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She was slurring worse now, her shaky emotions adding to it.

I leaned back in my chair, considering her question.

“My parents own a restaurant,” I finally said. “Had more women by twenty-one than some men get in a lifetime. Too many, maybe. I got tired of it. Then Janet came in one day. She was different. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe I just wanted her to be.”

She nodded like she understood.

We sat in silence for a while longer.

Then she started rambling again, telling me about how she wanted to rebuild old houses and about her lonely childhood and her best friend and more about loneliness, then she stopped in the middle of it all. Just stopped talking.

Then she stood.

In one swift motion, she pulled her shirt over her head, shimmed out of her skirt and let it all fall to the floor.

Then she just stood there in front of me in nothing but a matching red bra and panties, her skin glowing under the warm light of the living room lamp.

Jesus. She wasn’t good for my heart, and my dick was already hard from her jumping in my lap—it hadn’t gone down. Now it felt too hard.

“You think I’m pretty, Sam?” she asked. “You think my body’s nice? You saw a lot of women. You would know.”

My jaw clenched. My fists curled. I think this was the most restraint I’d ever shown in my life.

She stood there with this look on her face, begging me to make her feel something—wanted, seen, chosen.

She didn’t know what she was doing.

Or maybe she did.

Maybe it was just the liquor.

Or maybe she was just tired of being invisible.

Either way, I looked my fill. Checked out her thick thighs. Her belly wasn’t flat, but her waist curved in, giving her a figure-eight shape, and her breasts were perfectly round. She looked soft. Womanly.

Fuck!

She had the kind of body built for being held down and fucked deep—and praised with a filthy mouth and long, slow strokes.

And I wanted her.

I wanted to taste her. I wanted to pin her to the wall and eat her until she cried. I wanted to fuck her slow until she forgot her own name.

But I wouldn’t.

Whatever I was feeling wasn’t just lust. It was something meaner.

Something needier. Something that had teeth.

I stood up, breathing all heavy. I grabbed her clothes from the floor, redressed her myself.. She didn’t resist.

“You need to sleep this off, Zane. Lay down.”

She nodded, voice small. “Okay.”

She simply laid down and curled into the couch. I pulled the throw blanket from the side and laid it around her shoulders.

I stood over her a moment longer, watching her settle. Still wanting. Still hard. Still restraining myself.