Jan Week 3: Spa Day with Samantha...Leah doesn't kiss the attendant.

Then, with a boyish boldness as he tried to find her lips—a chaste, tender kiss to cap the depravity of what they were doing--Leah stopped him.

Her hand—gentle, almost maternal—cupped his jaw and pushed him back just enough to enforce the boundary without killing the warmth.

“Let’s keep it professional,” Leah said, her voice a honeyed purr. She offered the world’s most disarming smile, then wiggled her left hand until her engagement ring caught the spa’s soft light and flashed in Ethan’s face.

The diamond was modest, practical, not the sort you’d expect on the finger of a woman who’d just let a stranger shove his cock inside of her. But the symbolism wasn’t lost on either of them: she was promised, claimed, and this—whatever it was—could only ever be a borrowed pleasure.

For a moment, Ethan looked like he’d been slapped. Then he grinned, eyes crinkling with relief.

“Right. Of course.” He nodded, retreating his head a respectful distance. “Didn’t mean to cross a line.”

Leah’s heart thudded with a confusing mix of pride and shame. He was balls deep inside of her--but kissing felt like a violation of something deeper. It was so classically female, compartmentalizing sex and love, drawing the line not at penetration or orgasm or even swallowing, but at the intimacy of lips and breath and eyes. The real sin was in the symbol, not the act.

She told herself it was about Jonathan, about leaving some scrap of her soul unsullied for him, but the truth was more complicated. Leah wore two faces now: the fiancée, who went to yoga and planned rehearsal dinners and made polite conversation with her mother-in-law-to-be; and the other Leah, who got off on the transactional filth of being someone’s dirty little secret. One was worthy of love, the other worthy only of being used. Both were hungry, both at war.

"Maybe I better show Ughg...you a different...technique." He said smoothly, realizing that missionary was entirely too intimate for their heated tryst.