Just One Touch
by Maya Banks · HarperCollins · 2017
Engineers attachment by fusing a captivity-survivor heroine with a supernatural healing gift to an instantly devoted protector hero, then sustaining a long suspense runway where danger and slowly-earned trust gate every intimacy. Anticipation is built through repeated near-misses and the hero's possessive vow-making before payoff lands in extended, recurrent love scenes capped by a breeding-coded marriage-and-baby epilogue.
Engineered signals
Six estimated signals for how hard this title works the immersion engine, each scored on the same 0–100 scale so books compare directly. Directional, not exact — see the methodology below.
What this book is tagged
The full tag set, grouped by dimension. Heat & Kink and Content Warnings are the explicit signals — surfaced, not buried in a flat trope list.
Genre & Setting
Structure & POV
Relationship Tropes
Hero Archetypes
Heroine Archetypes
Heat & Kink
Content Warnings
Pairing & Orientation
Location
Estimated. These charts visualize the engineered signals — arc shape, trope weights, and the 0–100 profile are analytical estimates from automated text sampling, directional rather than exact.
Share of page-time spent on buildup and tension rather than payoff. High values mean the book sells the wait, not the moment.
How strongly the narration collapses the gap between reader and protagonist, peaking with first-person, reader-insert voice.
The "book boyfriend" pull: how hard the text works to form a one-sided attachment to a love interest.
Cliffhanger and serial-loop intensity — the compulsion to start the next chapter or installment.
How steeply intensity ramps across the arc. A steep slope is the tolerance signal: each payoff has to outdo the last.
Query the text itself
Beyond the scores: select a pre-determined query to read real keyword-in-context excerpts from the book’s text, located across its arc. Counts are first-pass lexical-pattern matches across the full text, refined as the analysis matures.
Excerpts are short keyword-in-context fragments from Just One Touch by Maya Banks (2017), quoted for research and commentary under fair use — a bounded window around each match, not continuous text.
Acts
Anatomy
Dynamics & Kink
Buildup
Mentions of Backside
117 matches · showing 6
| Ch. | Page | Matched fragment |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 6 | … Good thing it was winter—or as close as Houston weather ever got to winter—so he didn’t sweat his ass off by the time he’d made the long trek. As it was, there was a slight chill to … |
| 2 | 10 | … out as the merest thread of a whisper. “Get in my SUV. The keys are in it. Haul ass out of here. Get yourself to safety. There’s no helping me. I’m dying.” “No!” she denied. “I won’t … |
| 2 | 12 | … she pulled her knees to her chest, hugging them as she rocked back and forth, tears sliding down her cheeks. Realization was swift. By saving him—healing him—she’d given up any opportunity to run, to escape. The resignation … |
| 2 | 14 | … the hell you did, but I’m not about to let someone who just saved my life get her ass killed instead.” She scrambled up, keeping her head low, and slithered between the door and the interior. She … |
| 2 | 15 | … his partners? “No time for questions. I’ll explain later. Get me the fuck clear. Just don’t get your asses shot.” “Not in the game plan, my man,” Dex retorted. Then he paused a second. “You need a … |
| 3 | 16 | … angel was in serious trouble, and he’d be damned if he left her helpless and running from the assholes who’d made it clear they didn’t play nice. He had no idea what they wanted with her, but … |
Where the content lands
Not just how much, but where. Each content category is mapped across the chapter arc — buildup spread thin, explicit acts concentrated at the payoff chapters.
Acts
Anatomy
Dynamics & Kink
Buildup
How explicit is this, really?
A single title means little in isolation. Set against the indexed catalog, the scale of this book's explicit content becomes legible.
More explicit than 39% of the indexed catalog · #100 of 180 · 1.5 scenes / 100 pp
How these metrics are derived
The book is a real published work; the signals below are produced by sampling its text and scoring each on a common 0–100 scale, so titles can be compared on the same axes.
Estimated. Every signal on this page is an analytical estimate from automated text sampling — directional, not an exact measurement — and the arc curves are illustrative shapes, not chapter-by-chapter readings.
- Anticipation Ratio
- Share of page-time spent on buildup and tension rather than payoff. High values mean the book sells the wait, not the moment.
- Explicit Density
- Explicit scenes per 100 pages — how concentrated the payoff is across the length of the book.
- POV Immersion
- How strongly the narration collapses the gap between reader and protagonist, peaking with first-person, reader-insert voice.
- Parasocial Index
- The "book boyfriend" pull: how hard the text works to form a one-sided attachment to a love interest.
- Serialization
- Cliffhanger and serial-loop intensity — the compulsion to start the next chapter or installment.
- Escalation Slope
- How steeply intensity ramps across the arc. A steep slope is the tolerance signal: each payoff has to outdo the last.