The Honeymoon Upgrade

A Steamy Sapphic Vacation Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bisexual Awakening, Fake Marriage, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Vacation Romance, Age Gap, Ice Queen, Praise Kink, Light Bondage, Control/Surrender

She came to photograph a wedding. She got the honeymoon instead.

Nora Bennett shoots other people’s happy endings for a living. Then the bride bolts six hours before the welcome party, the resort gives away her room, her final payment bounces, and the only way home is a midnight car over a mountain road.

Elena Morales booked the honeymoon she and her husband never took. He left. The villa is nonrefundable. She came alone, and she is done explaining why.

So when a night manager asks one question too many, Elena looks the front desk dead in the eye and says, She’s my wife.

Now there is one villa, one very large bed, a private plunge pool, a butler who keeps calling them Mrs. and Mrs. Morales, and a list of rules on the nightstand in Elena’s perfect handwriting. No kissing unless necessary. Stay off the middle of the bed. Checkout Sunday. Nothing after.

Nora has never been with a woman. Elena has never let anyone take care of her. They have eight nights and six rules, and they are going to break every single one.

The Honeymoon Upgrade is a high-heat sapphic vacation romance with a bisexual awakening, a fake marriage that stops being fake, a hotel-director ice queen who finally lets someone else run the room, dual first-person POV, no cheating, no third-act breakup, and an HEA guaranteed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A wedding photographer whose bride bolts and whose room gets given away
✅ “She’s my wife.” Said out loud, at the front desk, to a total stranger
✅ Fake marriage, forced proximity, and one honeymoon bed with a wall of towel swans down the middle
✅ A rules list on resort stationery, struck out one line at a time
✅ An ice-queen hotel director who corrects the staff under her breath and finally lets go
✅ Praise kink in both directions: “Good girl” works on her too
✅ A first-time bisexual awakening that feels like coming home, not a phase
✅ A Saint Lucia homecoming, a butler named Desmond, and an aunt who reads them in four seconds
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat from Chapter Three, and an HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including oral, toys, a strap-on, and light consensual restraint and blindfolding with power exchange) and strong language. Also includes a divorce in progress, a cancelled wedding involving off-page infidelity by a side character, a parent’s past religious disapproval of her daughter’s sexuality, and mention of a parent’s death. No cheating between the leads. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Nora

The bride read her fiancé’s texts aloud in the same voice she used for sponsored content.

“‘Can’t stop thinking about Tulum,’” Paige Sutton recited, one acrylic nail dragging down the screen of an iPad. “Flame emoji. Then him: ‘Neither can I, baby.’ Then her: a photo I’m not going to describe, because my grandmother is on this property.”

Nobody in the bridal suite breathed. Six bridesmaids in monogrammed robes, a hairstylist with a curling wand frozen in midair, a makeup artist balancing one false lash on the back of her hand like a tiny dead spider. Through the open doors the Caribbean went on being blue and glittering, because nobody had told it.

I had my camera up. I’d love to say that was a decision.

It wasn’t. Eleven years of weddings have wired my right index finger directly to my nervous system. Something real happens in a room and the finger goes looking for a shutter before the rest of me has voted.

“Who’s Tulum?” whispered a bridesmaid.

“Tulum’s a place, Kenzie.” Paige didn’t look up. “The who is Sienna. From Love Lagoon. Eliminated week three for crying in a hot tub.” She scrolled. “Oh, good. There’s a voice memo.”

“Don’t play the voice memo,” I said.

She played the voice memo.

It was eleven seconds long and I will be hearing Ryan Calloway say the words my little mermaid until the day I die.

Kenzie made a sound like a kettle and started hyperventilating into her own sleeve. The bridesmaid beside her, a tall redhead named Brielle with the shoulders of a varsity rower, set down her mimosa very carefully.

“I’m going to find him,” Brielle said. “I’m going to find him, and I’m going to put his Rolex in a blender.”

“The welcome party is in six hours,” said the hairstylist, to no one.

Here is what I know that most people don’t: panic is just energy that hasn’t been given a job. A wedding photographer who can’t hand out jobs is a wedding photographer who gets trampled.

I lowered the camera and crouched in front of Kenzie.

“Hey. Look at me. In through the nose.” I waited until she did it. “You have the vendor spreadsheet on your phone, right? You made it. It’s color-coded. I’ve admired it.” A wet nod. “I need you to open it and start a list of every single person who has to be told not to show up tonight. DJ, florist, the steel band, the guy with the parrots. Top to bottom. Can you do that?”

“There’s a guy with parrots?”

“There was going to be. Go.”

She went. I stood and turned to Brielle, who had located her sandals and was buckling them like a woman strapping on a sidearm.

“You,” I said, “are on the door.”

“I’m on Ryan.”

“Ryan’s a coward, he’s already hiding. His mother isn’t. In about four minutes Diane Calloway is going to come down that breezeway in a caftan to explain that this is a misunderstanding, and somebody with your wingspan needs to be standing in front of this door when she does. Nobody gets in unless Paige says so. You’re the bouncer. That’s a way better job than the blender.”

Brielle considered this. I watched her pick the role up and try it on.

“I can be mean to Diane?”

“You can be magnificent to Diane.”

She took up her position.

Diane arrived in three minutes, not four. I’d underestimated the caftan.

“Girls.” Her voice came through the door like a hand through a curtain. “This is a misunderstanding. Ryan is devastated. Let me in so we can talk like a family.”

“Hi, Mrs. Calloway.” Brielle filled the doorway the way a refrigerator fills an alcove. “Paige isn’t receiving.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She’s not receiving. You can leave a message with me, and I’ll rank it.”

“I am the mother of the groom.”

“There’s no groom,” Brielle said kindly. “So right now you’re just a lady in a hallway.”

A long silence. Then the slap of expensive sandals in retreat. Brielle glanced back at me over her shoulder, flushed and radiant, a woman who had found her calling.

The room started breathing again. I turned back to the bride.

Paige had put the iPad down. She was looking at her own left hand as though it had been delivered to the wrong address. Then she worked the ring off, three carats, a stone you could signal aircraft with, and set it on the vanity between the lash glue and a can of setting spray.

“The welcome party is cancelled,” she said. “The wedding is cancelled. The content is cancelled.” Her eyes found mine in the mirror. One was fully made up. The other was bare and pink and about nineteen years old. “Nora. Are you getting this?”

“Do you want me to?”

“It’s in the contract.” She dragged a knuckle under the bare eye. “Document the day as it unfolds. So unfold it.” A breath that shook on the way in. “And get my left side.”

So I worked.

The ring on the vanity, shallow focus, the lash glue soft behind it. Six abandoned robes over the backs of six chairs. A place card in gold calligraphy, The Future Mrs. Calloway, face up in a wastebasket where Brielle had filed it.

And then Paige stood, gathered the hem of her dress in one fist, and walked out through the open doors barefoot. Down the breezeway toward the sea with one lash on and one lash off and the afternoon sun blowing out everything around her until she was a single dark, upright shape leaving a white room.

I took the frame. I knew what it was while my finger was still on the button.

It was the best photograph I’d made all year, and I resented knowing that.

Under the adrenaline, something in my chest came unclenched. No ceremony tomorrow. No standing ten feet from two people swearing forever while I hunted for the angle that made it look true. I recognized the feeling as relief, and I did with it what I do with most of my feelings.

I didn’t develop it.

Eight months ago I gave a perfectly good ring back to a perfectly good man. I’ve been telling people it was mutual ever since. I haven’t developed that one either.

The rest of the day went the way those days go. I located the grandmother and held her hand. I told a florist that four hundred stems of peonies flown in from Holland were now, legally speaking, a gift. I shot the contractual detail images of a ballroom being taken apart, which is a sentence I never expected my career to contain. Somewhere over the Atlantic my second shooter, Lacey, who’d flown out that morning because her dad’s surgery got moved up, landed and texted me.

Lacey: LANDED. how’s the welcome party???

Nora: define party

By ten that night the staff were eating the bottom four tiers of a lemon elderflower wedding cake in the kitchen, and the pastry chef, a formidable woman named Marguerite with flour to her elbows, pressed a white box into my arms.

“The top tier,” she said. “Tradition says somebody keeps it for the first anniversary. Take it away from me before I weep into it.”

I took it. I didn’t know what else to do. It weighed about as much as a newborn.

The lobby of Azure Cove had no walls. It had lanterns and a floor like poured cream and a thousand tree frogs screaming in the dark beyond the columns, and at eleven p.m. it had me, sunburned to the color of a boiled shrimp, holding a cake.

“Ms. Bennett.” The night manager’s name tag said CYRIL. He had the voice of a man who delivered bad news on linen. “Your accommodation was held within the Sutton-Calloway block. The block was released at four fifteen this afternoon, when the party’s card was withdrawn.”

“Released.”

“Yes.”

“Like a dove.”

Cyril inclined his head a tasteful quarter inch.

“I checked in yesterday,” I said. “My toothbrush lives there.”

“Your belongings were packed with great care.”

He lifted one hand. A bell cart rolled out from behind a column bearing my roller bag, my tripod case, and my light stands. Someone had laid a single white orchid across the top, like a condolence.

“Okay.” I shifted the cake to my other hip. “Okay. Then I’ll pay for it. Me, personally, a paying customer. One room. A broom closet. I’m bendy, I’ll fit.”

“I’m afraid the resort is at capacity. A pharmaceutical incentive group arrived this evening. One hundred and forty guests.” He let that land gently. “They were very pleased the block had opened.”

My phone buzzed against my thigh. I dug it out one-handed.

Your bank: An incoming payment of $9,400.00 from SUTTON CALLOWAY EVENTS LLC has been reversed.

I read it twice. It didn’t improve.

That was the back sixty percent of my fee. That was two months of studio rent, my quarterly taxes, and the lens I’d already bought on the strength of it. I opened the airline app with my thumb, because I am a professional and I can absorb two disasters at once, and asked it to get me home.

Next available seat to Boston: Sunday. Not tomorrow. The one after. Eight days. The change fee had a comma in it.

“We can offer a transfer to our partner hotel in the north,” Cyril said. “A very comfortable property. It is two hours by the mountain road. The car departs at midnight.”

“Two hours.”

“The road is scenic by day.”

“Cyril, I get carsick in parking garages.”

“There are bags provided.”

I laughed. It came out higher than I meant. I’d been on my feet for sixteen hours, I’d eaten half a bread roll and a mint, and my whole adult life was stacked on a brass cart under a sympathy orchid. The laugh was that or the other thing, and I do not do the other thing in lobbies.

That was when I noticed her.

Next station down the long marble desk. I’d been aware of someone there the way you’re aware of a lamp. Now I looked, and went on looking.

She was tall. Taller than me by a few inches and standing as if height were something she’d decided on. White linen, a shirt and wide trousers, creased by a flight and still more elegant than anything I’ve ever owned. Deep brown skin gone gold at the cheekbones under the lanterns. Black hair pulled into a low, smooth ponytail without one strand out of place, a thin gold chain at her throat, and one hand resting flat on the marble with the fingers spread. That hand was the only part of her that looked like it was working at anything.

I’ve spent a decade writing the word striking in captions about women like that so I wouldn’t have to write down what they did to me. I filed her where I file those things, under admiration, and tried to go back to my own catastrophe.

“And Mr. Morales,” the young agent in front of her was saying, bright and helpless. “Will he be arriving on a later flight?”

“As I said.” Her voice was low and even, with an island lilt worn nearly smooth. “I’m checking in alone.”

“Of course! It’s only that the Honeymoon, Finally package is for two guests, so I’ll just mark Mr. Morales as pending . . .”

“He isn’t pending.”

“Absolutely.” Click, click. “And shall we hold the couples’ welcome amenity until Mr. Morales joins you?”

That made three. I’d counted without meaning to. Three times in the ten minutes I’d been standing there, somebody had asked that woman where her husband was.

Nothing in her face changed. I’m paid to see what faces do, and I’m telling you, nothing did. But a muscle jumped once along her jaw, and the fingers on the marble pressed down until the nails went pale. I knew that hand. I’d photographed it on four hundred mothers of the bride.

“Ms. Bennett?” Cyril said. “The car. Shall I confirm?”

I opened my mouth to say yes, because what else was there.

“Never lead with what you can’t do,” the woman murmured.

She said it to the desk. She said it the way you’d correct a crooked picture frame in someone else’s house, under her breath, unable to stop herself. But I heard it, and she knew I had, because she turned her head and looked at me.

It was a full, unhurried look. I felt it take inventory: the sunburn, the bun that had given up around noon, the camera bag dragging my shoulder down, the bakery box. Sixteen hours of somebody else’s worst day, all over me like confetti.

Her eyes were very dark. They stopped on the cake and something in them almost shifted.

Then they came up to my face, and I watched her decide.

I’ve shot four hundred and twelve weddings. I know exactly what a person looks like in the half second before they say something they can’t take back. I’ve built a career on that half second.

“There’s a mistake on the reservation,” she told the agent. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. “It’s Mrs. and Mrs.”

She took two steps. Her hand settled on the small of my back.

“She’s my wife. She’s late because she was working.”

The tree frogs kept screaming. Everything else in the lobby went silent.

Her palm was warm through my shirt. Dry, firm, and absolutely level, like she’d set it there with a ruler. It was the first steady thing I’d touched since one o’clock that afternoon. My body leaned back into it a full second before my brain had caught up enough to be appalled.

Cyril looked at me. The young agent looked at me. The orchid on the bell cart seemed to be looking at me.

I had nowhere to sleep, no money coming, and a mountain road with complimentary vomit bags leaving in fifty-five minutes.

“Hi, honey,” I said. “Sorry. The bride exploded.”

“So I gathered.” Not a flicker. “You look exhausted.”

“I’ve been released. Like a dove.”

“Ms. Bennett is . . .” Cyril’s gaze traveled from me to her and back with enormous delicacy. “Mrs. Morales?”

“I kept my name,” I said. “So did she. We’re a nightmare at customs.”

“Oh my gosh.” The agent had gone pink to the hairline. “Oh, I am so, so sorry, Mrs. Morales, the booking notes said Mr., I just assumed . . .”

“The booking notes were typed by someone who assumed. It happens.” The woman’s thumb moved once against my spine, a small absent stroke. I don’t think she knew she’d done it. I felt it in my knees. “You’ll want to correct the welcome card as well. And she’ll need a key.”

It wasn’t a request, and it wasn’t rude. It was said in the tone of someone handing back a form with the errors circled. The agent was already typing.

“And how long have you two been married?” she asked, dimpling at her screen.

“Saturday,” said the woman.

“A week,” I said, at the same time.

A small, terrible pause.

“A week ago Saturday,” my wife said, without blinking. “She’s hopeless with dates. It’s why I make the reservations.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I once showed up for my own birthday on the wrong day.”

The agent laughed. Cyril very nearly smiled. A second key card slid across the marble in a little paper sleeve with a seashell embossed on it, and I handed over my passport to be copied, because apparently I was doing this. I was committing light fraud with a stranger at a luxury resort while holding a cake.

A porter appeared with a tray: two glasses of something pink with a hibiscus flower floating in each, and two rolled towels on a bed of ice.

“Towel first,” my wife said under her breath. “Then the drink. Always the towel first.”

The porter, who’d been reaching for a glass, changed course without a word. She lifted a towel from the tongs, shook it open, and instead of handing it to me she laid it across the back of my neck herself.

It was freezing. It was heaven. A noise came out of me that I’d have preferred to make in private.

Her fingers stayed a second longer than the towel needed, smoothing its edge flat along my hairline. Then she put a glass in my free hand. Our knuckles touched, and she looked down at the place where they’d touched as if it were a line item she hadn’t budgeted for.

While Cyril was occupied with the scanner, she bent her head toward mine. She smelled like orange blossom and something darker underneath, and her mouth stopped a careful inch from my ear.

“You may thank me or expose me,” she said, almost soundlessly. “I’d ask that you choose before the golf cart.”

I turned my face just enough. Up close her lashes were absurd. So was her mouth. Full, unpainted, and holding completely still, the way a person holds still when she’s waiting to find out whether she has just made a terrible mistake.

“What’s my wife’s first name?”

That time something did move in her face. One corner of her mouth, briefly.

“Elena.”

“Nora.”

“I know. He said it eleven times while failing you.”

The golf cart was driven by a man in his sixties wearing a pressed white tunic. He carried himself like someone who had never once been surprised.

“Mrs. and Mrs. Morales.” He gave it the weight of a toast. “I am Desmond. The Solara villa is in my care, and so, for the length of your stay, are you. On behalf of everyone at Azure Cove, my warmest congratulations.”

“Thank you, Desmond,” Elena said.

“Thank you, Desmond,” I said, half a beat behind, like the second kid in a school play.

His eyes dropped to the box in my lap. “May I ask, madam. Is that a wedding cake?”

“Top tier.”

“How traditional.” He sounded delighted. He released the brake.

We hummed off down a path lined with low torches, my luggage rattling behind us. The night was thick and sweet, wet earth and frangipani, and somewhere beneath us surf kept pulling back over stones. The bench seat was not wide. She sat with her spine straight and her hands folded on one knee, and between her white linen thigh and my wrinkled one was a gap of maybe two inches.

I was more aware of those two inches than I’d been of anything in months.

That isn’t a normal thing to notice about a stranger. I know what I notice about attractive men, and it’s mostly information: nice forearms, good jacket, noted. This wasn’t information. This was heat coming off her like a sidewalk in August, and my whole left side had turned toward it without consulting me, the way a plant leans at a window.

Admiration, I told myself. You admire her posture.

My posture-admiring pulse was going hard in my throat.

She had good hands. Long, capable, the nails short and bare. A paler band of skin circled the fourth finger of the left one, where a ring had been until fairly recently. I looked at it. Then I looked at the dark shape of the mountains instead, because looking at it felt like reading her mail.

“Why?” I said, low enough that the motor covered it.

“Not in the cart.”

“Are you a serial killer? You can tell me. I’ve had a long day, I’d honestly respect the efficiency.”

“If I were,” Elena said, eyes forward, “I would have let them put you in the car.”

Desmond took a curve. The two inches closed. Her shoulder pressed into mine, solid and warm, and neither of us moved away, and neither of us said a word about it for the rest of the ride.

The villa sat by itself at the end of the point, behind a gate and a wall of sea grape. Desmond unlocked a tall wooden door, reached inside, and brought up the lights.

“Solara,” he said, and stood aside.

I’ve shot in a great many expensive rooms. I walked into this one and forgot how my feet worked.

It had no seaward wall. Where a wall should have been, glass doors had been folded all the way back, so the room simply ran out onto a stone terrace, and the terrace ran out into a plunge pool lit from below like a cut gem. Beyond the pool was nothing but black water and stars, and the twin shapes of the Pitons blotting out a piece of the sky. A soaking tub big enough to drown a horse. A slatted screen with an outdoor shower behind it. Lanterns. White gauze breathing in and out on the wind.

And a bed.

One. It was the size of a small stage, hung with more gauze and tied back with silk cord. The sheets had been turned down on both sides. Somebody had laid out about a thousand red rose petals in the shape of a heart, and in the center of the heart, two bath towels had been folded into swans with their beaks touching.

In a silver bucket on the nightstand, a bottle of champagne sweated quietly.

Against the far wall there was a daybed. I gave it a hopeful look. It was approximately the size of a decorative pillow.

“The turndown team has prepared everything for your first evening,” Desmond said behind us. “Your luggage will go in the dressing room. Breakfast for two at eight, on the terrace, unless you’d prefer to be left undisturbed.” He allowed the smallest possible pause. “Many of our honeymooners do.”

“Eight is perfect,” Elena said. Her voice was not quite as even as it had been in the lobby.

“Then I’ll wish you both a beautiful night.”

He didn’t wink. He was far too good for that. He drew the tall door shut behind him like a man lowering a curtain. The latch clicked, and then it was only the two of us and the sea and the frogs.

Elena didn’t move.

She stood three feet inside the villa with her back very straight and looked at that bed the way I imagine a general looks at a map. Then she crossed to it, reached into the heart of rose petals, and turned one of the towel swans a quarter inch to the left, so the beaks lined up.

She seemed to realize what she’d done. Her hand stopped in the air.

“You fix things,” I said.

“I manage hotels.” She took the hand back and folded it into the other one. “It’s a condition. I’m told there’s no cure.”

“So that’s why you did it. Back there. You saw a service failure and you couldn’t help yourself.”

“That is a third of why.”

“What are the other two-thirds?”

Her gaze went to the bed. To the two turned-down sides. To the champagne and its two flutes. When it came back to me the lobby polish had a crack in it, hairline, and something tired and furious and very much alive was looking out through the gap.

“Ask me after I’ve had a drink,” she said.

It hit me then, all at once. The lanterns had turned her white linen to gold. Her profile was cut out against the open dark, and the shadow of the gauze was moving across her throat. My fingers went to the zipper of my camera bag. They do that. I told them no.

I looked at the bed. I looked at the woman who had married me in front of a night manager. I was holding a wedding cake in one arm and eleven years of other people’s love stories in the other, and I had no idea where to set either of them down.

“So,” I said. “Which side do you sleep on, wife?”

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The Wedding Night — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Sixteen months after the lobby, they are married at last in a hidden cove. Back in Solara, Elena counts every tooth on a marigold zipper, finally asks for exactly what she wants, and Nora adds a rule of her own to the page.

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