Drop Dead Sexy

PROLOGUE

Call me kinky, but I've always wanted a man to tie me up. Of course, in my fantasy the guy would have looked less like an extra from Deliverance and a hell of a lot more like Chris Hemsworth. I also would be bound by silk scarves, not the itchy rope that was wound extremely tight around my wrists and ankles. Most of all, I wouldn't be on a floor that was covered in sawdust and God knows what else. Instead, I would either be in the comfort of my own bedroom or in a five-star hotel suite. And most important of all, I would have given my consent to be tied-up, not been taken against my will by Bubba or Cletus or whatever the hell his mountain man/redneck name was. He hadn't been big on introductions before he shoved a sawed off shotgun in my face, which was just another aspect that so wasn't part of my fantasy.

Sadly, it's been my experience that nothing in my life resembles my fantasies, and more often than not, they're something out my nightmares instead. If you had to put my love life into a genre, it would probably be horror. In the same token, I'm not even sure that the master of scary shit, Stephen King, could adequately express it on paper.

Since I had some time on my hands, I couldn't help pondering how things had gone so far off the rails. A month ago, everything in my life made sense. To most people, I'm sure it looked boring as hell, if not strangely odd. After all, I was an unmarried, thirty-year-old mortician who ran the most successful family owned funeral home in the North Georgia Mountains. I also had the extreme pride of being the first female coroner for my county, not to mention the youngest.

Regardless of my professional accomplishments, I wore a figurative "S" scarlet letter for being single. A spinster. That fact was a fate worse than death to my mother. At least once a day, she would peer curiously at me and shake her head of perfectly coiffed brown hair. "I don't understand how a beautiful girl like you can still be single?"

I could put forth a vast array of arguments such as the fact we lived in a small, Southern town where we were related to a vast number of the citizens. I could have argued that there was nothing wrong with me, but instead, the fault lay with the pool of unmarried men I had access to. Well, you know, the ones I wasn't related to—although that hadn't stopped a second cousin from propositioning me once, but that's another story. I could have further argued that men never seemed to warm to the fact I worked with dead people.

Really, it all boiled down to the fact I was just completely and totally unlucky when it came to love.

They say when you're about to die that your life flashes before your eyes. In my case, it was my love life...or lack thereof. Instead of being bound and gagged in the ramshackle shack, my mind whisked me away to my teenage bedroom where I was tangled in the sheets and the long legs of my high school boyfriend, Jesse. It had taken six months of courtship to get to this moment of pre-coital bliss. At seventeen, I was more than ready to give my virginity to the guy I loved.

With my parents away for the afternoon, we had the house all to ourselves. That is if you didn't consider Mr. Greyman who was in the freezer in the basement waiting to be embalmed when my dad got back home.

Jesse tore away from our intense lip-lock. "Ready?" he panted.

"Yes," I murmured somewhat apprehensively. Since I binge read my mom's historical romances, I knew the first time was going to hurt, and I might even bleed when Jesse put his "pulsing manhood" in me.

After ripping open the condom wrapper enthusiastically with his teeth, he slid on the flimsy looking piece of rubber. He covered my body with his before bringing his lips to mine. Jesse spent a few more minutes kissing my breasts and stroking me between my legs. When it appeared he had demeaned me ready for penetration, I felt the head of his penis butting against the entrance of my vagina. Or if I was talking historical romance lingo, his smooth shaft against the opening of my Venus mound.