“What the freaking hell,” Emily muttered aloud as her foot gave the bucket of filthy water a solid kick. “Doesn’t anyone around here work except me?”

As the bucket’s icky contents sloshed and spilled over the sides, she was tempted to start screaming. Eyeing the new mess, she shook off the realization that now there was one more damn thing to do before she could call it a night.

“Trapped by my own fucking stupidity.”

It took most of the next half hour to clean up and finally, finally, shut everything down for the night. Another mind-numbingly bland, boring day in a string of thousands just like it stretching back almost five years was blessedly coming to an end.

Activating the security system, she straddled the front door of The Happy Bunny daycare center and swept the lobby with her eyes, making sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Even after the door was firmly locked and the system armed, she peered through the glass searching for the slightest indication that something was off.

Her job may suck from lack of challenge or excitement but that didn’t give her license to be negligent. The center’s owner, an old-school gentleman named Mr. Livingston, counted on Emily to manage the center’s day-to-day activities so the professionals on staff could tend exclusively to the kids.

So she did, and successfully too. The result of a firm hand and long hours.

Gathering the long handled satchel at her feet, it was hurriedly slung around her neck while she just as hurriedly began making for the bus stop. Some might shudder at the idea of using public transportation but she sure as shit didn’t. In her mind it was laughably simple. Get behind the wheel of a moving vehicle after an exhausting day and battle not only the traffic but the inevitable end-of-day decompress simultaneously and for her thinking, dangerously—or, use the time traveling by bus and train to relax, unwind, and let someone else handle the driving.

One short walk, a somewhat longer bus ride, and a restless wait on a train platform later, she was seated on a slippery bench, mindlessly staring at the advertisements stretching the length of the train car as the city sped by.

Minutes passed. She waited for her station knowing she had a little bit of a ride and emptied her mind.

Emily shifted on the seat, making sure to keep a firm grip on her bag. Someone coughed. A kid laughed. Lights flickered past outside the windows. All of it had a Groundhog Day quality that made her teeth grind.

She blinked and a light flickered in her mind’s eye. Swinging her gaze upward her eyes caught a surprising advertisement she couldn’t remember seeing before. It seemed to her that it vibrated even though she knew it was just cardboard.

Large, red, pulsing letters formed the words Are You Having Sex?

Life was mocking her, right?

Her gaze swept left to right, casually checking out her fellow travelers. Nobody but her seemed to be noticing the provocative ad.

She looked closer at the suggestive text and saw the logo of a condom brand she had never seen before. Modern Savage.

She gulped and shivered in the same moment. What. The. Hell.

Next thing she knew, her sensible work pants felt like a type of prison that covered her skin when what she wanted, what she needed, was to be exposed to the evening air. A fierce desire to let her hair down and stand naked under a moonlit sky filled her up.

The idea was actually funny. She coughed back a laugh and shook her head. Her. Sensible, dependable, stern task-master Emily, having some out-of-body Aphrodite moment out in the open.

As if!

A familiar rhythm in the rocking of the moving train car got her attention. She leaned back and peered out the window behind her head. Just around the next bend they’d be at her stop. Patting the bag nestled against her side, Emily did a fast check of her situation before standing up to grip a metal pole by the car’s exit.

A reflex made her glance back at the pulsing advertisement a second before it was her turn to make for the exit.

Something thudded, her heart maybe, and her throat felt tight. The words were gone. No pulsing red sex. No Modern Savage.

She stumbled getting down the steps and barely avoided face-planting from the adrenaline rush that chased her across the wood train station platform.

It was a brisk couple of long city blocks to her house, giving her enough time to tick off a string of possible explanations for what just happened.

Maybe a brain aneurism? That would cause a public hallucination, right?

Or perhaps a dream. Had she drifted off during the train ride? Dreamed the whole thing? Sure would explain a lot.

It was the darker side of dusk when she saw her home come into view. No matter how shitty a day Emily had she always liked this moment when the familiar twin half-way down a long narrow street, appeared like a beacon offering the way to comfort at the end of a drudge-filled day.

She loved the old house with its quaint charm that came courtesy of her grandmother Laurel. When the family matriarch passed away three years ago and the house was left to Emily and her older sister, Linda’s snappy rebuke of the loving gesture gave Emily one more reason to dislike her only sibling.

Declaring the modest, traditional three-bedroom home on a lot measured in square feet and not acres to be tacky, she’d played hardball and demanded a pay-off for her portion of the property.

Stuck up bitch.

Luckily, Emily was the sister raised to be practical as well as pragmatic. Since she held her first summer job at the age of fifteen until right this very second, she’d resolutely banked a specific amount each week in her savings account. Even if it meant having a yard sale and getting rid of a bunch of extra stuff to make the self-imposed goal, she did whatever it took. So when Linda made their grandmother’s inheritance about money, she was amply prepared to slap her down by writing a check for her sister’s half of the house.

Ha! She owned the little charmer now, and barely ever spoke to Linda. Married to a super-sized asshole with two bratty kids from a first marriage, these days her only sibling was busy playing suburban housewife in a rambling five bedroom McMansion about an hour north of Philadelphia. Despite the pleas of family unity by their parents, they exchanged birthday and Christmas cards and that was about it.

Snagging the dark blue recycling bin at the end of the walkway, she dragged it to the rear of the house and stowed it inside the gate just as her neighbor from the house next door came strolling from his backyard.

“Hey, Bob,” she called out. “I saw that Jack made second base on the baseball team. Way to go, Dad!”

Her laugh was genuine. She liked her neighbors across the way. Bob and his partner Larry were what she liked to call ‘property enhancers’, because simply by the presence of a couple of gay guys the cachet of the neighborhood rose. Call it a cliché if you have to, but it’s true. There was nothing like two creatively flamboyant gays to bring everyone’s A game when it came to curb appeal. She was pretty damn sure they catalog ordered every piece of seasonal solar crap they could find.

Bob barrel laughed as he latched his gate. “Holy crap, Emily. You’d think he got picked for the Phillies farm team by the fuss. It’s just middle school.”

“Well yeah,” she agreed with a smirk. “But baseball is like God’s gift to American kids no matter where they are.” Laughing as they walked to the end of the path leading to the sidewalk, she thought of something funny and added it with a heavy dose of mockery. “And who was it who coached Little League just so a disinterested Jack would sign up and play? Hmm? I pretty much think you’ve been dreaming about this fuss for years. Don’t lie,” she teased. “You know you have.”

“Guilty,” the busted but proud dad drawled. “Larry can drag him to the Barnes or make him sit through a thousand art museum lectures all he wants. As long as Jack makes the team, he can pretty much do any damn thing he wants.”

“Men,” she muttered playfully with a well-meaning eye roll. Scooting toward her walkway she waved him off and trudged along to the three concrete steps leading to her half of the twin home’s front porch. A package left by FedEx sat on the rattan chair closest to the screen door.

Flinging open the screen door, she eyed the package as the metal door smacked against her hip. Her key in the lock, she was just finished opening the inside door when a noise caught her attention. Turning her whole body toward the sound, she was chirping, “Hi Mrs. Ash. What’s …” when a complete stranger stepped from the front door of the other half of the twin home, startling her into silence.

But only for a split second. Recovering with speed she barked, “Who are you? Where is Sylvia?” An abundance of affection for her older neighbor triggered the instant defensive reaction.

The man didn’t immediately react to her strident demand, which only made her hackles rise more. Pulling the knob of the other twin’s wood door until it closed completely, he took his good old time in such a blatantly dismissive way that she bet when he finally turned around she’d be looking into the face of an arrogant bastard.

Slapping on her sternest expression, she went full resting-bitch-face with an added hand at the waist and cocked hip.

Slowly pivoting, he shut the screen door and finally looked at her. In that moment she had the distinct impression that all of the oxygen in her vicinity vanished. It was the only way to explain the fuzziness in her head when he looked her up and down.

“Good evening. Miss Sinclair, am I correct?”

Emily pushed pause and then rewound the moment in her head. The way he spoke, with the faintest hint of snobbish scorn delivered with uncompromising arrogance struck her like a match scraped across a rough surface. The flashpoint at ignition detonated a stealth explosion that rocked her world.

Conspicuously aware of her underwear being flooded with warmth, she held back a shiver. Who was this man and how had he managed to cower her with seven words and make her wet at the same time?

Her hand slid off her hip and she shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. For the second time in an hour, she struggled with the strangling effect her pants seemed to be having. Self-consciously, she reached a hand to fiddle with a tiny dangling earring as he continued to rake her with his eyes.

Startled by her reaction, she cleared her throat and made an effort to inject some strength to her spine.

“How do you know my name?” she barked a bit too harshly.

There were white wooden fence rails separating her side of the porch from the other occupant of the twin home, running from the house’s stone exterior to the stone column supporting the overhang. Maybe five or six feet wide, the low partition and the tall stone on either side made Emily feel boxed in. When he stepped closer to the railing and arched a perfect eyebrow at her, a shiver started at the crown of her skull and traveled at light speed into the soles of her feet.

“Are you always this rude when you meet a man, or is it just me?”

“What?” His pompous question brought her back from wherever the hell she’d been with astonishing swiftness. Rude? She wasn’t being rude. She was a woman living alone who found a strange man leaving her neighbor’s home. She was suspicious and if he read it as rude, well that was his damn problem.

Emily busted balls for a living. These days, it was the only way to run a small business if success was the objective. Sure, most of the people she supervised were women, but that hadn’t stopped her from adopting a no-nonsense, practical approach to whatever came at her during the workday. Snapping to attention and pursing her lips was simply a natural response. So was being a bitch.

Crossing her arms defensively, the hip cock she’d perfected fell into place, and she went into smack down mode. Whoever this guy was, he needed to know from the outset exactly who he was dealing with.

“I’m sorry,” she bit out. Returning his contemptuous scorn, she eyed him dispassionately. “Are you under the impression I’m an idiot? I find a strange man on my porch, leaving a house he doesn’t live in, who knows my name. If my reaction seems rude, then you sir, have a problem.”

Without stopping to think through what she was doing, Emily reached into her pocket and took out her phone. A faint whisper in the far back of her mind urged caution, but she silenced it with a determined huff. He wouldn’t be the first person she’d threatened to call the police on.

“Tell me who the fuck you are and why you’re leaving Mrs. Ash’s place or I’m calling the cops.”

The look he gave her was uncomfortable. She held her ground though and refused to back down. When his head shook slightly with disapproval, she swallowed hard and felt her heart rate increase. How the hell did he do that?

In a voice that commanded and spooked at the same time, he shocked her in a way she’d never experienced before.

“A mouth as tantalizing as yours should never use vulgar language.”

Her face froze with her mouth open and eyes wide in a stupefied expression that said, ‘What the fuck?’

And then he put out his hand. It sort of hung there, stretching across the railing, as she stared at it.

“Miss Sinclair,” he drawled. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Adam Jeffries and Sylvia, Mrs. Ash, is my aunt.”

Jeffries. Yeah. She knew that name. Sylvia’s sister was named Jeffries.

“Where is Sylvia?”

He didn’t move. Like, not even an inch. He merely stood his ground with his hand extended in her direction.

“This would be where you shake my hand and say something polite about how nice it is to meet me.”

Just like that, her hand shot out awkwardly. It looked to her as though she was learning to use her limbs for the first time. When her hand slotted perfectly into his, she had the distinct impression of being claimed. In her mind’s eye, Emily was shocked to find an alternate scenario showing her on her knees with Adam Jeffries stroking her hair.

What the goddamn hell was going on?

Once she’d handed him control, he drew her closer by two steps and covered the top of her hand with his palm. Heat built until she wondered if her hand would melt. Staring at their joined hands, she felt her breathing become labored.

“I believe in this instance, the pleasure is all mine.”

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Could barely react. Up close in the waning light of sunset, she was transfixed by the sheer perfection of his face.

He was older than her but not by much. Maybe late thirties. He had a structured hairstyle with a distinctive square face and a strong jaw that gave him a masculine and very authoritative look.

Eyes the color of blue midnight returned her stare. She sensed he would find it less than difficult to read her most secret thoughts.

Uh oh.

Laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes when he smiled slightly while squeezing her hand. The realization that he could so effortlessly see inside her shook Emily up.

Slowly releasing her hand, he stepped back and chuckled. “Are you always this tongue-tied? I’m really starting to think it’s me.”

Nothing like being called out for behaving like a twit. She swiped her tongue at both corners of her lips just to be sure she wasn’t actually drooling.

If she didn’t say something intelligent soon, he was going to think her daft. “Hi,” she croaked. Barley managing to suppress an eye roll at how stupid she sounded, she took two steps away from the railing into what she perceived was a safe zone on her side of the porch.

His knowing smirk did nothing to calm her rattled composure.

Maybe she should try to wrestle back a bit of control over this odd situation. Pushing hair behind one of her ears, she smashed her lips together, cleared her throat and took a stab starting with making it clear that a handsome face wasn’t enough to let him off the hook.

“You’re Eileen Jeffries’ son?”

“Indeed I am,” he chuckled. “Sylvia has gone to stay with my mom for a bit. She’s had a bit of surgery and needs help right now.”

“Help a son couldn’t provide?”

Her clumsy contrived attempt at a third degree didn’t go unnoticed.

Shoving a hand into the pocket of his immaculately tailored slacks, he leaned against the stone column and shook his head in mock-disbelief.

“You’re not very trusting are you?”

Yeah, whatever. She stared right back at him.

He shrugged. “Female surgery, Miss Sinclair. Something a sister would navigate better than a whole room full of clueless males.”

Who was he kidding? “You do not strike me as clueless, Mr. Jeffries.”

Why the hell were they speaking so formally? It was rattling her cage in a big way. Everything about this guy screamed different.

“And you, Miss Sinclair, strike me as someone who wants to know where the boundaries are. In everything,” he added in a silky growl.

Her neck bloomed goosebumps that spread across her shoulders. His voice sent chills racing through her.

“Some would say situational awareness is better than boundaries.” What was she doing? Verbally sparring with this man did not strike her as a smart idea. She didn’t doubt for a second that he’d win every round. For someone who saw control as a virtue, the thought was a disturbing one.