Wrapped Around Her Finger

A Fake-Fiancée Sapphic Holiday Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Fake Engagement, One Bed, Forced Proximity, Opposites Attract, Holiday Romance, Class Difference, Competence Kink, Suit Kink, She Falls First, Romantic Comedy

She made up a fiancée. Then the fiancée showed up in a suit.

One fake engagement. One bed. One week to keep their hands to themselves.

Madison Prescott has a business she built, a life she chose, and a mother who thinks both would improve with the right partner. So when the family seats her next to her ex at their Newport holiday ball, Madison does the mature thing.

She says she’s engaged.

Now she needs a fiancée, and there’s exactly one name in her coat pocket. Renee Lawson. Celebrity publicist, professional ice water, and the woman Madison has been thinking about an irresponsible amount.

Renee has rules. One week. Nothing public. No lies, only careful answers. And if either of them needs the truth, they say off the record.

Then Madison’s mother puts them in a suite with one bed and very thin walls. A “small family brunch” seats forty-one. And the rehearsal kiss goes on a lot longer than a rehearsal should.

Renee can sell any story. She’s never had this much trouble remembering one isn’t real.

Wrapped Around Her Finger is a high-heat sapphic holiday romantic comedy with a fake fiancée, one bed, a rich family with no boundaries, a tailor who’s very good with her hands, a publicist who finally loses her composure, dual first-person POV, and an HEA guaranteed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A fake fiancée invented over a plate of sole, and the business card that made it worse
✅ Five spoken rules, and the only safe word a publicist would ever choose: “off the record”
✅ One blue four-poster, one clawfoot tub, and a sister on the other side of a very thin wall
✅ A tailor who takes an inseam on her knees, and a publicist who buttons her own cuffs one-handed
✅ A forty-room Newport “cottage” at Christmas, a mother who calls forty-one people “just family,” and a butler who signs for everything
✅ Composed in public, wrecked in private, and a heroine who learns she’s allowed to make noise
✅ A lie with real consequences, a real apology, and a ring that comes back
✅ No cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat and an HEA guaranteed

Buy Now

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including oral, fingering, semi-public scenes, light restraint, and a strap-on), strong language, and alcohol. Also includes a lie told to family and its fallout, family pressure and class tension, a workplace scandal with online pile-on and a leaked photograph, and discussion of childhood financial hardship. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: Madison

The seating chart arrives between the consommé and the sole, which is how I know it’s an ambush.

My mother doesn’t hand it to me. She slides it across the tablecloth with two fingers, the way a croupier moves chips, and goes back to her soup as if the paper walked there on its own.

“What’s this?”

“The nineteenth, darling. I thought you’d like to see where you are.”

Where I am is the Ainsley Club, in a dining room the color of the inside of a shell, under a portrait of a woman who has been disappointed in everyone since 1911. I’m forty minutes late, there’s tailor’s chalk on my thumb, and I ran past the cloakroom so fast that my coat is hanging off the back of a chair that was built for a mink. Three separate members have looked at it. One of them looked twice.

Where I am on the chart is table two.

My mother’s calligrapher has done the Winter Ball in sepia ink on cream stock, ten names to a circle, twenty-nine circles. Three hundred people, give or take a senator. I find Miss Madison Prescott at about four o’clock on the second circle. On my right, a man named Dunning Fairweather, who is ninety-one and will tell me about a boat. On my left—

I set the chart down on the bread plate.

“You’ve put me next to Caroline.”

“Have I?” Victoria Prescott lifts her reading glasses on their chain and consults her own handiwork like it’s news. “So I have. Well. She’s coming up on the Monday, she’ll be staying at the house, and she won’t know a soul at table two.”

“She knows every soul at table two. She dated one of them for three years.”

“Which is why you’ll have so much to talk about.”

She says it warmly. That’s the thing nobody believes about my mother until they’ve been on the receiving end: she is never cold. She’s sixty-one, silver-blond, upholstered in bouclé the color of a good pearl, and she arranges people the way other women arrange peonies—with love, and with wire.

“Mother.”

“I’m only being hospitable, Maddie.”

“You’re being a matchmaker with a floor plan.”

“I’m being a hostess with a houseguest.” She breaks a roll. She does not butter it; the roll is a prop. “Caroline’s had a difficult year. Lisbon didn’t suit her. They’ve brought her back and given her all of North America, which sounds enormous and I gather mostly means airports. She asked after you at the Fairweathers’. Very particularly.”

“How particularly?”

“She asked whether you were still at the shop.”

There it is. First one of the day. I’d had money on before the fish.

The shop is Second Look, on Atlantic Avenue: eleven hundred square feet of other people’s best nights. I restore vintage occasionwear. Tuxedos, ball gowns, a 1962 opera coat that came in smelling of somebody’s attic and went out to a film premiere. I take a thing apart down to the canvas and put it back so it fits the woman who’s wearing it now, not the one who bought it. My alterations book runs six weeks out. To my mother it’s somewhere I keep busy.

“I own the shop. At is for people who can be fired.”

“That’s what I told her.” It isn’t what she told her. “I said you were doing wonderfully and working much too hard, and that it would do you a world of good to sit next to someone who makes you laugh.”

Caroline Wexler did make me laugh. She also made reservations, made vice president at thirty-one, and made the reasonable assumption, eleven months ago, that when she took the Lisbon job I would close a business with four employees and a waiting list so I could go be charming in Portugal. I said no. I said it in our kitchen, and then at more length in the car, and then one final time on the sidewalk outside her building with a box of my own bobbins in my arms.

My family refers to this as unfortunate timing.

“I’d like you to move me,” I say. Calm. Direct. Thirty-three years old, a grown woman making a simple request of another grown woman.

“Oh, sweetheart, I can’t. The cards are lettered.”

“Then reletter two.”

“He charges by the card.”

“I’ll pay for the cards.”

“Out of the till?” She laughs, lightly, and puts her hand over mine to show it was affection. “I’m teasing. Dee has your little packet, by the way. She says there are a great many numbers in it.”

“It’s a funding proposal. Numbers are the genre.”

“She’s reading it very thoroughly. You know how she is.” A pat. “I’m sure the trustees will be perfectly sweet about it.”

Perfectly sweet. I have eighteen months of revenue in that packet. I have a lease option on the storefront next door, a build-out quote, and a column called conservative case that would make an actuary weep with joy. The Prescott Enterprise Fund is my grandmother’s money, left for anyone in this family who’d rather build something than inherit it, and its trustees are going to be sweet to me.

The sole arrives. My mother thanks the waiter by name and asks after his daughter’s audition.

I pick up my fork, turn the seating chart face-down with the handle, and try once more, because apparently I’m an optimist.

“I don’t want to spend the Ball being walked back toward my ex-girlfriend like a horse that’s refused a fence.”

“Nobody’s walking anybody.” She takes a small, immaculate bite. “It’s a chair, Maddie. I’m not arranging your life. I’m arranging chairs.”

“And the rooms?”

A pause about the length of a swallow.

“What about the rooms?”

“Where’s Caroline sleeping?”

“The Rose Room. It has the nicest light.”

“The Rose Room shares a door with mine.”

“Does it?” Glasses up. Glasses down. “I’d forgotten that door. I don’t believe it’s been opened since your grandmother had the mumps.”

She hasn’t forgotten the door. She has, I would bet the build-out quote, had Arthur oil it.

And I can see the whole week, suddenly, the way you can see a garment while it’s still on the bolt. The Ball on the nineteenth and a full week of family things before it, because my mother has never in her life hosted one event when she could host nine. Caroline at breakfast. Caroline at the Founders’ Dinner, being lovely to my father. Caroline on the far side of an oiled door in the nicest light, and every person I’m related to watching the two of us with soft, hopeful faces, like a pair of pandas the zoo has plans for. I’ll say no forty times, pleasantly. I’ll be told I’m being dramatic. By Saturday I’ll be so worn down from being pleasant that I’ll end up at table two laughing at something Caroline says, and my mother will see it from across the ballroom and think, There. Wasn’t that easy.

The words leave my mouth before I’ve approved them.

“I can’t sit with Caroline. I’m engaged.”

My mother’s fork stops an inch above the plate.

Nothing in the room changes. A woman two tables over finishes a story about a cardiologist. Somewhere a spoon rings on china. Through the tall windows the sky over Sixty-Third Street is the gray of a suit lining, there’s a wreath on every lamppost, and my mother is not saying a single word.

I count. I can’t help it; my hands have been counting stitches since I was nineteen and my head picked up the habit.

One. Two. Three.

She isn’t managing me. She isn’t steering. For the first time since I sat down, she has no idea where I’m supposed to go.

Seven. Eight.

It’s the most peaceful I have ever been in this building.

Eleven. Twelve.

“To whom?”

Right.

That would be the flaw in the plan, if there were a plan.

My face does something I hope reads as private happiness and not woman watching a vase fall. My right hand, with no instructions from me, goes behind my chair and into my coat pocket, because that’s where it goes when I’m nervous. There’s usually a thimble in there, or a spool, something to turn over. Today there’s a rectangle of card stock. Heavy. Letterpress; I can feel the bite of the type under my thumb. A phone number on the back in ballpoint, the digits small and upright.

She gave it to me four hours ago.

“Renee Lawson,” I say.

My mother puts her fork all the way down.

“Renee Lawson.”

“Yes.”

“Lang and Abara’s Renee Lawson.”

“That’s where she works.”

“The Renee Lawson who did the Conservancy dinner. Who got Bitsy Aldrich out through the kitchens before the photographers worked out which car—”

“I couldn’t tell you. She’s discreet.”

Which is true. It may be the last true thing I say this afternoon, so I take a second to enjoy it.

“Maddie.” My mother presses her fingertips to her sternum. Her eyes have gone bright. I’ve seen her look at exactly two things this way: the Sargent in the front hall at Kestrel, and my sister’s licensing exam results. “She’s so serious.“

And there’s the other thing nobody believes until it’s happened to them. It works. It works at once, and it feels wonderful. Thirty seconds ago I was a charming problem with chalk on my hand. Now I’m a woman whom someone accomplished has seen fit to choose, and my mother is looking at me as though I’ve finally handed in something she can frame.

I ought to feel sick. I plan to, later. Right now it’s like stepping into a warm room.

“How long?”

“It’s recent.”

“How recent? Who asked? Was there a— let me see your hand.”

“There’s no ring yet.” My bare left hand is already under the table. “And we’re not doing this over fish.”

“You didn’t tell me. You sat through an entire soup.”

“I’m telling you now. She’s very private, Mother. We’ve kept it quiet, and I’d like to keep keeping it quiet.”

“Of course. Of course you would.” She nods the fervent nod of a woman who has never kept anything quiet in her life. “And what does she make of the— of Second Look?”

She has never once said the name out loud. I didn’t know she knew it.

“She’s a client.”

“A client. Well.” You’d think I’d said Renee was a shareholder. “And she simply—noticed you? Across the pins?”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“You know what I mean. A woman like that has her pick.” She says it tenderly, which is the worst part. “What is she like?”

I open my mouth to invent something and find, to my alarm, that I don’t need to.

“Exact,” I say. “She’s the most exact person I’ve ever met. She reads the inside of a jacket before she looks at the outside. She doesn’t fill silences. She says my whole name.”

I stop there. My mother’s face has gone soft in a way I haven’t earned, and every word of that was true, and I’d fully intended to be lying.

“Does Daphne know?”

“Nobody knows.”

“I’ll tell your father myself.”

“That is the opposite of—”

“Hugh isn’t people, darling.” She reaches into her handbag.

“Phones aren’t allowed in the dining room.”

“That rule is for members who can’t be trusted.” She’s already dialing. She holds the thing slightly away from her ear, as she does all telephones, on the theory that they’re a fad. “Arthur. It’s me. I need you to open the Blue Suite. …No, the Blue. …For Madison and her fiancée. …Yes, Arthur, I said fiancée, do keep up. From the twelfth.”

“The twelfth?“

She flaps a hand at me. “The good linens, and have someone look at the tub, it was making that noise. …Thank you. …I haven’t the faintest idea what she eats. Ask Madison.” She hangs up, radiant. “He says congratulations. Well, he said ‘very good,’ but with Arthur that’s the same thing.”

“The Ball is the nineteenth.”

“And everyone’s coming for the week. You can’t have her meet the family in a receiving line, it’s barbaric. Come up on the Saturday. It isn’t as though the shop will mind.”

Two.

“Define the week.“

“Nothing at all. A welcome dinner on the Saturday, very small. The tree on Sunday, which is only us. Founders’ on the Wednesday, and one can’t count that, it’s tradition.”

“How many is only us?“

“I never know until Arthur tells me.”

“The Blue Suite,” I say, a little faintly.

“It’s the only one fit for a couple. Your Aunt Phyllida had it on her honeymoon. One can hear the sea from the bed.”

The bed. Singular. I file that under problems for a Madison who’s had some air.

My mother, meanwhile, has turned the seating chart face-up again and uncapped the fountain pen she keeps for thank-you notes. With one clean stroke she puts a line through Miss Caroline Wexler. Above it, in her beautiful finishing-school hand, she writes Ms. Renee Lawson.

Then she carries Caroline over to table four on a little arrow and sets her down beside my sister.

“There,” she says, and blows on the ink. “Now, was that so hard?”

On the sidewalk the cold gets into my collar and I let it.

Sixty-Third Street is dressed for the season: wreaths, white lights wound up the trunks of the pear trees, a doorman in a greatcoat salting his steps as carefully as a man seasoning a steak. My mother’s car has already pulled away. She kissed me on both cheeks before she got in. She called me my clever girl.

My phone buzzes against my hip. Daphne.

Mom just called me making a noise only dogs can hear. WHO is Renee Lawson and why did I find out from ARTHUR

Eleven minutes. It’s been eleven minutes.

I take the card out of my pocket.

Renee Lawson, in charcoal ink on cream. Senior Publicist, Events & Strategy. Lang & Abara. Nothing on it that doesn’t need to be there. I turn it over. Ten digits in blue ballpoint and, underneath, four words in the same small upright hand.

For emergencies. Jacket ones.

“Oh my God,” I tell the pear tree.

I have met this woman four times.

A split zipper on a client at eleven at night. A hem with red wine on it. A groom’s mother who’d lost eleven pounds out of spite. Each time she came through the door of Second Look as though the room had been waiting for her before it started, told me the problem in two sentences, and paid the invoice inside a day. She has never flirted with me. She has never been late. She calls me Madison, all three syllables, level and unhurried, as if nobody ever mentioned there was a shorter version, and I’ve never corrected her, because I’d like to go on hearing it.

This morning was the fourth time.

Nine-ten. I wasn’t open yet. She knocked on the glass with one knuckle, in a charcoal overcoat and a silk shirt the color of cream going into coffee, and I let her in and locked the door behind her out of habit, and then stood there far too aware that I’d done it.

The jacket was on the form by the cutting table. A 1974 tuxedo jacket, black barathea, satin shawl lapel, for a client of hers who’s being photographed Thursday. “From the left, if she listens to me. She won’t.” It had come to me three weeks ago with the chest canvas collapsed and the lining in ribbons. Most people, when they collect a piece like that, hold it at arm’s length and say oh, gorgeous.

Renee took off her coat. She unbuttoned her cuffs and folded her sleeves back twice, exactly, to the middle of the forearm. Then she turned the jacket inside out on my table and read it.

That’s the only word I have. She ran two fingers down the new sleeve lining and paused where I’d eased it at the elbow. She found the shoulder I’d reset. She pressed the pad of her thumb, slowly, into the front of the chest, and felt it spring back.

“You rebuilt the canvas.”

“It had gone to felt.”

“By hand. These are pad stitches.” She tilted the lapel toward the window. “There must be a thousand of them.”

“About fourteen hundred.”

“No one’s going to know that.”

“You know.”

She looked up. Gray eyes, dark brows, a blunt line of dark-blond hair that just clears her collarbone. She doesn’t smile much. She does something quieter with one corner of her mouth, and you feel you’ve been handed a receipt.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

I have had people put their tongues in my mouth to less effect.

“You have chalk.” She nodded at my hand. “There.”

“I always have chalk.”

“I’d noticed.” She said it to the jacket.

From anyone else I’d have called that a line. From her it was inventory.

Her phone went. She glanced at the screen, said, “I’m sorry, I have to,” and took it with her right hand. And while somebody on the other end talked at her, while she said no, and not before noon, and then he can explain it to her himself, all in that same even voice, she rolled her left sleeve down and buttoned the cuff with her left hand.

Just the one. Thumb and two fingers folded back against her own wrist, feeling for the buttonhole, the tendons shifting under the skin. She never glanced down. The button went through. She passed the phone across and did the other side.

It took six seconds. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

I have been thinking, to be specific, about those two fingers and that thumb and how little supervision they seem to need. About what else they could find without looking. About her standing behind me at the cutting table with her sleeves still folded back, that composed voice right beside my ear telling somebody not before noon while her hand goes down the front of my trousers and opens me up, slow and exact, until I’m soaked and gripping the table edge and biting my own lip bloody so I won’t be heard on the call. About her hanging up. About her saying Madison, nothing else, all three syllables, and then how it would feel when she pushed inside me to the knuckle and curled.

I know precisely how I’d come. Bent over my own cutting table with my cheek on the pattern paper and my trousers shoved down around my thighs, her free hand flat between my shoulder blades to keep me where she wants me, her fingers working in and out of my cunt with a wet sound that would be mortifying in a room that quiet. She wouldn’t hurry. That’s the part that undoes me. She’d fuck me with the attention she gave that jacket, noting everything—the place just inside that makes my knees go, the angle that makes me swear—and she’d press her thumb to my clit the way she pressed it to the canvas. Slowly. To see what it did. And when I clenched around her and came all over her hand, she’d do that small thing with the corner of her mouth and tell me, Yes. I do.

I thought about it through a consultation and two fittings. I thought about it on the Q train with my knees locked together, reading the same mattress ad nine times. I dress people for a living; I’ve had my hands inside the clothes of half the pretty women in Brooklyn, and I have never once needed to sit down afterward.

When she’d finished her call she laid the card on my table. In case she destroys it before Thursday. She turned it over and wrote on the back, and put her coat on, and carried fourteen hundred stitches out into the morning. And I slid the card into my pocket instead of the register drawer where client cards go.

Then I took it to lunch and got engaged to it.

I breathe out. It hangs white in the air.

There are options. I’m a businesswoman; I can list options.

One: go back up those salted steps and tell my mother I made it up. Watch the brightness go out of her face. Be seated at table two beside Caroline with a new and richly deserved reputation for hysteria, right before my aunt decides whether I’m a serious person.

Two: invent a breakup by the twelfth. Be consoled. At length. In the Rose Room’s nicest light.

Three.

Three is ten digits in blue ink.

It’s absurd. She has no reason to say yes. She’s a senior publicist at a firm with its name on a building, and she spends her days stopping exactly this brand of nonsense from happening to people far more important than I am. The sane thing would be to walk to the subway.

I’ve never asked her for anything that didn’t come with an invoice. I know her inseam by eye and her opinion of polyester satin. I don’t know whether she’s seeing someone, or where she goes at Christmas, or if she’d laugh. I know that when a room goes wrong she’s the one everybody turns to, and that I’ve just volunteered her for the most expensive wrong room in Rhode Island with my name on her arm.

My thumb is already on the screen. It’s left a faint chalk print on the card, right beside her name, and I look at that longer than makes sense.

It rings three times.

“Renee Lawson.”

Even through a phone. Even on a street corner with a bus going by.

“It’s Madison. Prescott. From Second Look.”

“Madison.” No change in pace. Somewhere behind her a door shuts and the noise drops away. “Is it the jacket?”

“The jacket’s perfect. The jacket is the one thing I’ve done right all day.” I shut my eyes. “I need to hire you. Not professionally. Well—are you sitting down?”

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy Wrapped Around Her Finger

Get the Audiobook

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

Forty-One — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Three weeks after the epilogue: the engagement brunch they actually agreed to, forty-one place cards, and the flower room again. This time there’s a bolt on the door, nobody says not on a counter, and Renee finally calls in her favor.

Get the Bonus Chapter →