The Emerald Scarf

At fifty-two, Linda Thorne has everything that is supposed to make a woman happy. The big house in the suburbs. The country club membership. The charity boards, the tailored clothes, the husband who has not really looked at her in a decade. She is admired, envied, and completely invisible, a woman who keeps herself sharp and toned and beautifully maintained for an audience that stopped paying attention years ago.

Then, on an ordinary afternoon, she slips a silk scarf into her bag and walks toward the doors of a department store without paying for it. She does not need it. She can afford a hundred of them. She just wants, for one reckless second, to feel something. To find out if she is still there at all.

She is caught before she reaches the exit.

The two African American security guards who take her back to their windowless office are younger than she is by twenty years and more, fit, watchful, and entirely within their rights to call the police. One word from them and the careful life she has built collapses. The country club, the social standing, the comfortable lie she lives inside, all of it gone in an instant. Linda knows it. They know it. And in that small, locked room, with the surveillance monitors glowing and the rest of the world shut firmly outside, she stops playing the frightened socialite and makes a different kind of offer.

What follows is the most alive she has felt in longer than she can remember.

For one stolen hour behind a bolted door, Linda is not a wife, a socialite, or a thief. She is simply a woman, wanted with an intensity she had forgotten existed, the sole focus of two men who see every part of her and refuse to look away. There is no performance left in her, no careful mask, no thought for who she is supposed to be. There is only the heat of the moment and the dizzying realization that she is the one in control, that she walked into that office a victim and is choosing, with her eyes wide open, to walk a very different path out of it.

She came in desperate to feel noticed. She leaves carrying a secret that is hers and hers alone, a vivid private memory worth more than anything she could ever have slipped into her bag.

Linda Thorne spent years being looked through. Tonight she gets looked at, and she intends to remember every second of it.

A standalone, full-length steamy romance for adult readers. Contains explicit content for 18 years and over.