Ever wondered how it feels when a Southern heiress's breath catches the moment a forbidden shadow

first brushes the silk between her thighs, right beside her father's eternal rest?

Lillian Graves-Savannah's porcelain-skinned heiress, bound for a mayor's arm and a life of polite restraint-must prepare her father's body as the storm rages outside. Into the candlelit embalming room steps Rue Saint, a towering, dreadlocked embalmer with prison scars and a presence that makes the air itself throb. One touch-one slow, deliberate glide of his tongue across her trembling heat-and Lillian's world tilts. Beside the steel table, beneath her father's unseeing gaze, she discovers a pleasure so deep it drowns every vow she ever made.

Their descent is swift and sumptuous. In the mahogany showroom, a $20,000 casket becomes their altar; satin drinks her shimmering release while Rue marks the velvet with his own. Months later, Sunday services in the chapel see Lillian-now pierced, tattooed, gloriously rounded with new life-kneeling in devotion as Rue fills her before a rapt congregation, her cascades of ecstasy anointing the altar cloth in liquid light. On All Souls' Night, they unearth the bones of old tyrants, load them into defiled caskets, and ignite a glass-walled inferno. As centuries of supremacy turn to ash, Lillian laughs against the searing pane, Rue's rhythm driving her to a climax that steams the glass-two bodies, one future, forged in fire.

From mourning gown to silver-spaded crown, Lillian rises unapologetic, her laughter echoing over magnolia-scented ashes.

Tell me, curious heart...when your own storm finally breaks, will you welcome the spade that plants new life in the ashes of the old?