Tiffany’s hips moved with a rhythm she didn’t know she possessed, a primal piston motion that ground her down onto the hard, thick length of him. Her fingers were tangled in the coarse hair of his chest, nails biting into suntanned skin as she rode him, the world narrowing to the desperate, beautiful friction building deep inside her.

“God, look at you,” Marcus groaned, his artist’s hands gripping her hips, his thumbs pressing into the soft flesh of her belly. “A perfect fucking vision. A goddess claiming her due.”

She opened her eyes, her head falling back to take in the vast, indifferent blue of the sky. Free. The thought was a lightning strike. For months, her world had been a muted, grey box of condolence casseroles and hushed voices. A year of being the tragic young widow, the demure, delicate thing everyone handled with kid gloves. But here, sprawled in the wild, perfumed chaos of Marcus’s cliffside garden, with the salt-kissed air on her skin and a near-stranger buried inside her, the box shattered.