“Paxton …” Sebastian finally said in between her kisses. “Think this through. Is this really a good idea?”

She opened her eyes and slowly leaned back. They were both breathing heavily. His color was high, and it made him even more beautiful, that rose-red flush along his cheeks. His hands were tight on her buttocks.

What was she doing? He’d told her to let it go, but she was sure he hadn’t meant this way. And yet he was going to let her. Oh, God. How pitiful could she get?

She pulled away quickly, and found the towel and wrapped it around her again.

He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. He stayed that way, bowed over, clasping his hands in front of him, his breath still quick from their encounter. He was staring at the floor, seeming to collect his thoughts.

He finally stood. “I think I should go,” he said.

She tried to smile as she nodded that she understood.

Without another word, he left.

She wanted to move out but didn’t want to disappoint her parents. She wanted help with everything she had to do but was too proud to ask. The Blue Ridge Madam project was supposed to cement their family’s reputation, but there was a skeleton casting a pall over the project now. The Women’s Society Club’s seventy-fifth anniversary gala was supposed to be the crowning achievement of her presidency, but it was being threatened with a last-minute change of venue. And she’d wanted so badly for Sebastian to be something he wasn’t, that just now, in a matter of minutes, she may very well have ruined the best thing that had ever happened to her.

How could someone with a life this full feel this empty?

She went to the liquor cabinet and took out the vile bottle of whiskey and poured a glass. With a deep breath and a grimace, she forced it down.

Trying to stay awake after a very long day, Willa let the humid night air blow on her as she drove home from Rachel’s party. She hadn’t intended to go to Rachel’s regular Friday-night cookout. In fact, she usually said no. Friday night was vacuuming night. Sometimes jogging night, if she felt like it or had eaten one too many cookies at the store. Wild and crazy stuff. But the sight of that skull at the Blue Ridge Madam earlier that day made her want to be around people that night. Colin had taken her back to her store after the discovery of the skeleton, and then he’d rushed back to the Madam with an apology. She hadn’t heard from him since.

She’d left the store with Rachel and had gone straight to Rachel’s house. That had been seven hours ago. She’d stayed too late. Too late for her, anyway. The cookout party was still going strong when she’d left. Rachel wasn’t your typical twenty-two-year-old, except when she got around other twenty-two-year-olds, and that was when Willa realized how much difference eight years can make in a life. She didn’t exactly miss being that age—she’d been a college dropout and drank too much and partied too hard—but she did miss that sense of living in the moment, of living only to feel.

After she’d said her goodbyes, she’d headed back down the long road leading into Walls of Water. Rachel and her boyfriend rented a tiny farmhouse near the county line. A few miles into her drive, she passed a convenience store called Gas Me Up, a place frequented by college students in the summer because it sold cheap beer and didn’t always ask for ID. The parking lot had a few cars in it and, as Willa yawned, she assumed her eyes were playing tricks on her when she thought she recognized one of them.

No, surely not.

She slowed down to make sure.

Yes, that was definitely Paxton Osgood’s white BMW roadster.

And that was definitely Paxton coming out of the store.

What on earth was she doing there? She didn’t think Paxton knew what this side of midnight looked like, much less this side of town.

Willa had slowed down so much that the car behind her honked. She pulled over to the side of the road, and the car zoomed past.

That’s when she saw their old classmate Robbie Roberts come out of the store behind Paxton.

He’d grown up to be handsome in a fading kind of way. He was cocky and could be charming when he wanted to be. But he got drunk too often, worked only long enough to collect unemployment, and was reputedly thrown out of the house by his wife on a weekly basis.

Robbie was trouble, but he was soft trouble. A lover, not a fighter.

But his two friends, the men hanging around outside the store, were definitely hard trouble.

Of all the things Willa thought she knew about Paxton Osgood, she’d been most certain that Paxton could handle herself in any situation. Paxton didn’t need anyone to protect her. She had an air about her that made people pay attention. She had a way of speaking that made people listen. And it didn’t hurt that in heels, she was probably six feet tall. She wasn’t a person someone would take on lightly or easily.

But as Willa watched what was happening, she realized that Paxton was, probably for the first time in her life, completely out of her element. It was nearly one in the morning at an all-night convenience store on a side of town that didn’t often see the likes of her, in her red sundress and strappy heels with bright red roses on them. She was standing outside of the doors now, stopped there by the men, her arms heavy with bags that looked like they contained bottles of wine and potato chips. Cheap wine and chips? Not her usual fare. Her hair, normally in a chignon as tight as a baby’s fist, was only half up. The other half was falling around her pretty, wide face. She seemed strangely unfocused and uneasy on her feet.

She was drunk.

Willa would have thought it was funny, would have enjoyed watching the drunken spectacle of someone who had made a lifetime commitment to perfection, whose simple existence made all the women around her feel less somehow, fall flat on her face … if it weren’t for the men surrounding her.

There was a strange but universal understanding among women. On some level, all women knew, they all understood, the fear of being outnumbered, of being helpless. It throbbed in their chests when they thought about the times they left stores and were followed. The knocks on their car windows as they were sitting alone at red lights, and strangers asking for rides. Having too much to drink and losing their ability to be forceful enough to just say no. Smiling at strange men coming on to them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, not wanting to make a scene. All women remembered these things, even if they had never happened to them personally. It was a part of their collective unconscious.

Willa couldn’t just sit there on the side of the road and not help. She had to do something. What, she wasn’t quite sure. But she jerked her Jeep in gear anyway, and crossed the road to the convenience store’s parking lot, thinking that nothing about this day had been normal, nothing had been boring.

And she would never, ever admit, not even to herself, that she kind of liked it.

She stopped in front of the group, the Jeep’s high beams on. She saw Paxton jerk her arm away from one of the men trying to touch her, then walk forward, only to be blocked by the other man.

Willa reached into her bag for her pepper spray and opened the door.

“Hi, Paxton,” she said. Her heart was racing, and she could feel the adrenaline surge. “What are you doing here?”

The men turned to her. Paxton’s head jerked up, and Willa saw it, her fear, primal. She was the weak animal surrounded by predators. Help me.

“Look, a mini one. We got enough for a real party now,” the man holding Paxton’s arm said. He had abuse written all over him. It had happened to him. He had delivered it. It was so much a part of his psyche that he couldn’t look at another person and not imagine what they would look like with bruises. Willa felt it, the way he looked at her neck and the thin skin along her cheekbones.