The beer was the first step: peeking inside the door to her past when for so long, she’d kept it bolted shut. She wanted to throw that door open now, rip it off its hinges, and burn it to cinders, like a smoke signal that would call to LJ to tell him it was okay to come back.

Andra let herself out of his apartment and started the long journey up to her cottage. Why the hell had she built it so far from the rest of the ranch, anyway? It was so deathly quiet up there. She used to want to be left alone, but now . . . she wasn’t so sure anymore.

She mounted her porch steps and opened the door. Pausing for a second, she studied the clean white surface. If she were to paint an X across it, and her own numbers, would it help? The date she’d escaped. One man. Nineteen hours. Zero bodies. That zero should count for something. At the least, it was kinder than what LJ had been through.

Andra walked into her empty house with the couch on one side, the kitchen on the other.

Sex.

It was the root of all the problems in her life. But how could she work on getting more comfortable with it when he was all the way down in Louisiana? There was absolutely no way she was going to download one of those hookup apps and let some stranger put his hands all over her. Of course, at least with a stranger, she wouldn’t care if she disappointed him.

Andra’s eyes narrowed. Maybe there was something she could do without getting anyone else involved. She crossed the room to her couch and grabbed her laptop off a side table. When she opened it, it glowed to life on a page of equine nutritional supplements. She called up a new tab and typed “sex toys” into the search bar. Her eyebrows shot up at the images that appeared. “Wow, okay,” she mumbled, and tried a different search term.

She’d never owned a sex toy herself—she hadn’t missed sex after Gavin, and she hadn’t had a lot of experience before him. It wasn’t until she met LJ that she even remembered what it felt like to get that little tingle, that warmth that tugged and asked for more. There were a lot of things she never thought she’d want until she met him.

The new site loaded with a whole page full of pictures of dildos. She clicked on one and stared. There it was: the one thing that had ruined her life for the last five years. From the first moment her body had been violated, her personality had started twisting itself into knots she had no idea how to unravel.