The Resort Rebound

A Late-Bloomer Sapphic Age-Gap Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Age Gap, Bisexual Awakening, Late Bloomer, Vacation Romance, Wingwoman to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Chef Romance, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Fling to Forever, Romantic Comedy

She asked her wingwoman to find her a woman. The only one she wanted was next door.

One week. Adjoining balconies. A handshake at the airport on Friday. That was the deal.

Daniella Russo is forty-one, seven months out of a seventeen-year marriage, and has never once asked for what she wants. She runs forty-eight seats in South Philadelphia, eats cereal standing over the sink, and has just been dragged to a Caribbean resort by her best friend with one instruction: want something.

Holly Mercer is thirty-two, the resort’s fill-in singer, six weeks past a cheating ex, and completely fine. She can win any room in four minutes. She has never asked anyone for so much as a drawer.

When Holly catches a tall, silver-streaked chef rehearsing her escape from the welcome mixer, she offers a trade: she’ll be Daniella’s wingwoman for the week. Flirting lessons. Honest opinions. A rescue signal.

Then Daniella looks at her in a mirror and says, Find me a woman.

Holly finds her one. It’s the wrong one. The right one is asleep on the other side of a very thin wall, humming.

But the island is the easy part. Home is a restaurant that eats every hour Daniella owns, an almost-ex-husband who won’t sign, a singer who is finished being easy to leave, and one empty chair in the front row.

The Resort Rebound is a high-heat sapphic age-gap romantic comedy with a bisexual awakening at forty-one, a wingwoman who falls first, a one-week-only rule that was never going to hold, a chef who learns to take charge, dual first-person POV, and an HEA guaranteed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A wingwoman deal struck over a balcony divider, and a two-fingers-on-a-glass signal that stops meaning “rescue me”
✅ A forty-one-year-old chef who says “Find me a woman” to the one woman she actually wants
✅ Adjoining rooms, open sliders and very thin walls
✅ “Tell me what you like. Once. I’ll remember.” And she does
✅ A people-pleasing singer who finally stops running the room, and two words: “Yes, Chef”
✅ An outdoor shower, a green room with a clock in it, one misused piano and a restaurant kitchen after close
✅ The part most vacation romances skip: going home, getting it wrong, and making room for each other
✅ No cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ 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, toys and a strap-on, semi-public scenes, light restraint, praise and dominance), strong language, and alcohol. Also includes a recent separation and divorce proceedings, a past cheating ex (off-page, never between the leads), workaholism and a broken promise with real fallout, and discussion of people-pleasing and being taken for granted. 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: Holly

The lounge at Palm House had a dead spot, stage left, about six feet in front of the bar.

I found it eleven minutes into sound check, three hours after my plane bounced onto the only runway on St. Amara, still wearing the leggings I’d left Philadelphia in and a bra that had given up somewhere over the Carolinas. I sang a line while walking and my own voice dropped off a cliff. Two more steps and it came back. I reversed through it again like a woman hunting for a lost earring.

“There,” I said into the mic. “Right there. Anyone at that table is going to think I’m lip-syncing.”

The drummer leaned out from behind his cymbals. “Table nine. We call it the Bermuda Triangle.”

“What do you do about it?”

“Seat people we don’t like there.”

I liked him immediately. I liked all three of them, the house trio who’d been handed a stranger and a set list at noon and hadn’t once made me feel like the substitute teacher. Keys, upright bass, a kit small enough to fit in a hatchback. They listened to each other. You can’t teach that, and you’d be amazed how many wedding bands never bother to learn it.

The room was the kind you get maybe twice in a career. Open on three sides, thatch overhead, ceiling fans turning slow enough to count. Teak floor. Past the last row of tables the ground just quit, and then it was sea, and the sun going down into it with no shame whatsoever. Sound in a room like that doesn’t bounce. It leaves. You have to sing like you mean for it to reach somebody before it’s gone.

“Again from the bridge?” the pianist asked.

“From the bridge. And I’m going to stand in the Triangle and see if I can bully it.”

I couldn’t. But I learned exactly where its edges were, which is the same thing as winning if you plan your blocking.

The rest of the room I could work with. We ran an old standard, the kind every couple believes they personally discovered, one I’ve sung so many times I could do it under anesthesia. That’s the danger. A song you can do asleep is a song you start doing asleep. So I did what I always do somewhere new and picked a target. A waiter was polishing glasses at the far end of the bar, a kid of maybe twenty-two with his back to us and his mind somewhere off the island.

I gave him the whole second verse. Low and close, right on top of the mic, the way you’d tell somebody a secret in the kitchen at a party. The bass came in under me soft as a hand at the small of my back. The pianist left a hole exactly where I wanted to breathe, which I hadn’t asked for and which made me want to propose to him.

By the last line the kid had quit polishing. He stood there with the cloth in one fist and a wineglass in the other, head turned a few degrees toward the stage, like a dog hearing his name through a wall.

That’s the job. Not the high note; any decent singer has the high note. The job is making one distracted person put down what they’re doing.

My phone buzzed against the piano lid on the last chord. I shouldn’t have looked.

hey. quick q. did the blender end up at yours? pretty sure i paid for most of it

Six weeks earlier I’d borrowed Eric’s tablet to pull up a chord chart, and a message had slid down from the top of the screen from a contact saved as Dave Gym. Dave Gym missed the taste of him. Dave Gym used a great many peach emojis. I’d had three years of Eric’s belongings boxed and labeled by the time he got home, because apparently I stay organized even while being cheated on, and I had been fine ever since. Fine at the Hendricks wedding. Fine at the orthodontists’ gala. Fine singing other people’s first dances four nights a week with my whole chest. Bethany said nobody was that fine. Bethany was also the one who’d called nine days ago with a canceled singer, eight nights, six sets, flights paid, and a fee that made my landlord a non-issue through January.

I turned the phone face down. The blender was in my kitchen, where it lived, because I was the only one who had ever washed it.

“Holly Mercer.”

The woman coming across the floor had a tablet under one arm, a radio on her hip, and the walk of someone who had personally prevented four disasters since lunch. Late thirties, dark curls pinned back, Palm House polo that she somehow made look like a blazer.

“Sonia Vega. Entertainment director. You sound better than your demo, which almost never happens, and I’m irritated that I can’t take credit for discovering you.”

“I can sound worse if it helps.”

“Don’t you dare.” She shook my hand, firm and fast. “Here’s your week. Six sets across eight nights. Two nights dark. I’ll tell you which once the excursion calendar stops changing its mind. One rehearsal midweek for the farewell dinner. Sets are seventy-five minutes with a break, and when I say seventy-five, I mean I will cut the power at seventy-six, because I am not paying this band overtime so a man from Delaware can hear ‘Sweet Caroline’ twice.”

“Understood.”

“Now the part performers never believe.” She tucked the tablet tighter. “Onstage, you work for me. Offstage, you’re a guest. Eat. Swim. Sleep until noon. If someone corners you by the pool to complain about pillow firmness, you smile and you point at me. You are not the cruise director. You are not anyone’s new best friend unless you want to be.”

“I’m good with people.”

“I’m sure you are. I’ve watched people who are good with people work a fourteen-hour day on a six-hour contract.” She gave me a look that went straight through the leggings. “Staff housing has a burst pipe, so you’re in the guest wing. Jacaranda building, second floor, ocean side. Try to look upset about it.”

“Devastated.”

“Welcome mixer’s at eight, on the upper terrace. It’s called Ignite.”

“What ignites?”

“Nothing. There’s a cheese board.” She was already walking. “You’re not required to attend.”

“I’ll stop by.”

“I said not required.”

“I heard you. I’m going to go anyway. It’s a sickness.”

Sonia glanced back over her shoulder, and the look said she’d already written that down somewhere.

By eight I’d showered off two airports, pinned my hair, unpinned it, and zipped myself into the green dress.

Every working singer has one. The dress that has never let her down. Mine was emerald silk, cut close through the waist and generous everywhere I was, with skinny straps that left my shoulders bare and a slit that had earned me a stern look from at least three mothers of the bride. I put in the big gold earrings, the ones that swing. I looked like a woman who had never once cried in a Honda Civic outside a banquet hall.

Ignite was forty-odd adults on a torchlit terrace trying to work out what to do with their hands.

Fresh Start Week, the brochure in my room had called it. Solo travelers and friends. Not a singles event, it said, in a font that suggested it had been accused. I knew this crowd the way I know a first verse. The recently divorced, the recently promoted, the recently fed up. People who’d bought a plane ticket to stand somewhere beautiful and feel a little less like themselves.

I didn’t have to work it. So naturally I worked it.

I learned that the two sisters from Ohio hadn’t traveled together since their mother’s funeral and were being very careful with each other. I told a divorced periodontist that his shirt was doing a lot of the talking and he should let it. I got adopted on sight by a woman named June, forty-six, silver pixie cut, a laugh like a dropped tray.

“I haven’t had a vacation since 2014,” June told me, holding my wrist. “I intend to be a problem.”

“I respect that. Start with the cheese board.”

“I’ve been. It’s a crime scene.”

I was making my way toward the bar for hot water and lemon when I saw the woman by the exit.

There was an archway at the far end of the terrace where the flagstones gave way to the garden path, and she’d stationed herself just inside it, one step from freedom. Tall. That was the first thing. Tall, and holding herself with a stillness that made everyone around her look like they were fidgeting. Sand-colored linen trousers, a white sleeveless shirt, gold hoops. Dark hair cut blunt at the collarbone and tucked behind one ear, with a few threads of silver at the temple that she hadn’t bothered to hide, which I approved of in a way that I felt rather low down.

She had a rum punch in her hand, full to the paper umbrella. She wasn’t drinking it. She was looking at a spot on the middle distance, and her lips were moving.

Three feet to her left, a man in boat shoes was doing the lean. The orbit. I’d seen it at four hundred receptions: the slow sideways drift of a guy who has decided a woman standing alone is an unanswered question.

Well. This I could fix.

“There you are!” I arrived at her elbow with my warmest, loudest, we’ve-known-each-other-for-years voice. “I’ve been all over this terrace. Sonia needs us, like, five minutes ago.”

She turned her head and looked down at me. Dark eyes. Eyebrows that could have conducted an orchestra.

“I don’t know a Sonia.”

“Sure you do.” Through my teeth, smiling: “Go with it.”

Boat Shoes had already peeled off toward the Ohio sisters. I watched him go and let my shoulders drop.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“For what?”

“The guy.”

“What guy?”

I pointed. She followed my finger, studied the back of his head with mild interest, and came back to me. She genuinely had not noticed him. He had been circling her for five minutes like a shark with a mortgage and she’d had no idea.

“Your lips were moving,” I said. “I assumed you were praying for deliverance.”

“I was rehearsing.”

Her voice was low and dry and in no hurry at all. A voice that waited its turn.

“Rehearsing what?”

A pause. I’d learn about those pauses. Right then I only thought she was deciding whether I was worth the answer.

“My exit.”

Oh, I liked her. It went through me fast and uncomplicated, the way it does. Then my eyes dropped to the hand around the glass, to the strip of paler skin at the base of her fourth finger, and I filed the whole feeling in the drawer marked Not Yours, Mercer.

“Let me hear it,” I said.

“No.”

“I’m a professional. I’ve done toasts, vow renewals, and one eulogy with a key change. Let me hear the exit.”

Her mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile. She looked out over the terrace, toward a woman in a hibiscus-print wrap dress who was laughing with her entire body, and cleared her throat.

“‘Rebecca, I’ve got a bit of a headache. I’m going to turn in.'”

“Weak. She offers you ibuprofen. Does she carry ibuprofen?”

“She’s a school administrator. She carries a pharmacy.”

“Next.”

“‘I need to take a call from the restaurant.'”

“What restaurant?”

“Mine. I’m off duty.”

“Where’s the restaurant?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Get out. I’m from Philly.” I actually smacked her arm. It was a very solid arm. “Okay, see, that one’s dead on arrival, because it’s the same time zone and she knows your dinner rush is over. What else?”

“That’s all I had.”

“You’ve been standing here moving your lips for ten minutes and you have two excuses?”

“I was refining them.”

I laughed, one of the real ones, the bark that isn’t cute. She looked faintly startled, like she hadn’t expected to be funny on purpose tonight.

“Here’s your trouble,” I said. “It’s not the script. It’s the delivery. You’re selling it like you’re guilty.”

“I am guilty. She paid for half of this trip to get me out of my kitchen. I’ve been here four hours and all I want is to lie on a made bed and read the room service menu.”

“For fun.”

“For errors.”

God help me.

Someone tapped a glass for a toast across the terrace. The woman in the hibiscus dress, Rebecca, was scanning the crowd, and I watched my new friend’s spine go even straighter, bracing to be found and encouraged.

“Counteroffer,” I said. “Don’t exit. Relocate. There’s a service door behind the bar that lets out onto the lower terrace. Nobody’s down there. You are still technically, legally, at the mixer. You can see Rebecca’s dress from it. You could see Rebecca’s dress from orbit.”

She considered me. She took her time with that too, eyes moving from my face to the earrings to somewhere around my bare shoulder and back up, slow enough that I felt it travel.

“And you are?”

“The woman who knows where the door is.”

She handed me her paper umbrella. I have no idea why that was the thing that got me. She plucked it out of the rum punch, shook off a drop, and gave it to me like a ticket.

“Lead on,” she said.

The lower terrace was a curve of old stone hanging over the water with a waist-high wall and two torches somebody had forgotten to light. The party was a blur of noise up and behind us. Down here it was surf, and the sweet green smell of something blooming in the dark, and a breeze that went straight up my slit and reminded me I owned legs.

She set a cocktail napkin on the wall between us and unfolded it. Inside were four canapés, lined up in a row.

“You brought hostages.”

“Evidence.” She pointed with one blunt, clean finger. Short nails. A small shiny burn scar on the inside of her wrist. “This fritter was fried in oil that should have been changed on Tuesday. You can taste everything that’s died in it since. This has been under a heat lamp long enough to qualify for residency. And this.” She held up a porcelain spoon of ceviche. “This is the temperature of a mouth.”

“That is the most upsetting sentence I’ve heard all month. And I’ve had a month.”

“It’s an upsetting spoon.”

“I thought you were off duty.”

“I am. This is recreational.”

I leaned my hip against the wall and laughed until I had to press a knuckle under my eye to save my liner. When I looked up she was watching me do it. Not smiling, exactly. Just watching, with her whole attention, the way people look at a stage and almost never at a person.

“Holly,” I said. “Mercer. I’m the entertainment, in case the dress didn’t tip you off.”

“Daniella Russo.” A beat. “Nobody else up there is wearing anything on purpose.”

“Is that a compliment?”

That pause again. I was beginning to understand it wasn’t reluctance. She was checking the words before they left the kitchen.

“Yes,” Daniella said.

Just that. No decoration. I get complimented for a living, by drunk groomsmen and sentimental grandmothers and men who want to buy the singer a drink, and I can’t remember the last time one landed anywhere. That one hit me square under the ribs.

Married, I reminded myself. Or was. Seventeen kinds of straight. Sing your set and go to bed.

“So what did Rebecca drag you to,” I asked. “Fresh start from what?”

She turned the full glass on the stone, a quarter turn, another. “She believes I need to get back out there. I’ve explained that I was never out there. I got married at twenty-four.”

I did the math on her face. Around forty. Maybe a shade past.

“Seventeen years,” she said, saving me the trouble. “We separated in the spring. Seven months.”

Here’s what you say. I know what you say; I say it at receptions when somebody’s aunt gets weepy at the bar. I’m so sorry. That must be so hard. It’s a perfectly good line. It closes the subject and makes you look kind.

She was already braced for it. I could see it in her jaw, the patience of a woman who’d received that sentence so many times it had worn a groove.

“Were you the one who left?” I asked.

Her eyes came up.

“Yes.”

“Then congratulations. That’s the harder one, and nobody sends a card.”

For a second I thought I’d blown it. She went completely still. Then the breath went out of her and turned, halfway, into a laugh, low and rusty and surprised, like something she’d found in a coat pocket.

“No,” she said. “They don’t. They send casseroles. To a woman who owns a restaurant.”

“Monsters.”

“One had cream of mushroom soup in it.”

“Did you eat it?”

“I wrote notes on it.”

I was grinning like an idiot. I made myself look at the water. “Six weeks, for me. Three years, not seventeen. He cheated. I’m fine.”

“You said that quickly.”

“I’ve had practice.”

One of those conductor’s eyebrows lifted, a single eloquent inch. And then she let it go. She didn’t dig, didn’t tilt her head and make the sympathy face. She let me keep my fine the way you let someone keep their coat on when they’re not ready to stay, and went back to turning her glass.

It did something strange to my chest, being allowed to leave it there.

“Are you going to drink that,” I asked, “or just keep it company?”

“Someone handed it to me. I’ve spent twenty years watching what rum does to line cooks.” She looked at the punch, looked at a terracotta planter by her knee, and emptied one into the other without ceremony. “The bougainvillea’s seen worse.”

“You’re a menace.”

“I’m told I’m very responsible.”

“By who?”

“Everyone. Constantly. It’s exhausting.”

She said it lightly. It wasn’t light. I heard the drop in it, the place where the note went flat, and I had the oddest urge to put my hand on that solid arm again and leave it there.

I didn’t. I talked instead, and so did she, and it kept not being small talk. She told me about the restaurant, which was called Russo’s Table and sat forty-eight and had a walk-in older than her sous chef. I told her about the bride who’d requested “I Will Always Love You” for a first dance and had not, I was fairly sure, ever listened to the verses. She asked what I did when a room wouldn’t come with me. Nobody asks that. They ask if I’ve ever been on TV.

“You find the one person who’s actually listening,” I said, “and you sing to them until the rest get jealous.”

“Does that work?”

“Every time.”

The wind caught my hair and laid a piece across my mouth. I pulled it free, and her gaze followed my fingers and stayed a half second on my lips after my hand had gone. Then it moved off toward the horizon, unhurried, as though nothing had happened.

Nothing had. I told my pulse so, firmly.

My phone went off against my hip, the three-note chime I use for call times, and I startled hard enough that she noticed.

Nine-fifteen. I stared at it. We’d come down here at twenty-five to. I had been standing on this terrace for forty minutes and I hadn’t done a single bit. No impressions. No story with a button on the end. I’d forgotten to be any work at all.

“I have to go sing,” I said.

“Then go.”

“You’ve got your exit now. The path’s right there.” I nodded at the stone steps winding off into the hibiscus. “Nobody would see you. I’d cover. I’d tell Rebecca you were swept away by a periodontist.”

Daniella looked at the path. She looked at it for a while. Then she turned and looked up the slope, to where the lounge was coming alight, one amber lantern at a time.

“What do you open with?”

“Depends on the room.”

“And this room?”

I thought about the Ohio sisters, and June’s grip on my wrist, and forty people holding drinks like shields.

“This room needs to be told it’s allowed to have a good time.”

She folded the napkin closed over her evidence, squared the corners, and tucked it in her pocket to dispose of properly, because of course she did.

“I’ll walk up with you,” she said. “Rebecca will assume I’ve been mingling.”

“You have been. You mingled the hell out of me.”

It was out before I could inspect it. Her mouth twitched at one corner and held there, and she gestured at the service door with the empty glass. After you.

I felt her behind me the whole way up the steps. That height at my back. I am not a woman who usually needs to remind herself how to walk in heels.

The trio was already in place when I cut through the lounge, the pianist noodling something soft under the chatter. Sonia stood at the sound desk with her arms crossed and tapped her watch at me, once, without malice. I lifted my mic off its stand, and the weight of it settled into my palm the way it always does, like a key into a lock.

House lights coming down. That hush, a room deciding whether to care.

I shouldn’t have looked back. I had lyrics to think about, and a dead spot to steer around.

I looked back.

She hadn’t taken the path. She hadn’t gone to Rebecca, either, who was waving both arms from a big rowdy table by the bar. She’d walked straight past table nine and the Bermuda Triangle, down to the little two-top front and left, the one seat in the house with a clean line to the microphone. She’d set down a glass of something clear with a wedge of lime in it. She’d crossed one long leg over the other.

And she wasn’t looking at the stage, or the band, or the lanterns swinging in the wind off the sea.

She was looking at me. As though I’d already begun.

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Twelve Days — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Day seven of Holly’s second block at Palm House. A bad connection, a locked office after close, and Daniella in her whites with a list of instructions. Then the picture freezes, and Holly has to describe it out loud.

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