided not to open.

I did not succeed.

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The First Night In — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Tamsin and Nix move into their first apartment together. The last box is unpacked at 9:47 p.m. Nix announces she wants to christen every room. Kitchen counter, living room couch, office desks, clawfoot tub, bedroom. Five rooms. One night. Zero restraint.

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