I would
like to thank my publisher for taking a chance on a first-time writer and my editor for her tireless dedication and, more importantly, for shining a light in those dark corners I ignored. I would also like to thank my readers. A book without an audience is a stack of aging paper. Please visit my website,
http://www.sadierabbit.com
, and send me a message.
Nothing would make me happier than hearing from you.

Chapter
I: Hearing Whispers

It started with a mysterious posting on Craigslist. Olivia Hampton was scanning the site for used camera equipment. Bored, she poked around somewhere new: the classified lis
tings for “men seeking women.”

The first ad was innocent enough:
Businessman looks for date with businesswoman on Friday!
It sounded sincere:

“M
y name’s Edward, and I’ve got two tickets to Wicked on Friday. My first date fell through, and I’d hate to go alone. Your pic gets mine. Dinner, drinks and the show will be on me! P.S. they’re good seats in the orchestra: $125 each, face value! I’d prefer a businesswoman in a skirt and heels as I’ll dress to impress!”

I’d love to see the responses to that,
Olivia thought.
He might actually get a few.

The next post wasn’t as wholesome:
Muscle Man seeks wildcat in the sack.

The title alone made Olivia self-conscious. She
listened for the maids, then glanced out the window to see if her neighbor, nosy Mr. Vincent, was about.
Good thing she checked!
Her breath caught in her throat when she clicked the link. Muscle Man had posted a photo of himself from the waist down. He was nude, but he’d covered the important parts with his left hand. Perhaps intentionally, he hadn’t covered everything, though: Olivia could make out the base of his penis where it emerged from a cropped mass of pubic hair.

Her face flushed. She realized
it was only the second penis she’d seen apart from her husband’s! And if she was honest with herself, Muscle Man’s organ looked quite a bit bigger than Mike’s.

Olivia shook her head, closed the web browser, and then shut the lid on her laptop.
That’s the last time I look at personals on Craigslist
.

In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of lemon water to clear her head. The damage had been done, though. She couldn’t get that image out of her mind.

How did I even end up in the personals?
she wondered. It wasn’t as if her marriage were going badly.
It certainly isn’t going great, but it’s not bad enough to be surfing personals.

Olivia
grew warm. She wondered what
all
of Muscle Man looked like; specifically what
it
would look like if he pulled his hand away.

I’m getting myself all worked up for nothing,
Olivia thought.
Mike won’t be home until late tonight, and it’s Thursday. He’s always too tired to have sex late in the week.

But she couldn’t get the image out of her mind. The tantalizing possibilities of what lay behind
Muscle Man’s
hand sent her mind reeling.
What exactly would it look like if it were hard?

Now, you’ve done it!
Olivia thought.
You’ve gotten yourself so worked up by a picture that you’re wet!

And she wanted to look at the picture again.
Would there be any harm in it?

Olivia made sure the maids were gone for the morning. Then, she went back to the den, unplugged her laptop and carried it with her to the bathroom. She sat with her clothes on in the unfilled tub, opened her laptop and went back to Craigslist. She was about to click on
Muscle Man’s
post when she saw a different listing a few lines down:
Sex whisperer can improve your love life with your husband! 100% discreet and free!

Olivia had heard of
horse whisperers and dog whisperers, but sex whisperers? She put Muscle Man on hold and clicked the link.

“Let me record an erotic fantasy for you,” the posting read. “Listen to it before you have sex with your husband, and I can
guarantee
it’ll be the best sex of your life. Here’s how it works: you fill out a secret questionnaire by email. With your responses, I write and record a script as an MP3 and email it back to you. I never know your identity, and you never know mine. I’m so confident you’ll like what you get that I’ll do your first recording for free. No strings attached, just an extra jolt in the bedroom without all the guilt of an affair. Email me for details!”

Olivia tapped her temple with her finger. The idea was biz
arre enough to be intriguing, but the prospect that her husband might find the recording, or that the whisperer might uncover her identity was unnerving.
It’s something to think about, though.

If nothing else, the posting
helped her forget about Muscle Man. She didn’t need to masturbate after all. She shut her laptop again, got out of the bathtub and resolved to get some gardening done.

∞

Olivia and Mike’s house stood like a proud general atop a tree-covered hill just south of Dayton, Ohio. The back patio peered over a ravine where the couple could watch deer, raccoons, even the occasional owl in the woods.

They sat together under a gree
n umbrella, their dinner plates and wine glasses spread out in front of them. Armando, the chef, had outdone himself tonight, beef medallions in Cognac sauce with asparagus and spinach salad, all paired with a 2009 Padrillos Pinot Noir from Argentina.

Mike scarcely looked at Olivia during the meal, but Olivia studied him. Even tired and overworked as he was,
his eyes looked fiercely intelligent under his furrowed brow. His mind, it seemed, was always grasping to solve one difficult problem or another. Most likely those problems had to do with work. He wouldn’t waste time thinking about their relationship.

Mike was a VP at Proctor and Gamble. That meant excellent benefits, a pension and a large bi-weekly paycheck deposited into several different bank accounts. P&G was how they could afford for Olivia to stay at home and work on her photography. It paid for the five-bedroom, four-bath house, the pool, the wine, the trips and the parties. It paid for the help, too. They had a chef, two maids, two gardeners and a pool boy, all at Olivia’s beck and call.

But nothing comes without a price. Mike clocked more than 60 hours a week at the office. It left him cranky when he was home. He preferred to sit in silence when they ate. He didn’t want to talk about Olivia’s day or even the couple’s future plans.

“Were you able to get your va
cation approved?” Olivia asked.

A shadow passed over Mike’s face
. “It looks like two other VPs are already out the first week,” he said. “My boss needs to me to cover for them. We need to postpone until October.”

Olivia bit her lower lip.
“We’ve been planning this trip for three months, Mike,” she said. “I booked our flights.”

Mike sigh
ed. “You think I don’t know that?” he asked. “The company will reimburse us for the tickets.”

“That’s not the point.”
That’s not the point at all,
Olivia thought. But she also knew it was pointless to argue. Mike wasn’t married to her alone; he was married to his job, too. And that’s exactly what their marriage counselor had warned them about four years earlier.
Men,
she’d been told,
express their love by ensuring the financial stability of the family.
That meant long hours and emotional distance. And Olivia didn’t know if the tradeoff was worth it.

She sighed and looked down at the pool below. The water was perfectly still, reflecting the swaying leaves above. No Hawaii = no fun, she thought, and
— even more bitterly — no sex.

∞

Olivia met Charlotte, her yoga instructor/bestie, in the changing room before class the next morning.

“So I’m thinking about doing somethin
g entirely crazy,” she said.

Charlotte raise
d her eyebrows. “I’m interested.”

“I saw a p
osting on the Craigslist personals by a guy who says he’s a ‘sex whisperer,’” Olivia said.

“Ummm, right,” Charlotte said. “So my best friend is surfing Craigslist for men? WT
H, Liv? That sounds
really
sane. … But I have to admit, I’m curious. What’s a sex whisperer?”

“
He records naughty stories that are based on your life, then you listen to them before you have sex with your hubbie,” Olivia said. “He ‘guarantees’ that if you listen to one before sex, it’ll be the best sex of your life.”

“So, it’s kind of like
cheating without the cheating?”

Olivia
smiled. “It’s not like that at all.”

“Riiiigggght,” Charlotte said. “Well, I think you should most definitely do it. ASAP.”
She paused. “Then, if you don’t get butchered by a Craigslist killer, you can send me this guy’s email address so I can do it, too.”

They
laughed as they wiggled into their tight Lululemons.

“
I do have some bad news, though,” Olivia said. “Mike can’t get time off for Hawaii.”

“What? Please tell me you’re kidding,” Charlotte said. “He’s a VP. Can’t they do whatever the hell they want?”

“Apparently not,” Olivia said.

“Well, I refuse to accept that,” Charlotte said. “The trip won’t be worth it if you can’t go
. Kenneth will drive me crazy.”

Olivia
pouted. Talking about it made her realize how much she’d been looking forward to it.

“Maybe you could come alone?” Charlotte asked
.

“Mike would never let me do it.”

“How do you know?” Charlotte asked. “It never hurts to ask.”

“I sup
pose it doesn’t.”

“Besides, if you’re there, I’d have the perfect excuse to sneak away from Kenneth whenever I want
,” Charlotte said.

Olivia snapped her yoga top into place, and followed Charlotte into the workout room. She marveled at her friend’s toned figure in front of her. Charlotte was thin and powerful where Olivia was curvy and soft. Neither of them had trouble attracting other men, though.
Curves have their benefit,
Olivia thought.

Olivia decided to imagine herself on a Hawaiian beach during their workout. Maybe that would help make it happen.
P
ositive visualization never hurts, right?

∞

At home after her shower, Olivia sat in front of the computer tapping her foot. She’d decided to email the sex whisperer. She just wanted to make sure she took every possible precaution so her identity wouldn’t surface.

She set up a fake Hotmail account
since Mike and everyone else she knew used Gmail:
[email protected]
. She logged into the empty inbox and created a new message with the subject line:
Whispers.

I feel naughty just typing that,
she thought.

Hi,
she wrote.
I saw your posting on Craigslist, and I think I’d like to give it a shot. Can you send me the questionnaire?

Thanks!

She reread the message: no name, no personal details, nothing linking her back to the Hotmail account. She paused for a moment before hitting send. Her face felt warm.
What would Mike think if he saw this?
She shrugged.
He’d probably be thinking about work even if I told him, and besides, I’m doing it for him in a way.
She hit send.

∞

Olivia’s days were nothing if not predictable. Armando showed up five days a week, the maids and landscapers twice a week and the pool boy once. Beyond that, she had few visitors during the day in their palatial home on the hill. After yoga, Olivia spent most of her time tending or photographing plants in the greenhouse. Her latest contract was with a seed company. They needed photos for a new catalog, so she grew the plants herself using their seeds. Then, she’d stage and photograph them. Not exactly exhilarating.

She was only 30
, but some days, she felt she lived the life of a retiree. That didn’t bother her
per se,
but it definitely bored her.

After three hours in the greenhouse, Olivia retreated inside. Her clothes were damp and musty, reeking of
wet leaves and compost. Armando’s soup simmered in a cast iron pot in the kitchen. The whole house smelled of coconut milk and cilantro. Olivia went to the den to see if the whisperer had responded to her message. When she logged in, her inbox was empty. She sat there for a few moments soaking up the silence of the house, wondering how she might entertain herself until Mike got home at 6.

She was about to shut down her computer when
a popup bubble appeared. She had a new message. She’d only emailed one person from her fake Hotmail account, so she knew who it was. Her palms were sweaty as she opened the reply:

Thanks for writing, Hawaii Girl!

Other books

Through to You by Emily Hainsworth

The More I See You by Lynn Kurland

Whites by Norman Rush

King Kong (1932) by Delos W. Lovelace

For Richer, for Richest by Gina Robinson

Tracey H. Kitts - Lilith Mercury 1 - Red by Tracey H. Kitts

Life Sentences by Alice Blanchard

Murder Path (Fallen Angels Book 3) by Max Hardy

Shooting Butterflies by T.M. Clark

The Anal Sex Position Guide by Tristan Taormino