Too often in her marriage, she’d opened them in the dead of night to Todd’s hand around her throat, his penis being forced in her mouth. Three years of therapy hadn’t been able to dull the terror or the potent grip of those memories. But sleeping with the light on kept them at bay. In short, her bedside lamp was her best friend. The flashlight her backup buddy.

Della smiled, thinking about it as another kind of BOB.

She entered the living room and made a beeline straight for the television area. A flash of lightning chose that moment to illuminate everything inside the room, including the shape on the futon, the gauzy curtains at the windows no barrier to the intense white light.

Della pulled up short. She didn’t know where she’d expected Tucker to sleep—one of the recliners, maybe, or maybe she hadn’t expected he’d sleep at all—but not all stretched out on the futon, big and brawny. The room was plunged quickly back into black again, and it took her pupils a few seconds to adjust, but when they did, she was still looking at Tucker.

The throw blanket was all twisted up in his denim-clad legs, his arms were up above his head, and his chest was distractingly naked. Broad and smooth, hardly any hair apart from around his nipples. His belly was solid. Not ridged and puckered like the guys on Winona’s covers, but one giant block of muscle, and a trail of hair traveling south from his belly button cut off from full view by the low-rise waistband of his jeans.

Della’s breath actually stopped in her throat. Damn. He looked good—so good—and for long, crazy moments she let herself fantasize that she could overcome her demons and have a normal life that involved love and marriage and a family. That this could be her life. That Tucker could be hers and she could come home at night after working an afternoon shift and find him sleeping. That she could crawl in beside him, slide her hand across his chest, drop a kiss on his mouth.

Her sex clenched just thinking about that kind of freedom, and the urge to cross to him, to sit on the futon and reach out her hand and touch him, was almost overwhelming. But who was she kidding? She couldn’t have this. Her normal was haunted by hands coming out of the dark, and she wouldn’t wish that on any man, especially not Tucker.

Stop it, Della. It wasn’t a possibility, and all that she was doing right now was ogling a sleeping man. Get your batteries and get the hell back to your room.