The Straight Girl Bet
Sapphic Sports Romance
by Blair Lennox
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Bisexual Awakening, Age Gap (30/37), Tennis Rivalry, Bet/Dare, First Woman, Secret Relationship, Class Difference, Sports Romance, Forced Proximity
She bet she could never want me. Then she asked for a rematch.
Thirty-year-old Ashley Reed has spent her adult life winning the right way: perfect job, perfect fiancé, perfect membership at the Manhattan tennis club where her father built half his business connections. Then the fiancé calls off the wedding because Ashley cannot stop questioning whether she actually wants the life they planned.
At the club’s annual summer tournament, Ashley runs into Morgan Blake — thirty-seven, gorgeous, openly lesbian, former pro, and the only woman Ashley has spent six years competing with hard enough to make everyone think they hate each other.
Morgan has always known Ashley is attracted to her. Ashley has always denied it.
After too much champagne at the tournament party, Ashley makes a stupid bet: she could never want Morgan, no matter how close they got. Morgan should walk away. Instead, she says, “Prove it.”
One night destroys the bet. The next morning creates a new rule: Ashley can explore what she wants, but Morgan will not become a private practice run for a woman who still expects to marry a man. The problem is Ashley doesn’t just want Morgan once. She wants her every time they step onto the court.
When Ashley’s development firm and Morgan’s coaching bid collide on the same luxury-resort project — and Ashley’s father sees Morgan as a complication his daughter cannot afford — both women must decide whether a love that started as a dare can survive in daylight.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Rivals-to-lovers sapphic romance with a 7-year age gap
✅ Tennis rivalry that’s really six years of foreplay
✅ “She bet she could never want me and lost in Chapter Two”
✅ Competitive women who are equally competitive in bed
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Country-club tension, locked changing rooms, hotel walls that aren’t thick enough
✅ A heroine who learns to say her girlfriend’s name in daylight
✅ A rescue dog named Rally who judges everyone
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including locker-room encounters, hotel urgency, post-match intensity, and emotional vulnerability), strong language, themes of identity, coming out, a 7-year age gap, class difference, and a controlling father. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Fault
I applied my lip balm with the focus of a woman defusing a roadside bomb.
Same brand. Same shade — a barely-there pink that looked like I wasn’t wearing anything, which took forty-five dollars and a Sephora consultation to achieve. Same order of operations: bottom lip first, press together, check teeth. Then the playlist. Then the wrist stretches. Then the single deep breath through the nose that my college sports psychologist had taught me a decade ago and that I still couldn’t skip without feeling like the universe would collapse.
Ritual complete. I looked at myself in the Ardmore Athletic Club bathroom mirror and thought: You are going to walk out there, play tennis, drink champagne, and smile at every single person who asks how you’re really doing. And if your face cracks, you will excuse yourself, come back in here, and fix it before anyone sees.
My engagement had ended twenty-three days ago. Everyone at this club knew. Most of them had known before I did, which was the particular humiliation of belonging to a world where gossip traveled faster than grief.
Ben called it off. People assumed I did — women like me were supposed to be the ones who left — but it was Ben. He sat me down at our kitchen island with a glass of the Sancerre we kept for company and said, very gently, that he didn’t think I wanted the life we were building. He said it like he was returning a sweater that didn’t fit. Apologetic. Relieved.
The worst part was he was right.
The second worst part was that I hadn’t been brave enough to say it first.
I straightened the collar of my tennis dress — white, obviously, because the Ardmore had a dress code that hadn’t been updated since Reagan — and walked out of the bathroom into the kind of late-June afternoon that made Manhattan feel like a greenhouse.
The Ardmore Athletic Club sat on the Upper East Side like a monument to the belief that enough money could insulate you from anything unpleasant, including weather. It had eight clay courts, a limestone clubhouse older than most religions, and a membership waitlist rumored to be longer than the one for the Met Gala. My father had joined when I was four. I’d learned to hold a racket on Court 3.
Today was the club’s annual summer invitational — three days of round-robin play, exhibition matches, and the kind of socializing that required Xanax-level commitment to small talk. I’d been attending since I was old enough to pass hors d’oeuvres. This was the first year I’d shown up as a woman whose personal life was a topic of conversation rather than a source of quiet envy.
Morgan Blake arrived as a featured coach and exhibition-match player — the club hired her as a draw. Ashley hadn’t seen her in four months. Morgan was wearing a fitted black athletic dress and looked like she was built to ruin Ashley’s ability to concentrate.
Their old rivalry returned instantly during a casual exhibition match. Ashley played harder than necessary because Morgan made her feel too much. Morgan noticed Ashley was angry, restless, and staring.
After the match, Morgan approached her at the bar. “You always play angry when you’re falling apart.”
Ashley said she was fine. Morgan said, “I know. That’s the problem.”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Private Lesson — Six months later, Morgan strings café lights along Court 7, locks the gate, and gives Ashley a very different kind of private lesson on the court where everything started. The hottest scene in the series — too explicit for Amazon.
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