IT’S TOUGH TO SCRATCH your stomach when your hands are cuffed to the bed Cynthia Baxter discovered to her intense frustration. She twisted and rolled her naked body, but the elusive itch was an inch or so north of her belly button. Her feet couldn’t reach it, her knees couldn’t reach it; she couldn’t twist it away.

The sound of metal scratching the mahogany four-poster, which had been handed down in perfect condition through generations of Baxters, only added to the guilt she was feeling.

“Walter!” she yelled, but got no reply.

She’d carefully followed the instructions in Raunch Magazine’s fantasy issue in a bid to put some passion into her relationship. Here she was, enacting “Helpless Virgin Ravished by a Dark Dangerous Stranger,” and her fiancé, who should be overcome with lust while performing on her body all the outrageously kinky acts she’d read about in the magazine—and highlighted for him in yellow so he couldn’t miss them—was in the living room, attached to his cell phone.

She listened hard, but couldn’t hear his voice. Maybe he was too put off by her naked body in daylight to come back.

“Walter?”

Silence.

“Walter!” Her voice echoed through the house. Why couldn’t he hear her?

She took a deep breath, and her nose wrinkled at the smell of the new perfume she’d splashed all over her body. In the department store it had smelled spicy and exotic, but now that she’d been wearing it a few hours, it smelled cheap and cloying.

“Walter! Are you there?”

Nothing.

A terrible suspicion dawned. He tended to be obsessive about his work, which made him forgetful about other things. Was it possible he’d forgotten her and left?

Helplessness was part of the fantasy, according to the September issue of Raunch Magazine. The “sexperts” had been quite clear on that. They gave very specific instructions for fulfilling every woman’s wildest fantasies, instructions that left Cynthia hot and squirming and eager to create “her own personal erotic story, leading to an orgasmic orgy of legendary proportions.” She wasn’t greedy; she’d be happy with a single orgasm. So she’d lapped up the magazine pages with the same eagerness displayed by “Concubine Washing her Master’s Plinth.”

Fortunately, the magazine had helpfully categorized the fantasies into “Boudoir Beginners,” “Intimate Intermediates” and “Erotically Advanced.” Of course she’d read through the advanced pages, but frankly, even if she could afford all the equipment, she didn’t imagine ever wanting to play games such as “Whorehouse Dominatrix and Groveling Schoolboy” or anything that involved a cast of more than two.

Exposing her naked body in anything but utter darkness was intimidating enough, even in front of Walter, who didn’t see all that well without his glasses. No, Boudoir Beginners was plenty exciting enough. There wasn’t one scenario that didn’t speak to her in some way, but “Helpless Virgin Ravaged by a Dark Dangerous Stranger” was her favorite.

In the privacy of her own bedroom who was going to care if she was politically correct? She was free to imagine being imprisoned by an exotic stranger, a masked Zorro or a ruthless pirate. Whoever he was, this stranger was dark, tall, lean and muscular. She was his prisoner to do with what he pleased, and he was very imaginative.

It was an exciting fantasy. Not that Walter was a Dark Dangerous Stranger, not by a long shot, but then she wasn’t a virgin, either, although some of the stuff in Raunch made her feel like one.

She wasn’t a virgin, but she was definitely helpless. Bondage of a more pretend kind—by a loosely tied silk necktie for instance—was heavily frowned on by the sexperts at Raunch, who advised using real handcuffs. Since Cynthia was a person who always followed the rules, handcuffs now bound her.

So far, a kind of determined desperation had pushed her into actually following through with this crazy idea to become sexually exciting. But now that she’d bullied and begged Walter into acting out the fantasy, now that she was actually lying here staked out, naked and helpless, in a respectable suburban neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon, it wasn’t erotic excitement she felt.

It was embarrassment.

Who was she trying to kid? No wonder Walter had wandered off. She didn’t look a bit like the models in Raunch, with their breasts thrust upward like mountain peaks, their tiny waists, ever so slightly rounded hips and long Barbie-doll legs.

Cynthia’s breasts just sort of sat on her chest like lumps of unrisen bread dough with raisins on top, while the rest of her was far from voluptuous. Once she got out of these handcuffs she’d never ever suggest they depart from their standard quick couplings under the sheets in proper darkness.

She yelled a few more times, until her throat hurt and she heard an edge of hysteria in her tone. No use yelling herself hoarse; she’d have to calm down and wait. He’d remember her eventually.

Breathing slowly and deeply, Cynthia contemplated the ceiling. There was a shadowy streak in one corner that looked suspiciously like a cobweb. She’d have to take a broom to it as soon as she had a free hand. Which brought her back to her ridiculous predicament. She had no idea how long she’d been here, but her arms ached. She was cold, she was hungry and she had to go to the bathroom.

Where the hell was Walter?

She watched the time tick slowly by on the bedside clock while her anger mounted. Friday afternoon dimmed to Friday evening before true fear began to set in. She could starve to death, freeze to death or die of a bladder infection before Walter remembered her.

After seventeen eons, she heard the sound of gravel crunching outside. But her first thought—that Walter had remembered her and come back—was squelched when she heard the snuffle of a canine nose and the telltale hissing sound among the dahlias under her bedroom window. Thank God, it must be Mrs. Lawrence and Gruber, her overweight poodle, from next door.

Should Cynthia call out?

Embarrassment warred with physical discomfort, but it was a short battle. Her bladder won.

If she had to be rescued by someone off the street, at least it was a woman. “Mrs. Lawrence,” Cynthia yelled as loudly as she could, hoping her neighbor had her hearing aid turned up.

“What’s that? Who’s calling?” The wavery voice sounded uncertain.

Always excitable, Gruber started barking.

Cynthia yelled, “I need help. I’m tied up in the bedroom. Use the spare key, and please hurry.”

“Oh, my dear. Oh…it’s Cynthia. I hope it’s not a home invasion,” the wavery voice continued. Cynthia wished her sweet elderly neighbor would quit talking to her dog and get the key.

“Mrs. Lawrence? You remember where the key is? Under the third geranium pot?”

She heard the crunch of gravel and the muttering of her neighbor while she lay there hoping poor old Mrs. Lawrence wouldn’t have a heart attack when she saw Cynthia naked and in the most humiliating predicament of her life. At least her feet weren’t bound. Not that it made a lot of difference. If she brought her knees up to cover her breasts she’d expose the lower part of her body, and the added pressure on her bladder might turn her into a human water pistol.

So much for taking chances. So much for trying to be a sensuous woman. She might have known she’d fail.

Minutes dragged by, each one a painful battle for mastery between herself and her bladder. Cynthia thought she heard a scraping noise from outside, but couldn’t be sure. If she didn’t get to a bathroom soon she was going to have an accident.

After about three more stretches of eternity, she heard a tiny sound from inside the house. “Mrs. Lawrence, I’m in here, in the bedroom.”

But it wasn’t Mrs. Lawrence’s worried face she saw in the doorway a few quiet seconds later; it was a cold and deadly black revolver, in a large and very male hand.

Too frightened to scream, Cynthia stared at the terrifying thing. She pulled frantically against the handcuffs, but she was helpless—an occupational freebie if the guy with the gun was some kind of rapist pervert.

A dark shape leaped across the doorway. She had the impression of bulk and purpose, then the gun was pointing across her and into the room.

The man attached to the gun threw himself through the doorway, sailing like a missile, the gun held stiffly forward. Cold blue eyes, focused and deadly, swept over her and scanned the room.

It was the sight of those eyes that finally made her scream.

He hit the floor rolling and disappeared into the en suite bathroom.

She was going to be killed by a madman, and Walter had trussed her up like some twisted sacrificial offering. The chains of the handcuffs clanked against the mahogany bedposts over and over as she jerked frantically against her bonds.

In seconds the man was standing by her head, gun lowered slightly. He kept his eyes on the doorway. “To the best of your knowledge, are you alone in the house?” The hoarse whisper sounded as corny as a bad cop show.

A bubble of hysteria caught in her throat. Keeping her eyes on the gun, which was so far still pointing toward the door, she croaked, “I was.”

His hard glance flicked to her face, questioning, forcing her to clarify. “Until you showed up.”

He pulled something from his pocket and thrust it toward her face. She cowered, thinking of chloroform, or some instrument of horror, but the object in her face was an identification badge. “I don’t—”

“Jake Wheeler, FBI.” The curt words sent a new shiver of fear through her. He towered above her, black hair cropped short, his face so lean and chiseled it would surely splinter if the grim mouth ever smiled.

His eyes were a smoky blue and fringed with ridiculously thick, curling black eyelashes. They’d be gorgeous on a porcelain doll. On him, with the deadly expression in their depths, they were terrifying. He wore a black sweatshirt and jeans; she wondered absurdly whether they had casual Fridays at the FBI.

At her nod, he thrust the small black folder back in his pocket. “Do you know who did this to you?”

“Walter Plinkney. And I hope you find him,” she said bitterly. “The electric chair is too good for him.”

A flicker of doubt crossed the lean, hard face. “You know the perpetrator?”

She nodded stiffly. “My…” No way she was telling this frightening man that her own fiancé had wandered off in the middle of sex. “Ah, my date.”

He gazed more carefully down at her, as if her body was a crime scene and he was searching for evidence. “Did he hurt you in any way?”

Knowing he was just doing his job, she resisted the urge to squirm. “Only my pride.”

“He didn’t do anything you didn’t want him to?”

“Yes,” she wailed. “He left me here, before we even had sex.”

She thought he stifled a grin. His face softened for an instant, making him appear almost human. “But you were a willing participant?”

She had heard of a full-body blush, but never believed she’d experience one, until now. Even her toes felt like they were turning red enough to match the scarlet nail polish she’d applied to her toenails. “It was my idea. Do you think you could get me out of these things?” She indicated the cuffs with a jerk of her head.

“Where’s the key?” He glanced around the bedroom, neat and tidy as always. No key marred the gleaming bedroom furniture.

“Walter had it last.”

“Where is he now?”

Cynthia wouldn’t have thought it was possible to experience more humiliation than she already felt, until he asked that question. “He had to leave,” she mumbled.

“Maybe we could phone him?” He looked at her doubtfully. He was clearly wondering what on earth would prompt a man to chain a naked woman to a bed and then leave her there. It was a fair question; Cynthia was wondering about that herself.

“I really can’t wait much longer. I have to use the bathroom.”

Bending over, he fingered the handcuffs. “Are they regulation?”

“I don’t know, they came from a sex shop!”

“Probably not regulation, then. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Would you hurry? Please?”

Some of her agony must have got through to him. He sped out of the room and returned a couple of minutes later with a pair of shears she recognized from the workshop. Her poor father would roll over in his grave if he knew how they were being used.

The man fitted the blades to the chain of one handcuff. “Hold very still,” he ordered.

She did.

She watched the bulge of his biceps, the set of his jaw and his reddening face. Heard the grunt of effort and then the blessed sound she’d been waiting for. Snap. He walked around the bed and started on the second cuff.

Belatedly, Cynthia wondered what had happened to her neighbor. The last thing she needed now was the arrival on the scene of one of her mother’s oldest friends. “Where’s Mrs. Lawrence?”

“She went next door to call 9-1-1.”

With a little cry of horror, Cynthia stared at the icy blue marbles he had instead of eyes.

Muttering a curse, he shoved the cutting tool under his arm, reached into a pocket and hauled out a cell phone. Even as he pushed a button, she heard the siren, and seconds later saw the sweeping pattern of red light play across her bedroom ceiling.

The glance Agent Wheeler gave her could have contained pity, except she didn’t think he kept any in stock. He ignored the commotion outside long enough to snap the second chain.

Too desperate even to stop and thank him, she wrapped herself in the bedcover and shuffled to the en suite bathroom, almost tripping in her haste.

She emerged a few minutes later in her oversize white terry robe with the belt knotted tightly around her waist. She crept to the window and peeked out. The FBI man was there, talking with a local police officer in uniform. Both leaned against a squad car, as casual as could be. She heard male laughter and then, with a slap on the back, Agent Wheeler sent the uniformed officer on his way and headed back up her front path.

She grabbed panties out of her drawer and hauled them on under the fluffy robe. The handcuffs were still around her wrists, the severed chains hanging down a few inches. She pulled the terry-towel sleeves over them and took a deep breath.

She hazarded a glance in the mirror above her dressing table and wondered again just what the hell she’d thought she was doing acting out a torrid sexual fantasy. She was boring and dull Cynthia Baxter—an accountant, for God’s sake.

She sighed, pulling a brush through her nondescript midlength, midcolor hair. Hours earlier, it had looked pretty good in big soft curls courtesy of her hot rollers. But all that thrashing against the pillows had turned her sexy do into a cross between Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust.

“Why did you do it?” she wailed to her own reflection as she dragged the brush through another snarl. But she knew. She was staging an adolescent rebellion fifteen years too late.

She was exactly what her parents had wanted her to be—except for her unmarried state. “You’ll be left on the shelf, dear, if you leave it much longer,” her mother used to predict. It had made her feel like stale peanut butter. As if Cynthia could magically make men find a mousy, old-fashioned girl attractive.

Surprisingly enough, Walter did. Or maybe it was a case of one stale-dated jar of peanut butter gravitating to another. He wasn’t much to look at, but he was male, and single, and a doctor. Her mother was delighted, and Cynthia hoped she might at last experience some of the physical pleasures she’d read about at night in secret.

Sex with Walter was like a Pap test, only not as much fun.

She wondered if his being a gynecologist was the problem: he got the two mixed up.

They’d been engaged for six years. It salved her conscience, and her mother’s. Not that she’d ever spent an entire night at Walter’s, of course, but the unexplained hours didn’t have to be explained.

Cynthia hadn’t imagined how lonely she’d feel when her mother died. Or that within the year this jumpy kind of panic would set in, as though her youth was slipping through her fingers. She’d imagined her life in bright colors, not this uniform gray. There had to be something wild and unpredictable she could do. She decided to start in the bedroom. In private.

Nowhere in her fantasy had she imagined having to be rescued by an FBI agent.

She hadn’t been this mortified since sixth grade, when Daniel Prewitt asked her, in front of the whole class, if she wanted a stiffy, and she’d thought he’d asked her if she wanted a Slurpee and said yes.

Face it. You were born to be a boring accountant married to Dr. Dull. Her career as a femme fatale was definitely over.

Her makeup looked garish in the mirror, and she remembered in horror that she’d rouged her nipples like the magazine suggested. She hoped to heaven FBI Agent Wheeler hadn’t noticed.

She remembered the way that cold, hard gaze had just flicked over her without any hint of emotion. Her naked body hadn’t kindled the fires of lust in him any more than it had in Walter.

She could have spray painted the Stars and Stripes across her chest and it wouldn’t have raised his flagpole.

Being found handcuffed naked to a bed by a strange man was bad enough. To be in that predicament and leave him unmoved… No, wait a minute. She remembered the flicker of humor that had flashed in his eyes when he found out it wasn’t a criminal act but a sex thing. He hadn’t been unmoved at all. He’d been amused.

Her naked body struck him as funny.

She wanted to die.

But first she had to get rid of the FBI.

He was sitting in the living room. Her living room. Completely at odds with the antique furniture and her mother’s collection of Hummel figurines.

“Sit down,” he commanded. There was no sign of the gun, but just knowing he had it on him somewhere gave her a fluttery feeling in her stomach.

She sat.

Polite as always, she remembered to thank him. “Thank you for–” She cleared her throat. “Releasing me.”

He gazed at her for a long moment. “What’s going on?” he finally asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Could this day get any worse?

“I don’t have time to play games. Whose house is this?”

“Mine.”

He snorted. “Look, honey, I sent the cops home. You’re a hooker who makes house calls. Fine with me. I’m not the vice squad. I just want to clarify the situation before I escort you out the door.”

Her mouth dropped open and the first ray of sunlight brightened the worst day of her life.

“You think I’m a prostitute?” He believed men would pay to have sex with her?

He sent her the kind of look she imagined an FBI guy would give a hooker. She might even have played along with the idea except for the part where he was planning to lock her out of her own house. “I’m not—”

“Save it. Where’s the john?”

“Down the hall to your left,” she answered primly.

He chuckled. “You’re good, you know that? If I hadn’t given up the wild stuff…” His gaze wandered her body lazily, and she had her second pleasant shock of the day. Back when he used to be wild, he might have paid to have sex with her. “Where’s the guy?”

Belatedly she realized he had used the term “john” as in paying customer, not bathroom. “He was called away. To deliver a baby, I imagine.”

“What?”

“Walter’s an OB-GYN. I’m assuming he had to attend a birth. This really is my house.”

He shot her a skeptical glance. “And you can prove this?”

“The lady next door knew my voice.”

“She’s half-deaf. She heard a woman’s voice. You’ll have to do better than that.”

With a sigh, Cynthia said, “I’ll get my driver’s license.”

She strode to the bedroom to get her purse, and he dogged her footsteps. “Do you mind?” she asked in annoyance.

“Don’t want you hijacking the family silver.”

With an irritated huff, she grabbed her black leather purse and fished out her driver’s license. “There.”

He glanced down at it. “This isn’t you.”

“Of course it is.”

He took the plastic folder from her hands and looked more carefully—at her, then at the photograph on her license. “You should get that picture updated,” he said.

The photo was less than a year old. It was the Raunch version of her that was different. And once you took Walter Plinkney’s admittedly disappointing reaction out of the equation, she quite liked the Raunch version. It made a dangerous, gun-toting FBI agent talk about sex and her in the same breath.

At that moment she vowed to keep some part of her Raunch look. Not the rouged nipples, probably, but, well, part of it.

“Hold out your hands.”

“This is my house. Stop ordering me around.” She stuck her hands behind her back. Once she got the remnants of the handcuffs removed, no man was going to touch her hands for a very long time.

He plucked a pair of keys out of his pocket and dangled them in front of her. “I found them in the candy dish.”

With a relieved sigh, she gave him her hands.

Swiftly, he unlocked first one cuff, then the other. While he worked, he asked, “If you’re not a hooker, what do you do? For a job, I mean,” he amended hastily.

Well, it was nice while it lasted, she thought. “I’m an accountant.” She watched him from under her lashes, waiting for his eyes to glaze over in boredom.

Instead, she got a curious reaction. He blinked slowly and stared at her, hard. “You’re putting me on.”

“I’m serious. No one lies about being in accounting.”

“An accountant. That’s fantastic!”

No one, but no one, got excited about accounting except for one reason. Her mind fogged over with depression. “Don’t tell me, you have a thorny tax problem you’d like me to solve?”

“No, not at all. Let’s sit down. Why don’t you tell me about yourself.”

“You can’t be serious.” She pulled the terry robe tighter around herself, and was reminded she had nothing on underneath but mint-green cotton panties.

“I guess I should have introduced myself properly.” He shot her a killer grin, one that completely transformed him from scary law enforcer to incredibly attractive man. “I’m Jake Wheeler. I just moved into the neighborhood.”

“Cynthia Baxter.” She shook his hand automatically, while cold dread filled her. “Did you say you were a neighbor?” He’d seen her naked; now he was going to say “hi” over the fence? She’d bump into him on garbage day and at the Fourth of July neighborhood barbecue.

She felt like she needed to stick her head between her legs to stop from fainting with horror.