Wet

By Lauren Hawkeye

All I wanted was to escape my stifling grad school dorm room and soak away my stress in the nearby hot springs. Then I meet Susan and Adam, a slick city couple who intrigue from the moment I spot them at reception. And from my first encounter with Susan in the pool, it's clear I've caught their eye, too.

But once they offer me up to a complete stranger and take us back to their suite, I realize I've been made a pawn in their own sexual game. A game in which I don't know the rules and I have no idea what might come next...

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781460822388

Lauren Hawkeye

Lauren Hawkeye is a writer, yoga newbie, knitting aficionado and animal lover who lives in the shadows of the great Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada. She's older than she looks–really–and younger than she feels–most of the time–and she loves to explore the journeys that take women through life in her stories. Hawkeye's stories include erotic historical, steamy paranormal, and hot contemporary.

Book preview

Wet

Lauren Hawkeye

Contents

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Today is hot. Swelteringly hot, with the burning kind of air that makes me think of thick, sweet honey, gooey and good, trickling slowly from my fingers into my mouth. I’ve grown uncomfortable in this heat, but I can do nothing more about it here than I’ve already done. The window to my bedroom is propped open with one of my furry winter boots, and a rickety old electric fan that I picked up at a garage sale for a song blows lukewarm air at my face from where it sits, stuck to the tacky varnish on the glossy mahogany table that serves as my desk.

I’ve been struggling in the heat for a week now, attempting to work on a thirty page paper, the topic of which is Ernest Becker and his theory of terror management. But the heat has warped my mind, and my thoughts are chugging along slowly, like a stream of molasses out of its little cardboard carton.

I saw an advertisement on the wall yesterday, in the psychology building at the university. It offered, in bright colors on glossy paper, a student rate at a hot spring spa an hour and a half west of here. I don’t really have the money, but the heat is getting to me, and the idea of a break is so luscious, after almost twelve months straight of intensive university courses, that I can’t get the idea out of my mind. So as I sit at that little table in my dorm room, of which the quality and size have been improved only slightly now that I am in graduate school, I decide to just go for it. The breeze from the fan as it rustles my many papers is as listless as my energy level.

It’s not like I’m getting a lot done here, at any rate.

I pack a bag and, after a moment’s hesitation, leave my school books as they are, stacked high on the table. With a final look around at the sticky, stifling room—the beige room that represents my entire life at this point—I swing my knapsack over my shoulder and leave, shutting the creaky door firmly behind me.

The very act feels as if a mass of clinging, wet wool has been lifted from my body, and I breathe with greater ease as, after stowing my small bag in the trunk, I slide into the driver’s seat of the ’92 Ford Contour that I recently acquired from my older brother. It groans a little as I turn the key in the ignition, and it reminds me a bit of how I feel right now, as if it takes a massive amount of energy to just get started on my journey.

I need this break, I rationalize to myself. I need it so that I don’t go crazy. Lord knows I’ve been through enough lately, what with the extra courses that I’ve been taking on top of my already full course load, my honors mentoring program, and of course, that nasty little episode with the head of the department, the one in which I ratted him out for feeling me up, which, needless to say, he wasn’t really thrilled about. The memory of it all eases my guilt over the money and time that are about to be spent, and I’m feeling better already as I edge out