Rise & Grind
A Sapphic Age-Gap Romance
by Aurora North
📖 Available at your favorite retailer
Pairing: FF
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Age Gap, Mentor/Protégée, Praise Kink, Grumpy/Sunshine, Workplace Romance, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn, D/s Dynamic, Touch Starved, Secret Relationship, Found Family, Competence Kink, Dominant Woman, Control/Surrender
Rule #1 in Margaux Fontaine’s kitchen: perfection, or nothing. Sloane Delacroix breaks every single rule.
Sloane Delacroix is a disaster. She’s twenty-two, broke, blacklisted from culinary school, and permanently covered in flour. She has no business being anywhere near the most exacting pastry chef in Portland.
But Margaux Fontaine sees something in the chaos — raw, unteachable instinct buried under years of no one giving a damn. So she makes Sloane an offer: three months as her personal apprentice. Her rules. Her kitchen. Her way.
The rules are simple. Show up at 3 a.m. Don’t talk back. Don’t waste ingredients. And don’t — under any circumstances — mistake praise for affection.
Sloane breaks every single one.
Because Margaux’s hands correcting her grip feel like a dare. Her whispered “good girl” after a perfect lamination feels like a lit match. And when the door to the dry storage room locks behind them, Sloane learns that Margaux’s need for control doesn’t stop at pastry.
But Margaux has a past — a protégée she mentored, loved, and lost to the industry machine. She swore she’d never blur that line again. Sloane isn’t just risking her shot at a career. She’s asking Margaux to break the only rule that matters.
And when a prestigious competition forces them both into the spotlight, they’ll have to decide: is what they’ve built together worth the fire — or will it burn them both down?
Rise & Grind is a 90,000-word high-heat sapphic romance with an age-gap praise-kink dynamic, a dry storage room that should be classified as a crime scene, a tahini brown butter tart that will make you cry, and a guaranteed HEA. Featuring a strict French-trained perfectionist who learns to let go, a chaotic genius who learns to stay, a bread baker named Theo who takes no prisoners, and a prep table that has seen things.
You’ll Love This If You Enjoy
✓ An age-gap mentor/protégée dynamic with real power imbalance addressed head-on
✓ A strict, silver-haired French chef whose praise kink is the most devastating weapon in Portland
✓ A chaotic twenty-two-year-old who puts tahini in everything and has flour permanently in her hair
✓ Dry storage encounters, prep table devastation, peach-juice-on-the-kitchen-floor mornings
✓ A competition arc where a tart made from a foster kid’s survival becomes the highest-scoring signature in history
✓ An ex-protégée whose civil conversation detonates everything
✓ Dual POV, earned HEA, a partnership proposal on a prep table, and a bread baker named Theo who deserves his own book
✓ Six on-page heat scenes escalating from combustion to commitment
⚠️ Content Warning
This book contains explicit FF sexual content including oral sex, fingering, praise kink, D/s dynamics, dominant/responsive power exchange, kitchen-surface sex, food-adjacent sensory play, and multiple detailed on-page sex scenes with escalating emotional intensity. Features a protagonist who aged out of foster care, themes of abandonment and found family, an ex-lover whose reappearance triggers a crisis, a week-long separation, and a confrontation scene with emotional distress. Both characters are adults (22 and 43). All encounters feature enthusiastic consent with explicit check-ins.
Reader discretion advised. This book is intended for mature audiences only.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Prep Table (Reprise) — A 3,800+ word scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Six months after the epilogue. The new sign goes up: Fontaine & Delacroix. Margaux cooks a private tasting menu — every dish a chapter in their love story. Sloane brings a gift that makes Margaux cry. And the prep table? The prep table sees action again. This time, Sloane’s the one giving the instructions.
More Sapphic Romance
Browse all Aurora North books.
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