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to sod what anyone else thought and wear what I wanted, but I’d pointed out that a muffin top wasn’t something I wanted to advertise. I didn’t care that most other women I knew had them, I just… God, I just wished I didn’t have one.
    I glanced down at myself. Naked, I didn’t look too bad. Maybe if I bought clothes that fitted properly I wouldn’t have a problem. And there was that TV programme, wasn’t there? The one where those two women told the viewer which clothes suited which body. Yes, that was it. I’d buy some new clothes—as well as the ones needed for tonight—and see if they stopped me from feeling like such a blob.
    I diverted my thoughts back to the ones that demanded my immediate attention. We needed to check out the streets around the hotel, see if we could find somewhere suitable. Somewhere quiet and dark and seedy.
    Out of the shower, I wrapped a towel around my body and secured it beneath my armpits. I left the bathroom dressed the same way Jacob had, but with an extra towel twisted around my hair.
    He turned from the window to look at me, jeans moulded to his legs, a casual light blue shirt yet to be buttoned giving me an exciting glimpse of his bare chest and a tuft of armpit hair where the fabric flapped open. Had he been staring through the glass, remembering our encounter? Had it got him thinking of the same thing as me—acting it out tonight?
    “You all right, love?” he asked, voice back to its usual steady tone.
    “Yes. You?” Sudden shyness washed over me. A nugget of anger vibrated in my belly at that. I wasn’t going to allow myself to go back to how I was. Not now. Not when I had something so bad on the agenda. I straightened my shoulders and tugged the towel from my hair. Stared right at him, a woman with a sexy mission in mind. I’d take control, make things happen. Show him we still had it. “We need to go out. I have to buy a few things.”
    “Things?” He walked over to me and weaved his fingers in my damp, tangled hair.
    But I wanted him to jam them there, to fist my hair and yank my head back, pull until it hurt. The thought grew, took shape, showing images in my head that I perhaps should have been ashamed of.
    “Am I weird?” I asked. “Weird and wrong to want…what I said I wanted?”
    He smiled again, cocked his head, and stroked through my hair.
    Yank it, damn it!
    “If you’re weird, then I’m weird.”
    His shrug said it all. There was nothing to worry about. So long as we were both happy with it, then what was the harm?
    “Good.” I reached up to take his wrist, bringing his hand down so he cupped my cheek. The startling vision of him slapping it shocked me. Did I want to go that far? Have the fantasy so real? “Then you won’t mind acting out what I told you earlier, will you.” Statement. Asking it as a question gave him the option to refuse.
    He widened his eyes, unable to hide his surprise quickly enough.
    So he hadn’t been thinking the same as me when he’d stared out of the window, then.
    After clearing his throat, he said, “For real?” He glanced around the room. “It’s hardly big enough in here to act it out, love, but we’ll give it a go.”
    I laughed, a throaty sound that hadn’t belonged to me in years. “Not in here, Jacob. Fuck, no. I want you to ‘rape’ me outside. Down an alley.”

    * * * *

    I wobbled a little in the black stiletto heels, and the cold air on my bare legs wasn’t something I’d bargained for. Stares from passers-by as I did my best to strut seductively down the darkened street weren’t something I’d banked on either. It had been too long since someone other than Jacob had looked at me in that way. Too long since I’d worn a short black skirt that left nothing to the imagination and a cute red top that did the same. I’d applied makeup, too, taken more care than just the usual blast of the dryer to style my hair, and a sense of being me , myself, of being ‘a woman’ had given me a more