DivineDB

Reading, reimagined for women.

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Oops, I Licked It Again

by June Calloway

Margot Linden used to be the most feared food critic on cable — until a televised meltdown ended her career, her marriage, and any illusion that she was a person worth keeping. Now she's serving sixty days in her dead grandmother's Cape May cottage, the only condition of an inheritance she doesn't want, and trying very hard not to taste anything.

Then she walks into the gelato shop next door.

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Good Girl's Guide to Gangbang

by Vivian Hart

Imogen Park is a vet student, a pastor's daughter, and engaged to her high school boyfriend. She is also the person who, alone in her apartment for five years, has been writing fantasies about being the focus of group sex with men she's never met — and getting off to her own writing because she's too ashamed for anything else.

She doesn't want to be cured. She wants to know. So she does what a good student does: she researches. She vets. She drafts a contract. She picks four men. She picks a Friday in March. She tells herself it's an experiment — one night, one answer, then back to the life everyone expects her to want.

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Orgy I Wasn't Invited To

by Rosalie James

Sloane Kerrigan finds out about it the way you find out about most betrayals — by accident, three drinks in, at someone else's gallery opening. A standing monthly thing at Theo Vance's house. Her ex-husband goes. Her best friend goes. The man she's been quietly thinking about for two years hosts it. She's never been invited because, according to her ex, she's frigid.

So she shows up.

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Honey, I'm Home

by Elena Rivers

Margaux Whitlock has been married for eleven years to a man who walks through the door every night at 6:45 and announces himself to an empty foyer. *Honey, I'm home.* Same phrase. Same key in the same lock. He has not said her actual name in private in over a year. He has not touched her in fourteen months. He calls their marriage a good one and means it.

She restores antique frames in a workshop above the garage. She has been trying to fix a Federal-period gilt mirror for three months and cannot get the corners right. She catalogues her own life in her head like a museum placard. *Object: woman, thirty-four. Provenance unknown. Condition: unrestored.*

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Hotwife Factory

by Sienna Cole

Margot Hale resigned from her museum job in disgrace and let her husband pick the next chapter. He picked Linden Glen — a 1962 cul-de-sac of twelve houses on a dead-end street in a town nobody's heard of. The houses are beautiful. The neighbors are friendly. The aperitivo at the welcome party is bitter and served in mismatched crystal. By the third week, Margot has noticed three things: every wife on the street looks at her husband like she's still deciding something, the master bedroom intercoms are not disconnected, and the man who carried her broken mirror inside on moving day asked her, before he asked her name, whether her husband had told her what these houses were built to do.

Margot is an architectural historian. She knows who Reginald Vance was. She knows what he wrote. And she is going to figure out exactly what Linden Glen is — what the gatherings are for, what the wives are becoming, what her husband knew before they signed the papers — and she is going to decide, on her own terms, whether she wants any of it.

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More Cum Shots Please

by Ada Montgomery

Frankie Delgado pulls espresso for a living and writes the internet's filthiest anonymous newsletter for her actual paycheck. Two lives, no overlap — that's the rule. Then her roommate dares her to write something obscene on a regular customer's coffee cup, and Frankie, who has never met a dare she couldn't escalate, scrawls four words on a cortado for the quiet guy who comes in every morning at seven-fifteen.

More cum shots, please?

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Help, I Married a Pornstar

by Ada Montgomery

Margot Prinz is thirty-eight, divorced, and ten weeks away from making partner at the most discreet entertainment-tax firm in Los Angeles. She has color-coded calendars, a chocolate Lab named Pertti, and exactly one rule for her life: never again be the punchline.

Then she goes to Vegas for her best friend's bachelorette weekend, drinks two glasses of champagne, and marries one of her clients in a chapel off the Strip at one in the morning. The client is Beck Ramsay. The internet knows him as Hudson Wolfe. By Monday morning his face — and her wedding ring — is on every gossip site in the country.

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Politics and Broken Condoms

by Rosalie James

Sloane Reyes has eleven weeks to flip a Pennsylvania Senate seat for the most demanding candidate of her career, a corner office waiting for her in DC, and a one-night stand at a Georgetown wedding three months in the rear-view mirror that she's almost stopped thinking about.

Then she walks into debate prep and finds him sitting at the opposite end of the table, wearing the other side's lapel pin.

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Breeding Clinic

by Maren St. Claire

Caroline Vance is thirty-four, recently divorced, and finished waiting for any man's permission to have the life she wants. She walks into Manhattan's most discreet fertility clinic with a check, a calendar, and one objective: get pregnant on her own terms.

Dr. Adrian Voss does not deviate from protocol. Swiss-trained, exacting, untouchable — he has built his private practice on a single rule: the women who come to him want a child, not him. Then a lab incident on her ovulation morning leaves Caroline with a useless donor sample, a closing window, and an offer she was never supposed to receive. Off the books. Upstairs. Not as a doctor. As a man.

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Mommy Needs a Bigger Boat

by June Calloway

Delia Marsh signed her divorce papers on a Tuesday and booked a week alone on a private island off Hatteras by Friday. Forty-four years old, freshly single, two dress sizes bigger than the wife her husband decided he'd outgrown — she planned to spend seven days painting, swimming naked, eating whatever she wanted, and never apologizing for the space she takes up ever again. She did not plan on Wren Beaufort.

Wren is twenty-eight, runs a one-boat charter operation he inherited from his uncle, and has a personal rule about not sleeping with clients. He breaks it the first night, when his transmission gives out halfway to her rental and they end up stranded on a sandbar under a sky full of stars and he watches her undress to swim like she's daring him to look away. He doesn't. He has never in his life looked away from a woman like Delia, and he has spent twenty-eight years being polite about it.

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Fertilize Me

by Elena Rivers

Margaux Beaumont-Hale has a closing window and a closing argument she has rehearsed in the mirror.

Thirty-four. Endometriosis. Two failed IVF cycles she does not have the stomach to repeat. A grandmother's coastal estate she just inherited and the head gardener — Cal Reyes — who has been pruning the roses on her family's land since he was twenty. She knows the right way to ask for what she needs. She knows the price.

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Eat, Pray, Cum

by Rosalie James

Maren Vass is a New York food critic with a tongue sharp enough to end careers and a private grief sharp enough to end her own. When she files one review too many — and the magazine kills her column — her editor offers her a way back: go to Il Respiro, a discreet Tuscan wellness retreat that may not be a wellness retreat at all, and bring back the kind of exposé that ruins lives.

She books in under her mother's maiden name. She does not plan on enjoying herself. She does not plan on Dante Orsini — the retreat's founder, an ex-sommelier with a quiet voice and a fifteen-year-old sin he has never stopped paying for. She does not plan on the body she abandoned four years ago waking back up at his table. She does not plan on the night in the kitchen, alone, when she finally eats.

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Fuck Club (first rule…)

by Diana Reyes

The first rule of the salon is you don't ask his name.

Inés Vega is the most feared divorce attorney in Chicago, and the loneliest woman she knows. Two years after she walked in on her husband and her best friend, she has won every case, every settlement, every public victory — and not slept with anyone since. So when a client lets slip the address of a members-only club for women who want bodies without consequences, she pays the membership and learns the rules. No names. No professions. No outside contact. Masks past the inner door.

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Under the Eiffel Tower

by Sienna Cole

Margaux Léautaud watches the Eiffel Tower for a living. From a sealed control room buried in the south pillar, she sees everything — the after-hours rooftop kisses, the petty thefts, the maintenance crew that thinks no one is paying attention. She is excellent at her job because she spent her teenage years being the most photographed girl in France, and she has sworn she will never be the subject of a lens again.

Then she meets Idris Vautrin on camera nineteen.

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Daddy Watches Me Get Bred

by Violet Sinclair

He took me in when my mother died. He raised me into a woman in a house at the end of a logging road. And every night, after the porch light goes out, he watches me through the cameras he installed to keep me safe.

Hawk Thorne is the only man who ever stayed. He's twice my age, twice my size, and he runs the Thorne timber outfit on a Cascade ridge so remote the satellites barely catch us. He thinks he's the predator at the end of the lens. He thinks the rules he keeps are protecting me. He thinks I don't know.

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Thick Slut Summer

by June Calloway

Margie Petrosky is two-hundred-and-thirty-some pounds of Jersey Shore boardwalk attitude, and she has spent twenty-nine years not apologizing for a single one of them. She runs her dead grandmother's pierogi truck under a fluttering hand-painted sign that says BABA'S, she takes summer lovers the way other women take vitamins, and she has exactly three rules: no married men, no men who think her body is a phase, and absolutely no men in suits.

Beck Kallias is in a suit when he buys his first pierogi. He is also six-foot-three, built like a man who used to do something with his hands before he learned to wear cuff links, and he has been sent by his family's development firm to convince Margie to sell the lot her truck has occupied since 1987. He eats standing at her window. He closes his eyes when he chews. Then he tells her exactly why he's there, and she tells him exactly where he can go, and somewhere between the boardwalk and the back of his rented beach house she stops being able to remember which one of her rules he was supposed to be breaking.

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Every Inch Hurts

by Stella Moreno

Maren Holloway is thirty-four, a Seattle divorce attorney, and absolutely not in the market for a man — she fucks strangers and forgets them, and that suits her fine. Then a six-week case drops her in Spokane, and she meets a quiet, slow-spoken hockey coach in a hotel bar who is, in every measurable way, more than she can handle.

The first time hurts so badly she has to stop. The second time she comes back and tells him to figure it out. What she doesn't expect is that figuring it out — actually paying attention to her own body, actually letting someone else have a hand on the wheel — will undo her in ways she's spent a decade making sure couldn't happen.

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