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Preview from chapter one
Before the Collar
A Collared Prequel
Elena knew something was wrong with her before she turned the key in the front door.
It had been building all day — a low, coiled restlessness under her skin that no amount of meetings or coffee or brisk competence could burn off. She'd snapped at a junior associate over a misplaced deck and spent the rest of the afternoon hating herself for it. She'd read the same client email four times without absorbing a word. And underneath everything, threading through the whole long day like a secret, there had been heat — a slow, stupid, inexplicable ache between her thighs that made her shift in her chair and cross her legs and uncross them again, furious at her own body for misbehaving.
She was twenty-eight years old, a marketing executive, a married woman of almost three years, and she felt like a teenager who didn't understand what her body wanted.
The drive home through Houston hadn't helped. Late-autumn dusk, the streets slick from an earlier rain, the air warm and heavy through her cracked window. She'd caught herself at a red light with her thighs pressed tight together, her breath shallow, thinking about nothing at all and everything at once — about Damion's hands, about the way his voice went low when he wanted her, about dreams she'd been having for weeks that dissolved the moment she tried to hold them, leaving only the ache.
Their house was dark except for the lamps when she pulled in — the quiet two-story they'd bought in their second year, the oak out front black against the evening sky. She sat in the car a moment longer, hands on the wheel, and tried to will the restlessness away. It didn't go. It never went, not lately — for weeks it had followed her into meetings, into the shower, into her sleep, humming under everything like a second heartbeat, and she was starting to fear this nameless hunger was simply going to be part of her now.
Inside, the house smelled like garlic and butter and warmth. Damion was in the kitchen, sleeves rolled to his elbows, doing something at the stove. He looked up when she came in, and his eyes did their slow inventory — her face, her shoulders, the white-knuckled grip on her bag — and something in his expression shifted, the way it always did. In three years of marriage, Damion had never once failed to read her. It was, as she'd told Sofia more than once, simultaneously the most reassuring and the most infuriating thing about him.