She's a woman who's been around the block. She knows what she wants and how to get it.

She's remained faithful while her husband's off fighting in Iraq, but sometimes even good girls need a spanking. She's followed her lover from sunny California to medical school in Indiana-will it ever stop raining, and why has he brought an anatomy book to bed? In the prize-winning "Savage Nights," Trish loses a boyfriend, but discovers more than friendship with those crazy hippies next door. In "Torn in Two," Cindy gets another chance at romance, but is it worth it with a man who plays that rough?

The wife of a famous politician, she's sitting at the end of the bar, trolling for her next bad boy. A law student far from home, she's having an affair with her favorite professor. The girl next door, she eats too many sweets, struggles with a novel, and watches her neighbors through binoculars. Her mother might have been a cold war spy whose lovers whispered state secrets between the sheets, but Kate secretly yearns to be told how and when to do the nasty. She's the well-known defense attorney obsessed to the point of distraction with her lover's most private orifice, the country-western singer who needs to change her cheatin' ways, and the late-night waitress who swaps her panties for a hundred dollar bill and a brand new life.

Although told from a woman's point of view, don't expect mushy, romantic, happy-ever-ending stories here. Instead, meet real women making tough choices and getting on with imperfect lives. These women don't always get what they want, but they usually get what they need, both in life and in bed.

These are tight women in hard places.