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At three in the afternoon,Lisa Keenan stretched out on a lounge chair on the back patio,flipping through the latest issue of Cosmo as she waited for the polish on her toenails to dry.She’d been inspired by all those cool pictures she’d seen on Instagram lately,and spent the last hour trying to follow a tutorial on creating a gradient.Now her toes were splayed apart with foam separators so the polish wouldn’t smear,and she wasn’t quite sure she really liked the effect.The light pink at the base looked perfect against her skin—hertan had faded over the winter,and it wasn’t yet warm enough toactually lay out to soak up the sun,and the pale color made her skin look dusky.But the blue tips were a little odd.She wasn’t sure how she felt about blue nail polish.Wasn’t that only something little girls used?

She flipped through Cosmo,disinterested.What she really wanted at the moment was a cool drink of iced tea,cubes chinking in the cold glass,but she was afraid to smudge her toes.The polish said it was quick-drying,but she didn’t wantto take chances.

Behind her,the screen door slid open on its track and,a momentlater,a flash of black streaked past.“You let the cat out!”she hollered without looking up from her magazine.

“He’ll be back,”her boyfriend Nick said.“He knows who feeds him.”

“Yeah,me.”She didn’t hear the screen door shut,no surprise there.“Shut the door,will you?I don’t want any flies in the house.”

“It’s too early for flies,”Nick countered,but he did as she asked.

She knew she could be a little nagging sometimes,and it was easier for him to just obey instead of argue.Nick wasn’t very confrontational.Whenever she was angry,he always hid out withhis best friend Ray until the storm passed.Then he’d come home bearing flowers or jewelry,and apologize even if it wasn’t his fault.Half the time he did that,Lisa wondered if he even knew what he was apologizing for.

Now he came around the side of her lounge chair,a tall glass of tea in one hand like a peace offering.“For you,baby doll.”

Lisa rolled her eyes and sighed,but she took the offered drink.“You read my mind.”

Without asking if he could,Nick sat on the edge of the lounge chair and ran a hand up Lisa’s leg.She had on a pair of cut-offshorts,and had slathered on some tanning lotion in the hope of getting a little color while she could,so his hand slid effortlessly over her oiled skin.Nick was,in a word,gorgeous.He had a simmering smile and warm eyes the same exact shade of melted Hershey kisses.His brown hair was cut high on the sides and left long on top,and streaks of blond added depth.Even though he shaved daily,he seemed to have a perpetual five o’clock shadow,which only accentuated his square jaw line.He was a looker,to be sure,and sometimes Lisa’s breath caught in the back of her throat when she realized,out of all the girls in the world,he loved her.

Nick was sort of kind of an actor.Well,no,not really.He was amodel,mostly for catalogs and sales flyers,because he had thetall,lean body of a human clothes hanger.He’d done a few TV commercials—one razor ad in particular was Lisa’s favorite,where Nick stood in front of a bathroom mirror,face all lathered up,wearing only a towel that hung low on his narrow hips.He landed a walk-on role on a daytime soap opera after that,which was how they met in the first place.Lisa was a writer on staff at the soap,and Nick had come to her trailer to see if he could talk her into giving him a few lines.They ended up having sex right there on the set—she hadn’t even known his name at the time.She liked to tell her friends it was lust at first sight.

That was ten years ago,when soaps were still big.Nick moved onto internet ads,and he had some limited success in a handful of cheesy sci-fi cable movies,each worse than the last.Lisa was a full-time blogger,freelancing for a variety of websites on all sorts of topics in health and beauty.Which was why she read Cosmo.It may be aimed at a younger audience,but she had to keep abreast of the last trends in fashion,makeup,and sex.

Because,to be honest,sex was where Lisa made most of her moneynowadays.With the advent of e-books,she’d discovered she hada talent for kinky erotic romance that sold like hot cakes.It helped that she and Nick had a terrifically active sex life—itkept their relationship alive,and very little was off limits in their bedroom.She knew he liked big dicks,even if he swore he wasn’t gay,and she knew he’d once had a wet dream about getting slapped in the face with his best friend’s rock-hard cock.That was something Ray probably didn’t even know about him,and Lisa loved that Nick trusted her with the secret.He knew things about her,too,she’d never shared with anyone else.