Unguarded: An Erotic Later-in-Life Romance
Cheryl Stroud has taught art most of her adult life. Almost no one knows she once had a studio in Wicker Park, painted until three in the morning, and walked into rooms like she belonged to the night.
She kept the winged eyeliner. She let the rest go.
Now sixty-four and divorced - the last man who kissed her goodnight did it politely, in a parking lot - Cheryl has built a good, careful life. Until the college hires acclaimed muralist Reid Lawson and assigns her to be his liaison.
He's forty, intense, impossible to ignore, and talks about art the way she once did - as if it can save you. Looking at him, Cheryl feels something she hasn't felt in decades.
Recognition.
Reid built the artistic life she walked away from.
And they've met before. More than twenty years ago, he sat in her high school classroom. She looked at one of his drawings and told him he had a real eye. No one had ever said that to him before.
He never forgot her.
A donor meeting takes them to Chicago - the city where Cheryl buried her old life. On the seventh floor of a hotel, she stands outside Reid's room with her pulse in her throat and her hands unsteady.
She is sixty-four. She hasn't been wanted like this in thirty years. She's terrified.
And she wants him so badly she can barely knock.
She doesn't have to.
The door opens first.
Whatever Cheryl locked away thirty years ago comes off its hinges. What happens inside that room is not careful, not quiet, and not something she intends to take back.
But the moment that changes her life comes the next morning, when Reid asks what she used to paint - and waits for the real answer.
Within a month, there's a canvas in her living room.
Within three, there's something on it she can't look at without shaking.
She was careful for thirty years.
She's done being careful.
Unguarded is a spicy, full-hearted romance about a woman past sixty reclaiming her art, her appetite, and the fearless woman she thought she'd left behind. Open door. Explicit. No fade to black.
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