This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Dorine has spent years disappearing.
Good wife. Good mother. Good waitress. Every version of herself built around what everyone else needed, until there was nothing left over for her.
Then Derrick walks into the Grill & Chill on a Tuesday night, and for the first time in longer than she can remember, someone actually looks at her. Not through her. Not past her, on his way to the coffee pot or the check. At her.
He’s used to being the fantasy. A Black adult film actor who’s spent his career playing the part on camera, giving strangers exactly what the script calls for, over and over, until he stopped being sure any of it was real. But Dorine isn’t performing. She’s just tired, and hungry, and honest in a way none of his co-stars ever had to be. That’s what gets him. Not the blonde hair. Her.
After closing, with the diner locked and the lights off, she stops being careful.
Her first night with Derrick. The first time in years her body feels like her own. The first time in years someone has made her feel like a woman instead of a fixture. This isn’t Derrick claiming her. It’s Dorine taking back everything a slow, quiet marriage has spent years taking from her, piece by piece, one indifferent night at a time. She knows exactly what she’s choosing, and she chooses it anyway.
But the diner has a security system, an owner who doesn’t trust her sudden happiness, and a secret that’s about to get someone killed. In Shivers Lake, nothing stays hidden for long, not desire, and not the people who’d rather burn a woman’s reputation than admit she’s finally alive.
One night. Everything to lose. A woman who decides, once and for all, never to go hungry again.
Doing Dorine
(Tropes: Interracial romance, Forbidden one-night encounter, Cheating wife, Neglected wife awakening, Secret inheritance, Small-town scandal)