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I’m just a mom with a soft belly and a C-section scar.

Voss is virility in the flesh, with a body made for sex, and a voice that’s equally arousing. The mere thought of those muscles he hides beneath his fancy suits, covered in tattoos, flexing and contracting in slow, controlled movements is enough to make me squeeze my thighs together. Those intense eyes staring back at me, the right flanked by a scar that tells me someone, or something, tried to hurt him once, and failed.

How shamelessly those eyes would consume a woman, like thunderstorms tearing across a tranquil landscape. The last thing she’d see, before blinding pleasure strikes in a snap of wicked lightning. He’d undoubtedly leave any woman soaked and shaken afterward.

Stop it, Nola.

It’s been six months since my husband’s death, and I’m already fantasizing about a man. A complete stranger, no less. I screw my eyes shut to stamp out the thoughts of Voss, and whatever little sexual metaphors he conjures, in my head. I have a son to focus on, and my pottery show coming up. I don’t need to be indulging in these wet daydreams.

It’s just that he’s big and imposing. Dominant. The complete opposite of Denny. Voss is a man who takes control, takes what he wants.

A flash of him ripping away my panties has me gripping the edge of the tub to keep my hands away from my thighs.

I will not get myself off to this man. Regardless of the fact that we nearly got it on this afternoon, the fact is, Voss is off limits. He’s my tenant. My neighbor. A business transaction.

Forbidden.

Which makes him more enticing, somehow.

Smooth porcelain glides across my ass as I squirm with the visuals of him sneaking into my house, and up into my bathroom, watching me bathe right now. I spread my thighs apart, imagining his hands doing the same, as if he’s in this cramped tub with me. A dark stranger with a single agenda.

Palms on my knees, he holds me open, and I kick out at him to get away, but one strong yank captures me. Water splashes over the edge of the bath as he wrangles me beneath him, his big body caging me in so there’s no hope for escape.

My fingers tingle with the urge to touch the ache between my thighs, but I can’t. I won’t get myself off to these thoughts that border on forced sex. Growing up in a sexually-repressed house as a teenager, I often had these darker sort of fantasies, ones that allowed me to indulge without the guilt of actually enjoying something so perverse. To sate my desires without the punishment of my conscience. Unfortunately, my mother further smothered my curiosities, by making it clear that masturbation was something to be ashamed about, something only a person constantly preoccupied with sex would do.

I was always taught women who craved sex were little trollops, as I recall my mother saying, when she found out my father had been propositioned by one—his secretary. She’d have been horrified to know, as a freshman in high school, I sometimes touched myself to thoughts of senior Jake Northcott ravaging me in his dad’s pickup truck. The twisted imaginations of a young girl pining for the captain of the football team, but it wasn’t always confined to just him. Sometimes, my fantasies took place in the locker room with the other players, all of them wanting a turn with the shy and quiet Stiever girl.

So wrong.

Yet, something about those sinister little scenarios excites me. The chase. The dominance.

My ultimate surrender.

I imagine Voss pushing himself inside me, anesthetizing me with his dark poison. Hammering his hips into me while he whispers dirty things in my ear. Terrifying truths that keep me on edge, as he toys with my limits. You love this, don’t you, Nola?

God, he’d feel so good. Railing into me, while he watches me come apart at the seams, unraveling all my tightly-knitted control, until I’m lying in messy spools of what I once was.

I ball my hands into fists, as the visual overwhelms my senses, pervading every dark corner of my mind. Stop. I have more important things to ponder, after all, but his hands on my body this afternoon left behind phantom reminders of how good it feels to be touched by a man.

Particularly one as dominant and arousing as Voss.

The water splashes around me in celebration of my frenzy, as my body tenses, begging for one single touch, one quick climax.

I can’t.

“Ah!” A knot in my belly pulls tighter, until I’m rubbing my ass against the porcelain with these wicked thoughts of Voss.

Voss.

Even his name is sex on my tongue. Perhaps because it rhymes so well with boss, and that’s exactly how I imagine him with me right now. Taking charge. Unfettered by guilt and shame, or anything that gets in the way of his pleasure.

“You love when I fuck you,” the imaginary Voss says. “Admit it.”

The strings pull, winding my muscles up, and I can’t take it anymore.

One touch. That’s it.

Just one.