It had been two years, eight months and twenty-three days since Ella Lucas had last done the horizontal rumba. And even then it hadn’t been very good.

With the powerful Harley throbbing between her legs, she was acutely aware of every asexual minute. The machine pulsed against her, taunting barren places, reminding Ella of her depressingly sexless existence. Was it possible to orgasm on the seat of a Harley?

Alone?

She revved the engine. Lock up your husbands, Huntley, Rachel’s daughter is back in town.

Her red lips twisted in a bitter smile. Nearly two decades since she’d been in her hometown and it was still driving her nuts. Seventeen years she’d spent in this speck on the map trying to do the right thing, trying to be her mother’s opposite, playing the good girl. Until she’d cracked under the pressure of it all and just walked away. And still they tarred her with the same brush. It had taken them all of forty-eight hours to make her feel like that powerless and frustrated teenager again.

So today she was determined to give them what they’d always wanted. Proof. Real proof.

Something sound to gossip about once she’d hightailed it out of this one-horse town. Something to truly damn her. Something for them all to nod sagely over and say, see, we were right, the apple never falls too far from the tree.

And she intended having a damn fine time doing so too.

Ella thundered into Huntley’s main street. Remnants of some teenage sixth sense alerted her to the twitching of curtains as she flashed by. No doubt their owners were staring open-mouthed, their disapproving frowns mirroring their judgmental minds.

The sun beat down, heavy on her shoulders, and the black tar of the main street shimmered in her wake. It could have been any of a hundred main streets in outback Australia — wide, with a strip of central parking down the middle. Evenly spaced Pepperina trees cast much needed shade over the sweltering vehicles.

A monument to the fallen from the Great War took pride of place in the centre of the street. Her great-grandfather’s name was engraved on the white marble. Her mother, who had never known her grandfather, had taken particular pride in that. Ella had been chosen to lay the wreath there the Anzac Day she was in seventh grade and her great-grandfather’s name had jumped out at her as she’d placed the circle of red poppies at the base.

How she had envied Grandpa Lucas his fleeting freedom from mediocrity that day.

Four pubs dominated the corners of the main intersection, their corrugated roofs and wide verandas complete with fancy wrought-iron lacework unchanged in over a century. The bank, the chemist, the beige austerity of S.J. Levy’s law practice, the drapers and the Huntley café — with the same blue-and-white striped awning from her childhood — stood exactly as they always had.

It was like entering a time warp. Not even the advent of two-dollar shops had infected the Huntley streetscape.

People stopped dead on the footpath as she passed, their heads turning to track the path of the noisy motorcycle. Business owners stared askance through their shop windows, craning their necks to see if a marauding biker gang had moved into town.

Ella ignored them all. She was on a mission. She was a successful career woman who had long ago cast off the shackles of Huntley.

Her blood thrummed through her veins as she parked the bike and dismounted, her reckless mood ratcheting even further. The townsfolk still hadn’t moved as Ella took off her helmet and hung the sleek black dome on the handle bars. She shook out her untethered hair. It fell in careless disorder around her shoulders, just like in a shampoo commercial, and she smiled to herself.

She’d always wanted to do that.

Sadly, biker moll was as far removed from her ponytailed school ma’am persona as was possible — she was as nerdy today as she’d always been.

But Huntley didn’t know that.

She heard the scandalised whispers of two familiar old biddies, who were drinking lemonade on the rickety wooden church pew that had sat outside The Crown for as long as anyone could remember.

Ella wondered if the good citizens of Huntley had ever stopped to ponder the irony of religion and sin so intertwined.

The town was so quiet she could have heard a bee flap its wings in the next state. Good. She had their attention.

The rasp of her denim clad thighs was the only sound as she turned resolutely toward her target, squared her shoulders and strode past the women on the pew.

“Afternoon, Miss Simmons, Miss Aberfoyle,” she said, not bothering to wait for an acknowledgment.

She pushed the pub door open and for a second wished it was one of those swinging doors she’d seen in a hundred Wild West movies. She’d ridden into town for a showdown, hadn’t she?

It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust from the bright spring day to the dim interior of Huntley’s oldest liquor establishment. The patrons inside the pub stopped mid- conversation to stare at Ella. The only sound was Smokie crooning about living next door to Alice from the jukebox in the corner.

Ella didn’t bother to look around. She knew he was in town and exactly where he’d be. She’d seen him at the funeral yesterday, standing in the distance under the lilac canopy of a blooming Jacaranda. Like his father before him, Jake Prince was behind the bar.

She approached, coming to a halt beside Mrs. Coleman, Huntley’s librarian, decked out in her twin set and pearls and perched primly on a stool sipping a lemon, lime and bitters.

“Jake.”

Jake regarded Ella Lucas for a moment. She’d changed.

Matured. He guessed twenty years would do that to you. God knew these days he felt ancient.

He’d seen her quiet dignity at the funeral yesterday in the face of Huntley’s glaring hypocrisy and admired the hell out of her for it. The townsfolk had been there in full force, their ghoulish delight at Rachel’s demise barely disguised. She had weathered it all with a mellow poise that had called every faux mourner to account.

But time, it seemed, hadn’t erased her troubled blue gaze. Or the way it still clawed at his gut in some form of primal recognition. How often in the years they’d all but silently co- existed had he related to her torment? Understood the caged misery of her gaze?

Her eyes were still telling him the same old story. She wanted out.

Oh, Lady, you’re preaching to the choir.

He picked up a hot glass from the rack and casually dried it off. “Ella.”

A beat or two passed. Neither of them said anything and everyone in the pub inched slightly closer. “I’m so sorry about your mother’s passing.”

Ella nodded, swallowing a sudden lump in her throat. He’d be about the only one who was — she wasn’t entirely sure she was sorry herself.

The harshness of the concession almost sucked her breath away.  

What kind of a daughter was she? What kind of human being?

Disgust with herself intensified her grief, strengthening her purpose. “You still the bad boy around here, Jake?”

She was proud of the way it came out. Her voice was steady. Clear.

“No way, ma’am,” he drawled, channelling his best country yokel. “Model citizen these days.”

So not what Ella wanted to hear. Her stomach fluttered as her bravado wavered, her gaze flicking to Mrs. Coleman. How the hell was she going to pull this off in front of the elegant octogenarian who had taught her how to use the Dewey Decimal System?

Her plan had seemed so simple when she’d come up with it back in her mother’s house, with its memories and a hostile teenage brother goading her. She took a deep, fortifying breath, determined to show them all.

“Your dad still keep rooms in this establishment?”

Jake stopped his ministration with the glasses to look at her carefully. What the fuck? She was in jeans and a cute little gingham shirt that didn’t even show any cleavage but there was a directness in her gaze that left him in no doubt what she wanted.

Desire slammed into his groin and he gripped the glass a little harder. “Sure.”

“What do you say? Wanna give everyone round here some- thing real to talk about?”

Ella ignored the gasp from a rapt Mrs. Coleman as her heartbeat thundered through her head. She felt thirteen years old again, as awkward beneath his scrutiny now as she’d been the night he’d picked her to slow dance with him at the only school disco she’d ever attended.

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His rugged face (still screaming bad boy despite his protestations) was completely impassive. Why didn’t he say something?

Jake regarded her for a few more seconds, the desperation in her gaze compelling. He glanced around at his patrons, all waiting with bated breath on his next move. He knew not a single one of them understood the demons that drove her.

But he did.

He put the tea towel down and reached behind him to remove a key from the board. “Mind the bar, Kel,” he said to the peroxide blond staring at them.

The irritating noise of the barmaid’s gum chewing was suddenly silenced and Jake knew that Huntley was judging him.

Them.

But when hadn’t they?

He turned back to Ella. “Ladies first.” He gestured.

Ella’s legs were shaking as she passed the gobsmacked spectators, ducking through the archway near the jukebox and turning left to head up the stairs. She could feel Jake’s gaze on her ass and Huntley’s reaction vaporized into nothingness. Instead she wished she’d used the thigh-buster Rosie had bought her last year for body sculpting instead of alternative art for her office.

He overtook her at the top of the stairs, stalking down the corridor to room seven. Inserting the key into the lock, he pushed the door open and strode inside, turning to face her.

“What’s this about, Ella?”

Ella kicked the door shut after her and launched herself at the wall of his chest. She heard the intake of his breath at her

impact and ignored it. The man was a star footballer — had been for years — he could certainly hold his own with a girl.

“Ella.”

She raised herself on her tippy toes, awkwardly mashing her lips into his, stopping his protest. Her hands dragged his neck down, her fingers moving to the back of his head, delighting in the charcoal spikiness of his buzz cut.

Jake wrestled her hands from his neck and pulled his mouth away with difficulty – mostly because he didn’t want to. Hell, Ella Lucas had certainly graduated with honours in the kissing stakes. She’d come a long way since the sweet innocence of the brief shy press of lips she’d granted him at the end of that particularly memorable dance at the Huntley High disco.

There was nothing sweet about Ella Lucas’s kiss now. It was hot and hungry. Intense. Greedy. He could taste her desperation and a yearning that struck him straight in the solar plexus.

He held her at arm’s length, the sound of his breathing falling harshly between them. “Ella, don’t let them get to you. You were always too classy for this town.”

She growled in frustration, struggling against his hands, straining to get closer. “Damn it, Jake. I’m not a kid. I know what I want.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I bloody do.” She pushed against his bonds. “I’m thirty-four, Jake. I’ve been making up my mind for a lot of years.”

“This isn’t about you and me, and you know it.”

“I want to have sex with you, Jake. Since when did you give a shit about a woman’s motivation?”

Good point. But Ella was different. He didn’t know why. She just was. She always had been. The only girl in his fifteen miserable years in this town that had barely looked at him.

And he wasn’t foolish enough to believe this was about sex either. It was about hate and frustration and grief. Her muscles flexed and strained against his hands and her caged lust surged towards him on a waft of pheromones that almost brought him to his knees. But someone had to be mature here.

It was a shock to realize it was going to have to be him.

“It’s okay. No one has to know it didn’t happen,” he said in his best placatory voice. “We’ll just hang here for a bit then go on down.”

Ella blinked. She could see he was determined to be honourable Jake and couldn’t believe he’d choose to develop a conscience on the one day she needed him to be the screw-anything-that-moved Jake of tabloid fame.

She gritted her teeth. “I don’t want to hang.” His gentle restraint on her arms was way more exciting than it should have been and she was over his whole protesting-too-much bit. Time to step it up. “I want you to fuck me. Quick and hard. And when you’re done with that, I want it long and slow.”

Jake swallowed. Her crude request had a predictable effect. Little Ella Lucas — science geek, math nerd, teacher’s pet — who had barely said boo to him all those years they’d weathered Huntley’s gossip, could speak dirty with the best of them.

“What’s the matter?” she taunted. “Is your injury more extensive than first thought? Can you not perform?”

Ella had heard talk yesterday that Jake was back in Huntley resting up his “groin”. For a man whose groin (according to the tabloids) seemed to rest very little, it must be a frustrating experience.

She could help him with that.

He shot her a sardonic half smile. “I can perform just fine.”

Ella smiled back. “Excellent.”

“You’ll hate yourself for it later,” he sighed.

Ella stopped struggling. Of course she would — she didn’t do casual sex. But this was bigger than her.

“Jake Prince, in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve buried my mother, inherited a teenage brother I never knew existed and discovered that the entire town thinks I ran off with the school principal at the age of seventeen. If I’m going to be damned for my loose ways then you better believe I want to at least reap the benefits.”

Jake, feeling the resistance in her muscles ebb, let her go warily, relieved when she stood placidly, making no attempt to move closer. He’d been long gone when the scandal had rocked Huntley but he’d heard the rumours over the years on his brief sojourns home. “You’re angry.”

“No, Jake — I’m furious.”

He shrugged. “I guess you have a right to be.”

“You guess?” Ella felt her anger surge inside her again, swelling to tsunami-like proportions. “They knew me, Jake. This town. They knew me better than that.”

Ella took a step toward him, feeling a very unreasonable urge to pummel her fists against the solid wall of his chest. What did he know about how difficult it had been for her? Jake, who’d been given a get-out-of-jail-free card by a big city football club.

Kick a pointy ball around a piece of grass and the world was your oyster; work your butt off at school and people accused you of sleeping with the principal.

She lifted her hands and then clenched them, shocked that she’d almost followed the violent impulse. They came to rest against his shirt and she bunched the fabric tight, rage still simmering beneath her skin. His top button was at her eye level and suddenly her frustration found a more constructive outlet.

She fingered the plastic disk. Jake placed a hand against hers and she batted it away. “I was a valedictorian,” she muttered.

A red mist lashed her insides and fogged her vision, making dexterity impossible. All her pent-up hostility was now concentrated on a little piece of plastic.

“I won the academic medal for five years straight,” she growled, feeling like a two-year-old who hadn’t yet learnt the art of undressing. Her badly shaking fingers fumbled with the button. It finally popped and she made a triumphant noise in the back of her throat.

“I tutored kids for free,” she told the next button, having as much trouble as the first.

“Ella.” He placed his hand on hers again.

She shook it off and took a deep, steadying, breath, the mist lifting a little. “I volunteered at the old folks’ home.” The button popped. “I sponsored a child in Africa.” Another disk fell victim to her steadier fingers. “I still do.”

She eyed him squarely. “I was a girl guide.”

Jake looked on, bemused, as she struggled with his buttons and her emotions. He knew better than anyone how hard it was to grow up in a place that ostracized you for the sins of a parent. How unfair it was. How crazy it could make you.

And he was trying really hard to do the right thing but Ella’s mood was heady with seething sexuality. Her anger and frustration, and no doubt her grief, had morphed into a raw, sexual cocktail.  

She needed to burn off some heat.

And he was her explosive of choice.

After years of avoiding his gaze she was looking right at him. The last button gave way and she pushed the shirt off his shoulders. She pressed her nose to his sternum and inhaled. It seemed like such an innocent thing to do in the middle of her seduction and it took him back a lot of years.

To the high school dance.

To how he’d lain awake later that night running his tongue over his lips, savouring the taste of her.

“It doesn’t matter what they think,” he said, his resolve to do the right thing weakening by the second.

Ella knew he was right. Jesus! She had three university degrees in right. She wasn’t here for his Dr. Phil advice. She was here for the sex.

And from what she heard Jake had more than a few degrees in that.

His chest was smooth and she touched it tentatively, the beat of his heart pulsing against her hand. He had a tattoo of some kind of demonic superhero, the Phantom meets Wolverine, on his left pec and she traced it with her fingers.

“It matters to me.”

“Ella,” he murmured. “It won’t help.”

“Wanna bet?” She put her mouth where her fingers had been and licked the length of the tattoo as she reached for the button of his jeans.

“Whoa there.” He shifted, covering her hand with his, holding her away from him. “This isn’t...right.”

Ella almost screamed in frustration as she dropped her hand from his waistband. She’d come here for one thing and she was damned if she was leaving without it. “We’re two consenting adults, Jake. This has right written all over it.”

“I think doing this the day after you buried your mother is maybe not the wisest way to cope.”

Ella stared at him. Since when had he become so damn smart? “Why don’t you let me decide what’s the healthiest way to cope with my grief?”

Jake was running out of reasons why he shouldn’t just throw caution to the wind like she obviously had. He wasn’t even certain why he was putting up such a fight. “I don’t have any condoms.”

She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a strip of five, her gaze never leaving his. They concertinaed down like a pack of magic cards. She threw them at him and they bounced off his chest and fell to the floor. “That should do us.”

Jake looked down at the little foil packets of temptation. Five? He swallowed as his gaze returned to hers. “Kel’s off shift in an hour.”

“Then why are you wasting time pretending you don’t want to do this?”

His gaze flicked briefly to the condoms again and he shut his eyes against their lure.

She gave a frustrated growl low in her throat at his continued reticence. “You know, Jake, this wasn’t how I pictured it.”

Jake laughed. “How’d you picture it?”

She glared at him, the husky tug of her breath loud between them. Then suddenly she grasped the knot at her navel where the edges of her checked shirt had been tied firmly together and undid it. In one quick movement she yanked at the tails, ripping the shirt open.

Buttons flew in all directions and pinged on the wooden floor boards as she stripped it right off, flinging it to the ground at his feet beside the condoms.

“You weren’t talking, for a start.”

Jake’s laughter died on his lips. A gentleman may not have looked but there wasn’t one person in Huntley who would ever have accused Jake of being a gentleman.

So he looked.

In fact, he barely stopped himself from licking his lips.

He’d seen a bra like that hanging on the Lucas clothes line when he’d been fifteen. Red lace. D cup. He’d known it was Ella’s — Rachel was a classic A cup and had never been big on underwear anyway.

He felt all his good intentions slowly melt away and he swallowed. There was a point at which resistance became futile.  And God help him, he’d reached that point.

In fact, suddenly, he was way beyond it. “I can do mute.”

It was Ella’s turn to laugh. She had him and she knew it. She reached behind and unclipped the bra, throwing it on the ground too.

“I can do deaf and blind also.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she demanded as she tugged on the waistband of his jeans and dragged him forward.