A Valentine in Queens: A Single Mother’s Awakening (Jetset Seductions)

Three scoops. Six ounces. Shaken, not stirred.
That’s the formula for her daughter’s bottle. Not for the rest of her life.
It’s Valentine’s Day, 2008. Priscila Oliveira dos Santos is twenty-two, alone in a 412-square-foot studio apartment in Astoria, Queens, with a six-month-old daughter, a broken radiator, and a bag of rice that needs to last three weeks. The man who got her pregnant sent two words when Luna was born: Beautiful. Congratulations. She hasn’t heard from him since.
She is invisible. She rides the subway and no one looks twice. She carries her daughter through the bodega and the park and the pediatrician’s office and she is mother, function, role — and the woman underneath, the Brazilian who danced at Carnival in São Paulo and kissed strangers and felt the city bend toward her, is disappearing.
Tonight, in a bathtub with rust stains and cooling water, this single mother remembers she’s still alive. And in the quiet after, wearing a silk nightgown from a life she left behind, she makes her daughter a promise — and sends an email that will change everything.
A Valentine in Queens is a spicy Valentine’s Day romance for women who’ve ever felt invisible — a fierce, tender short story about desire, single motherhood, and the night a Latina woman decides she’s done disappearing.
Perfect for readers who love: single mother empowerment stories, spicy Valentine’s romance, Latina heroines, solo female pleasure, and women’s awakening fiction.
Contains: explicit solo female pleasure, emotional intensity, single motherhood, immigrant experience, and a woman who refuses to disappear.
Part of the Before the Fire Valentine’s Day collection. Can be read as a standalone or as a prequel to Lust in Rio and Jetset Seductions: JFK