Her Plus-One Problem
Sapphic Escort Romance
by Aurora North
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Escort/Client, Fake Dating, Age Gap, Possessive MC, Forced Proximity, Hurt/Comfort
She hired a plus-one. She didn’t plan to fall in love with the invoice.
Naomi Blake doesn’t do chaos. She does billable hours, closing arguments, and the kind of composure that makes opposing counsel flinch. She’s weeks away from making partner at one of Manhattan’s top law firms — but her colleagues keep noticing she’s always alone at events, and the whispers are getting louder.
So she does the most Naomi thing possible: she hires a professional. Sloane Vega is a high-end escort who specializes in making powerful people look even more powerful. She’s warm, witty, and dangerously good at reading rooms. The arrangement is simple: three events, one convincing girlfriend, zero feelings.
The arrangement is not simple.
What starts as a performance becomes a compulsion. Naomi starts buying out Sloane’s calendar, then her evenings, then her nights — building spreadsheets and retainer agreements because contracts are the only language she trusts and I love you is the one she can’t speak. Sloane, who’s spent four years keeping clients at professional distance, starts breaking every rule she’s ever set — returning money, staying until morning, falling for a woman who treats intimacy like a hostile acquisition.
When the arrangement detonates, both women will have to decide: is what they built worth saving — and can it survive without the framework that created it?
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Sapphic romance with an escort/fake dating hook
✅ Ice queen lawyer × warm chameleon escort
✅ Age gap (28/37) with a power dynamic that flips
✅ “I bought out your calendar” possessiveness
✅ Spreadsheets as love letters (literally)
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ 9 explicit scenes that escalate from transactional to devastating
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, escort/sex work themes, age-gap relationship dynamics, jealousy and possessiveness, and depictions of emotional vulnerability and workplace pressure. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Optics
“Clause fourteen-point-three doesn’t say what you think it says.”
Naomi Blake didn’t raise her voice. She never did. Volume was a tool for lawyers who’d run out of better ones. Instead, she placed her pen on the conference table—parallel to the edge, because chaos was for amateurs—and looked at the man across from her with the kind of patience usually reserved for explaining gravity to someone who’d just walked off a roof.
“It says—” he started.
“It says the acquirer assumes liability for pending regulatory actions as of the signing date.” She flipped three pages in the marked-up agreement without looking down. She’d memorized it at two in the morning, standing in her kitchen eating peanut butter from the jar like a feral raccoon in a Tom Ford suit, but opposing counsel didn’t need to know that. “Your client’s EPA violation wasn’t pending at signing. It was filed six days after. Which means your indemnification argument has the structural integrity of wet tissue paper.”
Steven Halverston—gray-templed, corner-office smug, the kind of lawyer who still called female colleagues “young lady” when he thought no one important was listening—opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at his associate for help. The associate was twenty-eight and visibly wishing he’d gone to dental school.
“We can revisit the language,” Halverston said, with the careful dignity of a man pretending he hadn’t just been publicly pantsed.
“We can.” Naomi folded her hands. “Or you can accept the carve-out I sent last Tuesday—the one your team has been sitting on for six days while presumably hoping the problem would solve itself through the power of positive thinking—and we can close this by Friday.”
A beat. Two.
“We’ll review the carve-out.”
“Wonderful.”
She stood first, because she always stood first, and extended her hand across the table with a smile that was perfectly calibrated: warm enough to seem professional, cool enough to remind him she’d just won. Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she walked to the door, posture immaculate, every line of her charcoal Givenchy suit saying I was born for this room and you’re renting space in it.
Then the door closed behind her and she was in the hallway, alone, and she checked her phone.
Three texts. All from the same person.
Meredith (Events): Hi Naomi! Just finalizing the seating chart for the Partners’ Gala on the 14th. Need your plus-one’s name for the place card by EOD Thursday.
Meredith (Events): Also dietary restrictions if applicable!
Meredith (Events): 😊
Naomi stared at the smiley face with the specific contempt she usually reserved for poorly drafted arbitration clauses. She locked her phone, dropped it into her bag, and walked toward her office.
No plus-one. No place card. No dietary restrictions.
Just Naomi, party of one, for the fourth year running.
The cocktail hour before the gala was technically optional in the way that breathing was technically optional if you didn’t mind turning blue and falling over.
Naomi arrived at six-fifteen, exactly on time, in a navy sheath dress that cost more than her first month’s rent out of law school. She carried a glass of Sancerre she wouldn’t finish and a smile she’d finish even less.
The room arranged itself the way it always did: in pairs. David Chen and his husband by the bar. Rebecca Torres and her fiancé near the hors d’oeuvres. Marcus Webb—goddamn Marcus Webb—holding court by the windows with his wife Priti, a pediatric surgeon who somehow managed to look radiant after twelve-hour shifts.
Marcus caught Naomi’s eye and raised his glass. She returned the gesture, because she was a professional and professionals didn’t scowl at their rivals across a room full of voting partners, no matter how much they wanted to.
But Marcus had Priti. Marcus had the brownstone in Park Slope and the golden retriever and the effortless optics of a man who had his life assembled, not just his career.
Naomi had a one-bedroom in the Financial District with a Le Creuset she’d never used and a succulent that was putting up a brave fight.
By seven-fifteen she’d spoken to every partner in the room except one.
“Naomi.”
Diane Holloway materialized beside her the way Diane always did—without warning and without apology, like weather. At sixty-three, Diane was the firm’s founding-era remnant: silver-haired, sharp-jawed, built like a woman who’d survived the ’80s legal world by being twice as smart and three times as mean as anyone who’d tried to push her out.
“The partnership vote is in ten weeks,” Diane said. “You’re the strongest candidate. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”
“I’m not finished.” Diane took a measured sip. “You’re brilliant, Naomi. But this firm runs on relationships. The partners who’ll vote on your name? They want to see someone who has a life outside this building.”
“Marcus has Priti,” she said, and hated how small it sounded.
“Marcus has optics.” Diane finished her scotch. “You need yours. You’re the better lawyer. Don’t make them pick the better story.”
She walked away. Diane Holloway always walked away first.
“You look like someone slashed your tires and then complimented your shoes.”
Jeanine Okafor, paralegal, twenty-six, relentlessly cheerful, and the only person in the building who wasn’t scared of Naomi, was perched on the edge of her desk eating a Kind bar.
“Diane gave me the speech tonight. The you need to appear stable speech.”
“You know what you need? A professional. Like, someone whose literal job is showing up and being impressive.”
“You’re suggesting I hire a sex worker to attend my law firm’s gala.”
“I’m suggesting you hire a social companion to attend a series of professional events where the only qualification is looking great and making you seem like a person with a life. Which, no offense, you currently are not.”
“Tremendous offense taken.”
“The deliverable being optics,” Jeanine said, pointing at her with the Kind bar. “Diane’s word, not mine. But also mine.” She grabbed her bag. “Think about it. Or don’t. But responding to Meredith with ‘party of one’ for the fourth year in a row is going to make her sad, and she already has seasonal depression.”
Her apartment was quiet the way it always was—intentionally, aggressively quiet, the kind of silence that came from living alone and preferring it, or at least preferring the version of it she’d convinced herself to prefer.
She poured a glass of Burgundy, opened her laptop, and typed: Discreet companion services NYC.
Then she found it. Aurelius Group. The website was minimal—cream background, serif font, no photos of anyone’s body parts. It looked like the homepage for a private art gallery or an invitation-only supper club.
She scrolled through the profiles. Then she stopped.
Sloane.
Sloane specializes in social-companion engagements for professional and high-profile clients. Fluent in corporate, creative, and social environments. Adaptable, discreet, and uncommonly perceptive.
She typed an inquiry with the same ruthless efficiency she brought to contract negotiations—before the sober, sensible, controlled part of her brain could stage an intervention. She hit send. Then she sat at her kitchen counter, in her empty apartment, in her perfect dress, and thought: What the hell did I just do?
Her phone buzzed. Meredith from Events.
Just a friendly reminder — plus-one name needed by Thursday! 😊😊
Thursday. She had until Thursday.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Hotel Room — Sloane’s POV — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
The first hotel room scene from Chapter 4 — expanded, extended, and told entirely from inside Sloane’s head. Every touch was calculated. Every reaction was catalogued. And the moment Naomi’s composure shattered was the moment Sloane knew she was in trouble. Now you get to feel every second of it from the woman who was supposed to be working.
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