The Merciless Travis Wilde. Sandra Marton

shiny black behemoth of a truck and a battered red van.

      She pulled between them, opened her door, checked the faded white lines, saw that she hadn’t managed to center her car, shut the door, backed up carefully, shifted, pulled forward, checked again, backed up, checked one last time, saw she’d finally parked properly and shut off the engine.

      Tick, tick, tick it said, and finally went silent.

      Too silent.

      She could hear her heart thudding.

       Stop it!

      Quickly, she opened her consignment-shop Dior purse, rummaged inside it, found her compact and flipped it open.

      She’d spent twenty minutes this afternoon at Neiman Marcus, nervously wandering around among the endless cosmetic counters before she’d finally chosen one mostly because the clerk behind it looked a shade less unapproachable than the others.

      “How may I help you, miss?” she’d said. “Foundation? Blusher? Eyebrows? Eyes? Lips? Hair? Skin?”

      Translation: Sweetie, you need work!

      But her smile had been pleasant and Jennie had taken a deep breath and said, “Do you do makeovers?”

      Almost an hour later, the clerk—she was, she’d said, a cosmetician—put a big mirror in her hands and said, “Take a look.”

      Jennie had looked.

      Nobody she knew looked back.

      Who was this person with the long, loose blond waves framing her face? When had her pale lashes become curly and dark? And that pouting pink mouth, those cheekbones …

      Cheekbones?

      “Wow,” she’d said softly.

      The cosmetician had grinned.

      “Wow, indeed. Your guy is gonna melt when he sees you tonight.”

      “No. I mean, that’s just the point. I don’t have—”

      “So,” the cosmetician had chirped, “what do we want to purchase?”

      “Purchase?” Jennie had said, staring at the lineup of vials, bottles and tubes, the sprays, salves and brushes, even an instruction sheet about how to replicate the magic transformation. Her gaze had flown to the woman. “I can’t possibly …” She’d swallowed hard, pointed to a tube of thirty-dollar mascara and said, “I’ll take that.”

      Nobody was happy. Not the cosmetics wizard. Not Jennie, whose last mascara purchase had cost her six bucks at the supermarket.

      Had all that time and money been worth it?

      It was time to find out.

      Even in the badly lit parking lot, her mirror assured her that she looked different.

      It also assured her that she was wearing a mask.

      Well, a disguise. Which was good.

      It made her feel as if she was what she’d been trained to be, a researcher. An observer. An academic who would spend the next hours in a different kind of academia than she was accustomed to.

      Jennie snapped the compact shut and put it back in her purse.

      Which was why she was parked outside this place with the blinking neon sign.

      Upscale? No. The lot was full of pickup trucks. She knew by now that pickup trucks were Texas the same way four-wheel drives were New England, but most of these were old. There were motorcycles, too.

      Weren’t motorcycles supposed to be sexy?

      And there were lots of lighted beer signs in the window.

      Downscale? Well, as compared to what? True, something about the place didn’t seem appealing.

      It’s a bar, the dry voice inside her muttered. What are you, a scout for Better Homes and Gardens?

      Still, was this a good choice? She’d worked up logical criteria.

      A: Choose a place that drew singles. She knew what happened in singles bars. Well, she’d heard what happened, anyway—that they were where people went for uninhibited fun, drinking, dancing … and other things.

      B: Do what she was going to do before summer changed to autumn.

      C: Actually, it had not occurred to her there might be a part C. But there was.

      Do Not Prevaricate.

      And she was prevaricating.

      She put away her compact. Opened the door. Stepped from the car. Shut the door. Locked it. Opened her purse. Put her keys inside. Closed the purse. Hung the thin strap over the shoulder of her equally thin-strapped emerald-green silk dress, bought from the same consignment shop as the purse, the Neiman Marcus tag still inside.

      Assuming you could call something that stopped at midthigh a dress.

      She knew it was.

      Girls on campus wore dresses this length.

      You’re not a girl on campus, Jennie. And even when you were, back in New Hampshire, you never wore anything that looked like this.

      And maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be doing this tonight. She wouldn’t have to be looking for answers to questions that needed answers, questions she was running out of time to ask …

      “Stop,” she whispered.

      It was time to get moving.

      She took a breath, then started walking toward the entrance to the bar, stumbling a little in the sky-high heels she’d also bought at the consignment shop.

      She was properly turned out, from head to toe, to lure the kind of man she wanted into her bed. Somebody tall. Broad-shouldered. A long, lean, buff body. Dark hair, dark eyes, a gorgeous face because if you were going to lose your virginity to a stranger, if this was going to be your One and Only sexual experience, Jennie thought as she put her hand on the door to the bar and pushed it open, if this was going to be It, you wanted the man to be …

      Was that music?

      It was loud. Very loud. What was it? She had no idea. Telling Tchaikovsky from Mozart was one thing. Telling rock from rock was another.

      She caught her bottom lip between her teeth.

      Maybe she was making a mistake.

      Yes, the place was far from the university. She wouldn’t see anyone she knew, but what about the rest? Was it a singles

      bar? Or was it—what did people call them? A tavern? A neighborhood place where people came to drink?

      Such a dark street. Such an unprepossessing building. That neon sign, even the asphalt because now that she’d seen it, close-up, she could see that it was cracked …

       That’s enough!

      She’d talked herself out of a dozen other possibilities. She was not talking herself out of this one.

      Chin up, back straight—okay, one last hand smoothing her hair, one last tug at her dress and she really should have chosen one that covered her thighs …

      Jennie reached for the door, yanked it open …

      And stepped into a sensory explosion.

      The music pulsed off the walls, vibrated through the floor.

      The smell was awful. Yeasty, kind of like rising bread dough but not as pleasant, and under it, the smell of things frying in grease.

      And the noise! People shouting over the music. What sounded like hundreds of them. Not really; there weren’t hundreds of people at the long bar, at the handful of tables, but there were lots of them … And they were mostly male.

      Some were wearing leather.

      Maybe