WICKED PARADISE | JENLISA

NINETEEN

JENNIE
***

AS FAR AS FANTASIES went, this was a tame one.

I stood in the middle of a hay barn.

The sweet scent of harvested grass, the natural heat from fermenting bales, the dust motes shimmering on the air from the sunset spilling through the windows at the top of the huge A-frame building.

It all spoke of calm country. A slower pace of life for a city lover, and a world away from a tropical island in Indonesia.

Spinning in place, I drank it all in. Stables waited for equine guests by the large double wooden doors, a tack shed held a multitude of saddles and bridles, and a mismatch trophy wall held sun-bleached photos of someone galloping, running barrels, and smiling in victory with ribbons.

The brick floor looked freshly swept and birdsong outside mingled with the crow of a rooster and twitters of happy hens.

Without elixir fogging my mind and body, I had the luxury of judging the quality of Lisa’s virtual reality.

She was right when she said she contorted the parameters of fact and fiction. Try as I might, I couldn’t spot a glitch in the illusion. Not when I swiped a hand through the air and felt the heat of a dry summer, rather than the damp mugginess of the tropics. Not when I stepped forward, my feet encased in simple lace-ups stained with mud, manure, and who knew what else. Not when I ran my hands over the blue-flowered cotton dress that skimmed my thighs with a flirty hem.

I pinched myself, trying to force my body to return to truth thanks to pain.

However, unlike a dream, the barn didn’t vanish.

I stayed standing in the centre of a farm I’d never been to before, all while my body remained tethered to some harness in Lisa’s Euphoria villa.

My heart raced at the thought.

At the unnaturalness of it.

To be torn down the seams and denied access to my body.

The more I thought about it, the more panic crept over me.

I didn’t like the distance. My mind was homeless. My heart in two locations at once—the feeling, knowing, instinctual part of me existed in this fantasy, but the pumping, working, biological muscle remained in a place I couldn’t see, hear, or touch.

I didn’t like it.

Claustrophobia clawed, scratching my skin and licking through my hair.

I want to wake up.

I need—

A boot scuffed on the broken-brick floor.

My eyes soared upward, my body twisting to face the intruder.

Instantly, my heart pounded even harder, confused and alarmed, sensing a trap even while skipping with hopeful joy.

Lisa.

She stepped from one of the stables as if it held a portal to another dimension. She’d been inserted into this illusion through a simple button, rather than walking through the barn doors.

She didn’t speak as she came toward me.

Her tall, sexy frame no longer wore her armour of suits and ties but had traded them in for holey, torn jeans, complete with smears of dirt from hands used to working outdoors. Her black and blue plaid shirt was rolled up to her forearms, revealing her clevange with perspiration. The hollow of her throat and sweeps of her collarbone held grime and sweat, begging me to lick and taste a female not afraid of hard toil.