The Plus-One Rules

A Steamy Sapphic Fake-Dating Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Fake Dating, Best Friends to Lovers, Only One Bed, Forced Proximity, Destination Wedding, Vineyard Romance, Rules Meant to Be Broken, Mutual Pining, Ex at the Wedding, Meddling Mom, Photographer × Sommelier, Praise, Dirty Talk, Strap-On, Romantic Comedy

She panicked and said her best friend’s name. Her best friend said yes.

Romy Castellano can photograph a weeping lemon tart so it looks worth committing crimes for. What she can’t do is survive her sister’s vineyard wedding in Portugal while her mother’s latest setup — a tall, very single litigator — is booked into every event.

So on a family video call, Romy announces she’s bringing her girlfriend. Then she says a name.

Del Okoro. Wine director. Five-foot-ten of linen and certainty. Romy’s best friend for three years, and the one woman she’s spent all three of them pretending not to want.

Del doesn’t laugh. Del says come over Thursday, bring the good olives, and writes the rules on the back of a wine list. Kiss only when someone’s watching. Hands above the waist in public. Stay on your own side of the bed. It ends when the plane lands. Nobody falls for anybody.

Then the quinta upgrades them to a tower suite with one bed. Romy’s ex turns up as a bridesmaid. Her mother starts buying Del a Christmas stocking. And the rules start breaking, one by one — on a balcony at sunset, on a dance floor in Porto, on a tasting table in a candlelit cellar, in a stone shower open to the whole Douro Valley.

Romy turns everything into a joke. Del needs just one thing she says to be true. With a wedding at golden hour and a plane home on Monday, one of them has to say it out loud, in front of everyone.

The Plus-One Rules is a high-heat, standalone sapphic friends-to-lovers romance with fake dating, only one bed, dual POV, no cheating, and an HEA guaranteed. Explicit content. 18+.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A fake girlfriend announced on a family video call before the real one even knows
✅ Seven rules on the back of a wine list — and the exact moment each one breaks
✅ One tower suite, one carved bed, and a pillow wall called the Maginot Line
✅ A calm, devastating sommelier who gives tasting notes in bed
✅ A funny, chaotic photographer who has never once said what she wants out loud
✅ An ex in the bridal party, a meddling mom, and a litigator falling for the winemaker
✅ Port poured where it shouldn’t be in a 16-degree cellar
✅ No cheating, no villains, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat and an HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including oral, fingering, mutual masturbation, semi-public scenes on a nightclub dance floor and in an open-air shower, food play with port, a strap-on, hands-on-the-headboard restraint, edging, praise and dirty talk), strong language, and alcohol. Also includes an ex in the wedding party, heavy family matchmaking pressure, and an emotional rupture-and-repair arc. 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: Romy

The tart was dying, and Romy Castellano was the only one who seemed to care.

It sat under the ring light on her kitchen island like a patient on a gurney: a lemon meringue the size of a hubcap, commissioned by a Fishtown bakery for its spring menu, already weeping little amber beads of sugar down its sides. Forty minutes ago it had been perfect. Glossy peaks, toasted tips, the kind of thing that made people on Instagram say I would commit crimes for this. Now it looked like it had received bad news.

“Hold still,” she told it, and leaned in with the camera.

Her laptop chimed from where she’d propped it against the flour canister. Castellano Family ❤️ is calling.

“No,” Romy said to the laptop.

It kept chiming. It would chime until the heat death of the universe. Her mother had once let a FaceTime ring for eleven minutes because she was “sure Romy was just in the bathroom,” and Romy had been, and had finally answered from the bathroom out of sheer spiritual exhaustion.

She clicked accept with her elbow and went back to the tart.

Four squares bloomed on the screen. Her parents, in Cherry Hill, sharing a single square the way they shared everything: her mother in front with reading glasses pushed into her silver-streaked hair, her father behind her, mostly forehead. Nico in Boston, still in her scrubs, a glass of white wine already in hand. Dita beside her, half out of frame, eating cereal for dinner with the serene focus of a woman who had made peace with marrying into this.

“There she is!” her mother said. “Honey, you look tired. Is that a pie?”

“It’s a tart, Ma. It’s a client.”

“It looks wet.”

“It’s weeping. Meringue weeps. It’s a known condition.” Romy fired off three frames, checked the screen, and winced. “It’s fine. It’s having a moment. I can fix it in post.”

“Can you fix you in post?” said her father, and laughed at his own joke so hard the forehead disappeared entirely.

“Love you too, Pop.”

“Okay.” Nico set down her wine with the air of a woman calling a board meeting to order. “Five weeks. Five weeks, people. I need final headcounts by Friday or the quinta is going to start charging me for chairs nobody sits in. Ma, you said there were two more on your side?”

“Three,” said Roz.

Nico closed her eyes. “Who’s the third?”

And there it was. Romy felt it coming the way you feel a sneeze, or a Septa bus that has decided you are not going to make it across the street. Her mother sat up a little straighter. She took off her reading glasses. She folded them, which was what Roz Castellano did instead of clearing her throat.

“So you remember Joanne Vance,” her mother began. “From Pilates.”

“I have never been to Pilates,” Romy said. “I don’t remember anyone from Pilates.”

“Joanne has a daughter. Hollis. She’s a lawyer, honey, a litigator, she does something with companies suing other companies. Very smart. Very pretty. Tall.”

“Ma.”

“And she’s single, and she’s going to be in Portugal that very week, isn’t that funny—”

“Is it funny?” asked Dita, through cereal.

“—so I thought, what’s one more at the welcome dinner? And the tasting. And the pool day. Nico, you said there was a pool day.”

“I did not say there was a pool day for Hollis,” said Nico.

“She’s invited to every little event,” Roz finished, glowing. “Just as a guest. Nobody’s setting anybody up.”

Romy put down the camera.

There were women who could take this kind of thing gracefully. Romy had met them. They said things like Mom, I appreciate the thought, but I’m going to handle my own dating life, and their mothers nodded and said Of course, sweetheart, and then everyone went to brunch. Romy had never been one of those women, because Romy’s mother was not one of those mothers. Roz Castellano did not hear no. She heard not yet, and she wrote it on a Post-it, and she stuck it to the inside of her skull.

So Romy did what she always did.

“Okay,” she said. “Ma. Love of my life. Light of my world. We’ve done this. We’ve done the dentist.”

“Dr. Amy was very nice.”

“Dr. Amy spent our entire dinner looking at my molars. She said I grind. On a date, Ma. She diagnosed me over calamari.”

Her father wheezed. Nico pressed her lips together, which was how Nico laughed when she was trying to be the bride.

“And then there was the cantor’s niece,” Romy went on, warming up, because once you had the room you didn’t give it back. “Who was lovely. Who brought her ex-husband. To the coffee. As a ‘support person.'”

“That was a miscommunication.”

“He ordered for me, Ma.”

“Well, this is different,” said Roz. “Hollis is a professional.”

“A professional what? Do I pay her by the hour? Does she bill me in six-minute increments for flirting? ‘Romy, that’ll be point-three hours for the hand on the knee, plus expenses—'”

“Honey.”

“—’and I’ll need you to sign this NDA about the kiss—'”

“Romy.”

“I’m just saying, I’ve seen Suits, I know how this ends, somebody’s crying in a parking garage—”

“You can’t bring a joke as your plus-one, honey,” her mother said.

She said it gently. That was the worst part. She didn’t say it like a jab; she said it like a diagnosis, with the same soft sorry face Dr. Amy had used about the molars. And on the other side of the screen, Romy watched it land on everyone else, too — her father’s laugh trailing off, Nico glancing down at her wine, Dita’s spoon pausing halfway to her mouth. Not mean. Nobody in her family was mean. They just all, very quietly, agreed.

Funny Romy. Single Romy. Romy who’d bring a great toast and a camera and a story about a terrible date, and go home alone, and be fine, because Romy was always fine.

The tart wept a single fat bead of syrup onto the marble.

“I’m bringing my girlfriend,” Romy said.

Silence.

It was a stunning silence. It had texture. Romy could hear her refrigerator humming and a car alarm two blocks over on Passyunk and, faintly, the sound of her own life choices pulling up a chair.

Then all four squares exploded at once.

“What?“

“Since when?”

“Rosalind, I told you, I told you she was seeing somebody—”

“You did not tell me anything, Sal, you said she looked ‘regular’—”

“Romy, I need a headcount—”

“Who?” said her mother, over all of it, and the word cut through the noise like a cleaver through a chicken back. Roz leaned in until her face filled her half of the square. “Who, honey? Who is she?”

Romy opened her mouth.

She had no plan. She had less than no plan; she had a negative plan, a plan-shaped hole. Somewhere in her brain a tiny, organized version of herself was running through the women she knew, and every single one of them was either married, straight, Nico’s friend, or her landlord. The organized version of herself threw up her hands and left the building.

So she said the first name in her head. The name that was always there, honestly, sitting quietly in the front row like it had bought a ticket.

“Del.”

The silence came back, but it was different this time. Warmer. Worse.

“Del?” said Nico.

“Del Del?” said her father. “The tall one? The one who fixed the thing with the chairs at Thanksgiving?”

“She didn’t fix them, Pop, she told you you’d bought the wrong chairs.”

“She was right, though.”

“Delphine,” Roz breathed, as if she’d been handed a baby. “Your wine friend.”

“She’s not my wine friend. She’s—” Romy heard herself and kept going anyway, because the car was already off the cliff and you might as well enjoy the view. “She’s my girlfriend. We’ve been dating. A while. Three months. It’s new. It’s—private. We didn’t want to make it a whole thing.”

“Three months,” said Nico flatly. “And you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“You’re telling me because Ma tried to give you a litigator.”

“That’s—” Romy grabbed a fork. “That’s a coincidence of timing.”

On the other side of the screen, Dita had stopped eating. She was looking straight into her camera with the expression of a woman watching a very small dog attempt a very large staircase. She didn’t say a word. She just tilted her head, smiled the faintest smile in the history of faces, and went back to her cereal.

“Oh, I knew it,” her mother was saying. “Didn’t I say? Sal, didn’t I say, at Easter, the way she looked at her over the ham—”

“You said Del was ‘too tall for this family.'”

“I said it lovingly. Oh, honey. Oh, this is wonderful. Is she coming? She’s coming. She has to come. Nico, put her down, put her down for everything—”

“I’m putting her down.” Nico was typing. Nico was the kind of person who typed angrily. “Plus one, Romy. Plus one. Does she eat octopus?”

“She eats everything. She’s a sommelier, she has to, it’s in the contract.” Romy’s mouth was moving without her. “Okay, I love you all, this has been really emotional, my tart is collapsing, I have to go—”

“Tell her I said welcome to the family!” Roz called.

“Ma, it’s been three months—”

“Welcome to the family!”

Romy closed the laptop so hard the flour canister wobbled.

For a while she just stood there.

The ring light hummed. The tart kept weeping. Outside, somebody on the sidewalk was yelling about the Eagles in a tone usually reserved for funerals. Romy’s kitchen — narrow, bright, clutter on every surface, a South Philly rowhouse kitchen with a window that faced west and got the kind of late light photographers would kill for — looked exactly the way it had five minutes ago. Same chipped yellow cabinets. Same thrifted copper pans hanging from the rack Del had once called “a tetanus chandelier.”

Everything was the same except that she now had a girlfriend, and the girlfriend didn’t know.

“Okay,” Romy said to the empty kitchen. “Okay. Okay okay okay.”

She picked up the fork, cut a wedge out of the dying tart, and ate it standing over the sink.

It was good. That was the stupid thing. It tasted bright and sharp and sweet all at once, the curd cold, the meringue gone a little chewy, and it was good, and she had ruined it by taking too long to get it right.

She ate another bite. Then another.

The thing was — and Romy made herself think it, made herself look straight at it the way she’d look at a bad photo, all the flaws on the screen at once — the thing was that she hadn’t picked Del at random.

She’d picked Del because Del was the answer to a question nobody had asked her out loud in three years.

They’d met at Wes and Arjun’s dinner party, back when Wes still thought he could make cassoulet. Romy had been working — sort of — shooting the spread because Wes had wanted something nice for his blog, and she’d been crouched by the end of the table with her camera, trying to make a pot of beans look like it had feelings, when a voice above her said:

“Are you working, or can you just not put that down?”

Romy had looked up. And up. And up some more.

Delphine Okoro had been standing there in a black linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of something red in one long hand, looking down at Romy with an expression of grave, scientific interest. Close-cropped hair. Collarbones like a dare. A face so composed it was almost rude about it.

“Both,” Romy had said. “It’s a condition.”

“Like the meringue,” Del would say, three years later, if she were here. Del always remembered things like that.

What Romy remembered was that Del had crouched down beside her, carefully, the way tall people do when they’re used to being too much in a room, and said, “You’re shooting it from the wrong side. The good side of a cassoulet is the side where someone’s already taken a spoonful. People don’t want perfect. They want proof somebody else wanted it first.”

And Romy, who had been photographing food professionally for six years, had moved to the other side of the table, and taken the shot, and it had been the best photo of the night.

Del had been with someone back then. Corinne. A sleek, glossy, unbothered woman who’d shown up to exactly one group dinner, checked her phone through dessert, and left early. Romy had disliked her with a purity she usually reserved for cilantro. By the time Del was single, Romy had been with Margaux, and by the time Margaux was over — “You’re a lot of fun, Romy,” Margaux had said at the end, which was the kind of review you gave a waterpark — Del had become something else. Something load-bearing.

Sunday market runs at the Italian Market, Del haggling over cheese with the terrifying calm of a hostage negotiator. Del showing up to help her move, then standing in the doorway of the new place and vetoing the couch on sight. (“It looks like it’s apologizing.” “It’s mid-century.” “It’s mid-breakdown.”) Cooking together in Romy’s kitchen and fighting over the pan, Del’s long arm reaching past her for the salt, Romy pretending the brush of that forearm across her shoulder did nothing to her at all.

The look. God, the look — the one they gave each other across any room when somebody said long story short, and the story was never short, and they both knew it, and Del’s mouth would go a little crooked at one corner, and Romy would have to look at the floor.

Three years of that.

Three years of Romy wanting her so badly she sometimes forgot how to hold a fork, and three years of never saying a word.

Because the list was very long, and Romy knew it by heart.

Reasons Delphine Okoro Was Out of Her League, a partial inventory:

One. Del was five-foot-ten of linen and certainty. Romy was five-foot-three of printed shirts and anxiety, and at least one of those shirts had pineapples on it.

Two. Del was the wine director at Halden, the restaurant on Locust where people went when they wanted a server to explain the butter. Del could taste a glass of wine and tell you the hillside, the year, and what kind of mood the winemaker had been in. Romy had once described a rosé as “pink, but in a confident way.”

Three. Del had a palate. Del had taste. Del’s apartment looked like a catalog for a furniture company that didn’t need to advertise. Romy’s apartment looked like a yard sale that had won the lottery.

Four. Del was calm. Del was the most calm human being Romy had ever met. Del had once watched a sommelier from a rival restaurant knock an entire magnum of Brunello off a table at an industry party, and her only reaction had been to say, quietly, “Well, that’s a shame for the floor.”

Five. Romy was the funny one. Romy was the fun one. Romy was the friend you called when you needed someone to make the night better, not the woman you called when you wanted to build a life. Margaux had said so. Her mother had said so ten minutes ago, gently, with her reading glasses folded in her hand. You can’t bring a joke as your plus-one, honey.

Six. If Romy ever told Del the truth, and Del looked at her with that calm, careful face and said Oh, Romy, I’m sorry, kindly, the way you’d tell someone their tart was weeping — Romy did not think she would survive it.

That was the whole list, really. One through five were just decoration on six.

So she’d kept it a joke. She was good at that. If I laugh first, it can’t be the joke. She’d made a hundred little cracks about how nobody would ever take her seriously, about dying alone in a rowhouse surrounded by cast iron, about how she’d be the eccentric aunt who brought a camera to every christening, and Del had always smiled that crooked smile and changed the subject, and Romy had taken that as an answer.

She looked down. She’d eaten a third of the tart.

“Great,” she told it. “Great. Very professional.”

Her phone was face-down on the counter, buzzing every few seconds. She flipped it over. Nineteen notifications. Most of them from the family thread, which had been renamed — by her father, she could tell from the capital letters — ROMY HAS A GIRLFRIEND!!!!!

Ma: Does Delphine have any allergies. Asking for the menu
Ma: Also does she like to be called Delphine or Del. I want to get it right
Pop: Tell her the chairs are fine now
Nico: Call me tomorrow. I mean it.
Ma: I’ve told Joanne it’s off with Hollis. She was very understanding. Hollis is still coming though, she already booked
Ma: I’m so happy honey ❤️❤️❤️

Romy put the phone face-down again.

There was a version of tonight where she called her mother back and said Ma, I lied, I panicked, there’s no girlfriend, please give me the litigator. That version had the benefit of being honest and the downside of being the most humiliating phone call of her adult life, followed by eight days in Portugal being gently, lovingly, relentlessly fixed.

There was another version where she flew to Portugal alone and said Del had food poisoning. For eight days. Possibly forever.

And there was a third version, small and stupid and glowing at the back of her head like a pilot light.

Romy picked up the phone. It was 10:41 on a Friday. Del would be mid-service, standing in the dining room at Halden in one of her dark, perfect shirts, holding a bottle like it was a newborn.

She hit call before she could think about it, which was the only way Romy had ever done anything brave.

It rang four times. Romy almost hung up on three.

“You have ninety seconds.” Del’s voice came through low and close, like she’d cupped the phone against her mouth. Behind her, the soft roar of a full dining room: cutlery, laughter, someone saying oh my God, taste this. “I have a six-top at table nine having an argument about Barolo, and one of them is wrong in a way that’s going to cost him four hundred dollars.”

Just hearing her did something stupid to Romy’s spine. Del’s voice was low for a woman and very even, every word set down deliberately, like she was placing it on a tablecloth.

“Hi,” Romy said. “Okay. Hi. So.”

“Romy.”

“I’m fine. Nobody’s dead. Well — my tart’s dead. But that’s a separate issue.”

“Eighty seconds.”

“Right. Okay. So you know how my mother is a — and I say this with love — a heat-seeking matchmaking missile, and she’s been trying to set me up since the Obama administration, and tonight we had the wedding call, the five-weeks call, and she announced that she has invited a lawyer named Hollis, who is tall, apparently, that’s the selling point, to every single event in Portugal, the welcome dinner, the tasting, the pool, the pool, Del, and I started doing a bit, I did a whole bit, it was a good bit, there was a parking garage, and then she said I couldn’t bring a joke as my plus-one, and everyone sort of went quiet like they agreed with her, and I panicked, and I said I was bringing my girlfriend, and they said who, and I said—” Romy took a breath, which was a mistake, because breathing gave her time to hear herself. “I said you.”

Nothing.

The dining room roared on in the background. Somebody laughed at Del’s end, a man, booming. Glass clinked. Romy stared at the ruin of the tart and listened to the sound of Del not saying anything, and it went on so long she checked the screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.

Still connected. Fifty-one seconds. Fifty-two.

“So now they think we’ve been dating for three months,” Romy said, because silence was a vacuum and she’d always been helpless before a vacuum, “and my mother wants to know your allergies, and my father wants you to know the chairs are fine now, and Nico is furious that I didn’t tell her, which — fair, if it were real, which it’s not, which is — obviously I’m going to call them back. Tonight. Tomorrow. I’ll tell them I was kidding. They’ll believe that, honestly, that’s the most believable part. Don’t worry about it. I just — I didn’t want you to hear it from my mother, because she will absolutely find your number, she found the number of a guy I went to prom with—”

“Romy.”

She stopped.

“Breathe,” Del said.

Romy breathed.

Another silence, shorter. She could hear Del moving — the noise of the dining room dropping away, a door swinging, the clatter of the kitchen, then quieter, like she’d stepped into a hallway or a walk-in. When she spoke again, her voice was even lower. Not cold. Considering. The voice she used when she was holding a glass up to the light and tilting it, looking for something.

“Portugal,” Del said. “The Douro.”

“The— yes. A quinta. Above the river. Nico picked it off Instagram, I think it has a tower, there’s a pool, it’s very—” Romy made a vague gesture at her empty kitchen. “Very wine.”

“Late May.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Eight days. Nine, with the flights.” Romy pressed the heel of her hand to her eye. “Del, you don’t have to — I’m not asking, I’m confessing, there’s a difference, I’ll fix it—”

“Did you say you were going to call them back tonight?”

“Yes. I’m going to call them back and tell them it was a bit.”

“Don’t.”

Romy’s hand came down from her face.

Somewhere on Del’s end, a chef yelled for a runner. Somebody dropped a sheet pan. Del didn’t seem to notice either.

“Don’t call them yet,” Del said. “Come over Thursday. Eight o’clock. Bring the good olives — the Castelvetrano from Di Bruno’s, not the ones in the jar you think I can’t tell the difference.”

“I— you can’t tell the difference.”

“I can always tell the difference,” Del said. “Thursday.”

The line went dead.

Romy stood in her kitchen holding the phone against her ear long after there was nothing on the other end of it.

The ring light hummed. The car alarm on Passyunk had finally stopped. The tart sat in its puddle, ugly and delicious and done.

She played it back. All of it. The silence, the questions, the hallway, don’t. She played it back twice, the way she’d scroll back through a shoot looking for the one frame where the light hit right, and it was only on the third time through that she found it, sitting right there in plain sight like it had been waiting for her to notice.

Del hadn’t laughed.

Del hadn’t said Oh, Romy.

Del hadn’t said no.

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September. Leonor’s field blend just went on Halden’s list. At one in the morning, in the cellar where Del used to count bottles when she was sad, Romy shows up with her camera, a bottle of white port, and the rules card she taped back together — and asks Del to break every one of them again.

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