My Ex-Husband’s Sister Wants Me

Sapphic Forbidden Romance
by Blair Lennox

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Ex-Husband’s Sister, First Time with a Woman, Bisexual Awakening, Fourteen Years of Pining, Divorced Heroine, Small-Town Maine, Workplace Proximity, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, No Cheating, No Third-Act Breakup

The divorce ended her marriage. It did nothing about his sister.

Donna Hale spent fourteen years as a Webb by marriage, and twelve of them turning the family boatyard’s dusty sail loft into the wedding venue that kept the whole place afloat. The divorce was civil. The contract they offered her afterward was one season, no equity, and a line thanking her for her commitment to the family legacy.

The only problem is Kerry Webb — her ex-husband’s younger sister, the boatwright in the shed downstairs, and the most infuriating woman Donna has ever met. Kerry has avoided her for fourteen years. Donna always assumed it was judgment.

She was wrong.

Kerry never hated her. She wanted her — through every family dinner, every summer on the harbor, every year Donna was married to someone Kerry refused to betray. Now the marriage is over, Donna is asking dangerous questions, and one kiss on the Loft floor wrecks what’s left of Kerry’s restraint.

It’s supposed to stay private until Launch Day. But private turns serious, serious turns into love, and love doesn’t fix a business built to keep both women useful and powerless.

Donna is done working for praise. Kerry is done wanting her in silence. This time, their names go on everything they build.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Ex-husband’s sister — forbidden-adjacent, with zero cheating
✅ Fourteen years of silent pining, and the one confession that ends it
✅ A divorced heroine at forty having her first time with a woman — and taking to it
✅ A boatwright with rolled sleeves, scarred hands, and the filthiest mouth in the county
✅ Praise kink that runs in both directions
✅ A sail-loft floor, a storm-bound apartment, an outdoor shower, a boat on her mooring
✅ A harness she finds in a drawer — and asks about
✅ Two women who put it in writing: contracts, clauses, and a cohabitation agreement
✅ A yard crew with ten dollars riding on it
✅ No third-act breakup
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno heat — graphic, explicit, emotional
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including masturbation, oral, fingering, strap-on use, face-sitting, held-wrist restraint, and semi-public and risk-of-discovery encounters), strong language, divorce aftermath, a relationship with an ex-husband’s sister, family conflict, the past death of a parent from illness, and years of unpaid labor inside a family business. No cheating. No third-act breakup. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One

DONNA

Six weeks after a judge agreed I was nobody’s wife, I let myself into my ex-husband’s family business with a key nobody had thought to ask for back.

That was the Webbs all over. They had never once taken anything from me. They’d just never gotten around to giving me anything, either.

The sign over the yard gate still said WEBB & SONS BOATWORKS, EST. 1924, in gold leaf that needed redoing. There had only ever been one son per generation, and the current one sold craft beer to restaurants and got seasick on the ferry. Nobody had ever suggested changing the sign.

I climbed the stairs to the Loft. The ninth step still creaked. At the top, the air still smelled of cold pine and old canvas and, underneath, the faint ghost of four hundred catered dinners. I stood in the doorway with my bag on my shoulder and looked at the best thing I’d ever made.

Sixty feet of harbor windows. The original sail-loft floor, wide boards the color of dark honey, scarred by a century of men on their knees cutting canvas. Beams I had personally strung with lights for twelve summers running. In mid-April, with the chairs stacked and the bar under a tarp and the water outside the glass a flat, sulky gray, it looked like a church between congregations.

When I found it, it had been full of dead outboard motors and raccoon shit. I’d turned it into the reason the boatyard downstairs still had a bank account.

The contract in my bag agreed with me, in its way. One season, mid-April through Labor Day. A management fee that had made my lawyer’s eyebrows go up in the good direction. Full authority over bookings, vendors, and staff.

Ownership: none. Equity: none. A sentence on page six thanking me for my continued commitment to the Webb family legacy, which I’d read three times in her office, looking for the part where the legacy committed back.

“It’s a good number, Donna,” she’d said.

It was a good number. It was also the first number. Fourteen years of marriage, twelve of them spent building this room into a business, and that fee was the first time a Webb had put a price on what I did. They’d only done it because a settlement agreement needed something in the blank.

I’m not bitter. I want that on the record. Martin and I ended the way a good dinner party ends: everyone tired, nobody throwing anything, a general agreement that it had been lovely and it was time to go home. We’d spent two years in a counselor’s office discovering that we were excellent co-managers and fond roommates, and that neither of us could remember the last time the other one had walked into a room and made it harder to breathe.

So I wasn’t bitter. I was itemizing. It’s a different activity.

I hung my coat on the hook outside the office and got to work, because that is what I do with a feeling. I turn it into a list.

Linens: count, check for mildew. Glassware: same. Call the tent people, the flower people, the man with the oyster boat who needed to be told he was a genius before he’d return a voicemail. Eleven weeks until Launch Day, when the yard would finally put Samuel Webb’s last boat in the water, and I would throw the biggest party this harbor had seen since the tall ships came through, and a developer named Tolland would find out whether his very generous offer for the whole waterfront was still required.

No pressure. Just the rest of everyone’s lives.

The office was a slant-ceilinged closet at the back of the Loft with a desk, a window, and a decade of my handwriting on cardboard. I started pulling boxes. CANDLES, VOTIVE. CANDLES, NOT VOTIVE. EXTENSION CORDS (GOOD). EXTENSION CORDS (MARTIN’S).

SAMPLES.

I stopped with my hand flat on the lid.

When I opened the Loft, I couldn’t afford a photographer to shoot a portfolio, so for the first three seasons the sample album I slid across the table to nervous brides was my own. My wedding, held on the lawn outside this building under a rented tent, two years before the room upstairs was anything at all. I’d shown those pictures to something like forty couples. Here’s the light at six o’clock. Here’s what the harbor does behind a first dance. I’d looked at my own wedding so many times as a sales tool that it had stopped being mine.

I opened the box anyway. Inventory is inventory.

The album was on top, white leather gone the color of teeth. I flipped through it standing up, fast, the way you look at a house you used to live in from a moving car. Me at twenty-six with too much hair and a strapless dress I’d felt like a movie star in. Martin, thinner and unbearably earnest. Samuel giving a toast with his whole arm. Judith fixing my veil with the grim tenderness of a woman tying down a load.

A loose print slid out of the back sleeve and landed face-up on the desk.

It wasn’t one of the photographer’s. Somebody’s disposable camera, flash too bright, composition a mess. I was in the middle of it with my shoes off and my head thrown back, laughing at something out of frame, a champagne flute tilting dangerously in my hand. Half of Martin’s shoulder. Somebody’s aunt. Everyone in the shot was looking at the camera, or the cake, or their plate.

Except the person at the right-hand edge, leaning against a tent pole with her hands in the pockets of a dark suit.

Kerry.

She’d been twenty-two that summer. Her hair was longer then, falling in her eyes, and her tie was pulled loose, and she looked like the kind of trouble somebody’s mother would describe as a shame, really, with that face. She wasn’t smiling. She also wasn’t giving me the look I came to know so well over the next fourteen years, the flat, shuttered one, as if I were a draft coming in under a door.

She was looking at me like someone had hit her somewhere soft and she was being polite about it.

I picked the print up and held it closer to the window.

I knew Kerry Webb’s faces. There weren’t many. There was the nod she gave me at Thanksgiving in place of a hello. There was the jaw-set silence when Martin put an arm around me. There was her back, most of all: leaving the kitchen when I came into it, heading for her truck before the pie was cut, disappearing down the dock every Fourth of July about thirty seconds after I showed up in a swimsuit. She’d worked boatyards from Maine to the Carolinas and come home four days a year, and she’d spent most of those four days in whatever room I wasn’t in.

I had decided, early, that she thought I wasn’t good enough for her brother. Later I upgraded it: she thought I was after the yard. The joke being that I’d given the yard twelve years and it had given me a key.

Whatever was on her face in this photograph, it wasn’t contempt. I didn’t have a word for it. It made the back of my neck prickle anyway.

Down in the yard, a diesel engine coughed, rattled, and died.

I went to the window. A pickup the color of old moss had pulled in beside the main shed, its bed stacked with lumber under a tarp and its tailgate held shut with a length of line. Rhode Island plates. The driver’s door opened and a long leg in canvas work pants came out, then the rest of her.

A week early. Of course she was.

I put the photograph in my back pocket, and I couldn’t have told you why.

I went down because I am a professional, and because if Kerry Webb planned to disapprove of me for eleven straight weeks, I wanted it to start on my schedule.

The main shed is the size of a small cathedral and about as well heated. Hull 41 sat in the middle of it on her cradle, where she’d sat for six years: thirty-eight feet of planked, unpainted sloop, Samuel’s last and best idea. He’d laid her keel the spring before the diagnosis and kept working on her long after he should have been in a chair with a blanket. Two winters ago he’d died with her half done, and nobody in the family had been able to finish her or sell her or walk past her without slowing down.

A pair of boots stuck out from underneath.

“You’re a week early,” I said.

“Boat needs ten weeks. Calendar’s got eleven.” The voice came from somewhere near the keel, low and unhurried. “Didn’t like the margin.”

There was a scrape, and she rolled out from under the hull on a mechanic’s creeper with a flashlight in one hand and an awl in the other, and got to her feet in a single motion that had no business looking that easy.

I’d like to say I had forgotten what she looked like. The truth is I’d never let myself take the full inventory.

Kerry had two inches on me and wore every one of them like she’d earned it. Short dark hair, shoved back, already dusted with something. A faded blue work shirt hung open over a ribbed white tank, sleeves rolled past the elbow, and the forearms that came out of those sleeves were ridiculous. Corded, brown, a pale nick here and there from a lifetime of sharp things. A thin white scar ran along her left collarbone and vanished under the strap of the tank. She was leaner than the girl in the photograph, and harder, and she had finally grown into that face.

I had always looked at her. I’d filed it under comparison, the way a woman sizes up another woman at a party. It occurred to me, standing there, that I had never once looked at anyone else at a party for fourteen years running.

She pulled a rag from her back pocket and wiped her hands. Slowly. Each finger. I watched her do it and told myself I was looking at the awl.

“Donna.”

“Kerry.”

I could count on my hands the times she’d said my name. It sounded strange in her mouth, like a tool she didn’t use much and had kept oiled anyway.

She looked at the boat. She looked at the rag. She looked at a spot on the wall about eight inches to the left of my head.

“You cut your hair,” she said.

I touched the ends of it without meaning to. It had been halfway down my back for most of my marriage. I’d had it taken to my shoulders in March, the week the paperwork went through, in a salon two towns over where nobody knew me.

“Six weeks ago. You haven’t seen me since the funeral.”

Something moved in her jaw. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said she wanted the sentence back.

“It was long at the funeral,” she said, and crouched to slide the awl into a canvas tool roll as if the subject were closed.

I let that one go by. I’m a hospitality professional. I know what to do with an odd remark from a difficult guest: you smile, and you file it.

“How bad is she?” I nodded at the hull.

“Don’t know yet. Dad’s joinery’s good. Dad’s joinery was always good.” She ran her palm down a plank the way you’d gentle a horse. “It’s what he didn’t get to that worries me. And what’s been sitting damp since.”

“Can she launch by the Fourth?”

“She’ll launch.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“It was the answer.”

Dry as a cracker. It took me a second to realize it might have been a joke. I had not known she made those.

“Well,” I said, in my brightest walk-through voice, “I have a hundred and forty people coming to watch her do it. A string quartet. A raw bar. The first wedding of the season upstairs that same weekend. So if ‘she’ll launch’ is going to turn into ‘she’ll launch in August,’ I would love to hear about it before I order the oysters.”

“You’ll hear.” She tucked the rag away. “Did the lawyer send you the amendment?”

My smile stayed where it was. Years of practice. “Which amendment?”

“Friday. From Mom’s attorney.” Still talking to the wall. “Trust wants two signatures on anything that touches Launch Day. Budget, schedule, the railway, headcount. Yours and mine.”

It took a moment to arrive, like cold water finding its way down a collar.

“They gave you a veto over my event.”

“They gave you one over my boat.”

“I have never wanted a say in a boat in my life.”

“Then it’ll be easy for you.” She shrugged, and the collar of that shirt shifted against her throat. “I didn’t ask for it.”

“No, of course not.” It came out pleasant. The pleasantest things I say are usually the worst. “Nobody in your family ever asks for anything, Webb. Things just turn up for you. Boatyards. Signatures. People.”

That did it. Her eyes came around and landed on mine.

Brown. I’d known they were brown. I had not known what it was like to have them on me with nothing in the way, because in fourteen years she had never held them there long enough for me to find out. It was like stepping onto a dock I’d assumed was fixed and feeling it move.

One full second. Two.

Then her gaze dropped, quick and unmistakable, to my mouth, and she turned her whole head away as if she’d touched a hot pan.

Heat went through me from the scalp down. It pooled low in my stomach and stayed there, which was a peculiar place for anger to go.

“I need the floor under the Loft stairs cleared by Wednesday,” she said to the hull. Her voice had gone rougher. “You’ve got ninety rental chairs where my planking stock goes.”

“Thursday.”

“Wednesday.”

“I have a tasting Wednesday, and your father’s boat has been in my way for six years, so you can extend a little patience to my chairs. Thursday. Noon.” I held out my hand. “Partner.”

She looked at my hand for a long time.

When she took it, hers was warm and dry and rough as rope across the palm, and it closed around mine completely. Her thumb settled on the crescent scar below my fingers, the one a wine crate gave me my first season, and stayed there a beat longer than a handshake needs.

Then she let go like it had cost her something.

“Thursday,” she said.

I made it to the shed door before I gave in and glanced back, mostly to enjoy the sight of her returning to ignoring me.

She wasn’t under the boat. She was standing exactly where I’d left her, her right hand opening and closing at her side, staring at the patch of floor I’d just been standing on.

She caught me looking and turned her back.

That back had always made me feel dismissed. Climbing the stairs with my palm still buzzing, I couldn’t work out why today it felt like something else.

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Sea Trial — Three months after the epilogue, Donna and Kerry take Nothing Borrowed out alone overnight. Donna brings a hank of soft rope and one request: for one night, she doesn’t decide a single thing. Too hot for the retailers.

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