"So that I don't forget."

"Forget what?"

"That I need reminding."

A low chuckle rumbled through his chest. "That's circular thinking, babe."

Sure it was. "What about you? Any tattoos? A Semper Fi on your a.s.s, maybe?"

He snorted. "No, sorry to disappoint you. My brother James has already cornered the market on tattoos. Besides, I'd have better places to put the marines' motto than on my a.s.s. I'm old-fashioned: no tattoos, no piercings, no earrings. A man should look like a man, not a Christmas tree."

Christy laughed softly. Yep, that sounded just like Cole. If Max was the pinup-calendar hottie with the Hollywood looks, and James was the tattooed, tough-a.s.sed bad boy, then Cole was the highly opinionated, no-nonsense soldier. Piercings? Tattoos? Studs? Ha! The man didn't use any cologne, for crying out loud.

For a while they silently watched the fireworks. Christy was horribly aware of him behind her, of his muscular chest glued to her back, of his heat surrounding her, of a hard something pressing at her lower back. The force field around him was so intense she literally felt it in her bones.

As he nuzzled her ear, he traced his fingers over her thigh. "No skirt today. Afraid I'd take advantage of it?"

d.a.m.n right. She was wearing jeans and long sleeves and a jacket. She would have worn a chast.i.ty belt if she had one. It was inviting disaster to wear a skirt.

After a couple of seconds pa.s.sed by, he whispered casually, "So tell me, baby, did you wax your p.u.s.s.y?"

Christy turned around so fast she almost got whiplash. "Oh. My. G.o.d. You didn't say that to me."

"What? Just making conversation," he said, shrugging his shoulders and keeping his face blank. She saw a smile tugging at his lips though.

She poked him in his chest, trying her d.a.m.nedest to keep her tone low. "And that's something else I don't take kindly to, mister. 'Wax it, or I won't f.u.c.k you,'" she said, imitating his baritone. "Jesus."

"So I take it that's a no?"

Her smile was all teeth. "What do you think?" G.o.d, the guy was infuriating. She poked him again and whispered irately, "And so that you know, I don't have a jungle down there. My pubic hair is nicely trimmed."

He grabbed her poking finger and, chuckling, brought her back to his chest, wrapping his arms around her to keep her in place. "I know, sweet thing. I had my hand up your skirt, remember? You're perfect, but I want you bare. And you are gonna love it."

She snorted. "I doubt it. Waxing hurts."

"I'd kiss it better afterward, babe. I promise. I'll rake my teeth over the smooth skin and lick every inch of your sweet p.u.s.s.y all night long until you're dizzy from coming and beg me to stop. Your folds will be so sensitive the smallest friction will set you off."

Sure, like she needed any help in that department with him around.

Shivering at the image his words were conjuring in her mind, she tried to wrestle back control of the conversation. "Whatever. Moot point now that my...ladyscaping isn't to your liking. I reckon you won't be f.u.c.king me tonight."

She felt his smile against her skin. "Oh, honey, make no mistake. Hair, no hair, your p.u.s.s.y is mine tonight. You are mine tonight." He nuzzled her throat. "Such a pity you're wearing jeans. With a skirt I could slip my hand under it and make you come right here. I'd cover you with a blanket, and with your body bracketed by my legs, no one would notice. You could watch as the fireworks explode in the sky and inside you. Would you like that? I would, babe. It was so f.u.c.king hard to walk away from you yesterday. I can still feel your tiny p.u.s.s.y sucking my fingers in like a greedy mouth. I can't wait to feel that around my c.o.c.k. And my tongue." His voice, low and raspy, was full of dark promise.

Oh G.o.d. This was getting out of hand. She must have been crazy to even think for a second that she could take him on. She couldn't. He was taking them into a zone she didn't even have a name for, although if the response of her body was anything to go by, then this was what other people called falling in l.u.s.t.

She was flushed to her very core, her heartbeat trip-hammering, her mind spinning out of control. Her folds felt swollen and dripping wet. Her nipples were so hard that contact with her bra was uncomfortable. And technically he hadn't touched her yet. His words, his heavy presence around her were enough to send her careening into a s.e.xual frenzy. She didn't need any more foreplay. Two more seconds of that and she was going to come.

She nervously looked around. It was close to eleven p.m., but this was a bring-the-kiddos event, a family picnic for Christ's sake. They couldn't be having this conversation here. She'd spontaneously o.r.g.a.s.m from his words alone and treat some poor innocent kid to her own version of an epileptic episode.

"We need to talk. You and me. Somewhere with less sound and more privacy," she said, scrambling to her feet.

The guy was h.e.l.l-bent on getting into her pants, and she had to get some things straight, because the s.e.x he had to offer sure as h.e.l.l wouldn't be the well-mannered, prim, and proper kind she was accustomed to. Cole was hardly the under-the-blanket, lights-off kind of guy. He wouldn't settle for halfway, and Christy needed to tell him what to expect. If that scared him off or repulsed him, good riddance then. At least she would avoid the embarra.s.sment.

"My house?" he asked.

She snorted again, this time more nervously. "Yeah, right. Think again."

She took him to a quieter corner. Well, the quietest she could find. At least it was far away from the tables. Everyone was watching the fireworks, and as far as she could see, no one was paying them any attention. She paced in front of him for a long while, worrying her lower lip.

"Christy..."

"I haven't had s.e.x for over a year," she blurted.

He crossed his arms and looked at her, his expression giving nothing away. "You mean besides with your fiance, right?"

She shook her head. "No. And I...ah, I..."

He kept quiet.

She opened her mouth and then closed it again, feeling ashamed. How could she tell him about...about it? The craziness, the insanity of it all? The inability to stop? The tons of food shoveled down her throat in an attempt to fill a hole that wasn't even in her stomach?

He wasn't going to understand. She had trouble understanding it. He would look at her with disgust, or worse, make fun of her. He'd ask questions, questions she wasn't sure she had answers for. And this wasn't the place to delve into those. There were too many people around. She paced some more.

"Talk to me, sweetheart," he said.

Oh, come on, Christy, give it up already. Just tell the man and be done with it. It wasn't as if she'd been turning up tricks and smoking crack on Skid Row, LA. Although she'd rather admit to that than to the truth.

She stopped in front of him and took a deep breath. Alea jacta est.

"I...I have a problem with food, Cole."

He was quiet for several seconds.

"Do you mean a problem with food as in you eat and then throw up, or as in you starve yourself to death?"

How cute. Big, tough marine had been watching late-night shows and knew about bulimia and anorexia. Pity it wasn't as clear-cut as that. "No, I mean a problem as in I can't stop eating, and before I realize it, I'm five hundred pounds and in need of a crane to be airlifted to get out of home."

Silence. Yep, overeating hadn't made it onto his radar. No big surprise there. When it came to eating disorders, it was just the people starving themselves or hiding a week's worth of vomit in their closet that had scared public opinion. It still baffled her, though, how most people didn't see that a 500-pound person eating anything that didn't move was trying to kill herself as surely as an anorexic.

She sighed heavily. "Early in life I discovered chocolate bars made things better. That habit of eating for comfort when I was feeling bad, which was pretty much all the time, turned into an obsession, and then an out-of-control compulsion that for many years made my life a living h.e.l.l. Food was the only tool I had for managing my emotions." Overeating, undereating, using diuretics, laxatives, diet pills, shots...she'd done it all. Except for throwing up. That she could never bring herself to do. Besides, what she was after was that blissful state of numbness that being stuffed with food brought her to.

"Although the bouts of bingeing were always followed by short periods of undereating, I was never too successful at restricting my food. Overeating is my thing."

His gaze was boring a hole in her. His face was so impenetrable she had no clue what he was thinking.

She didn't know how to explain to him about emotional hunger, about the inability to cope without using food to take the edge off. She couldn't convey the h.e.l.l her life had been while she was in the food, unable to stop overeating and unable to stop obsessing on how to lose the weight she was unable to stop gaining because she was unable to stop eating. Unable. Unable to control her life. Unable to control her mother. Unable to control her own body and mind. And so terribly ashamed.

"It brought me to two hundred pounds before I realized I was medicating my feelings with food and got some help. I was never five hundred pounds, that and the crane were just a poetic license on my part, but I don't have the smallest doubt that, given time, I would have been that fat and more. When it came to food, to sugar specifically, there was never enough for me. I relate to it the same way an alcoholic does to alcohol. I'd binge on sugar all day long until I'd literally pa.s.s out in the night, then wake up the next day and start all over again. That was how I checked out of my life...it was my downer."

"Okay," he said without taking his eyes off her.

Okay? That was all he had to say?

She'd expected irony, incomprehension, repulsion, at best confusion. Instead he was accepting her explanation as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

She cleared her throat. "I'm telling you that because, well, me and my body..." G.o.d, she didn't know how to say this. "Look, I'm better now, I maintain a weight loss of seventy pounds, and the food is in its place, but my body...well, my body..." G.o.d, she wasn't making any sense. "I'm just...I don't know, warning you? I'm not the most confident person when it comes to my physique."

She waited for him to say something. Nada. His face was inscrutable.

"What I'm trying to say here is that s.e.x implies a level of exposure that, for obvious reasons, I find difficult to deal with. The guys I had s.e.x with didn't blow my socks off, but it's mainly my fault, not theirs. I'm kind of...handicapped." Much as it pained her to admit it, there was a reason why she'd always ended up with mellower specimens with as much s.e.x appeal as a trip to the dentist. If you wanted to win big, you had to risk big. She wasn't able to do that.

He wasn't talking, so she took it as a rejection.

"If you want to pull out of your s.e.x-for-fake-dates offer, I totally understand."

He frowned. "Why would I want to do that?"

Oh G.o.d, the guy looked genuinely puzzled, like all that she had said to him was nothing.

"Oh, I don't know, maybe because I'm a...a..." ...nutcase that, left to her own devices, can't stop eating even if her life depends on it? "And my body isn't...isn't..." ...acceptable or what you're used to? No help came from him. He was just intently staring at her, waiting for her to spell it out. "Oh G.o.d, forget it. Let's go with the others."

"Come here, Christy," he said in that deep voice of his. As she came closer, he pulled her to him and kissed her, thoroughly, possessively. He held her head with both hands, caressing her cheeks with his thumbs. "You had some issues, and you learned how to deal with them. I'm okay with that. I don't see why what you told me should in any way change my mind about f.u.c.king you."

No? Boy, the man was shortsighted. "Don't say I didn't warn you, mist-"

He silenced her with another of his mind-blowing kisses. "Come on, let's get my keys from Max and go for a spin," he said, dragging her toward the others.

On the way there, he turned to her. "I have one question though."

She swallowed hard. Here it was. "Yes?"

"Why on earth didn't you have s.e.x with your fiance?"

Of all the things she'd expected him to say, that wasn't it.

She shrugged. "We did have s.e.x at the beginning. It just wasn't working for me. Then we got engaged, and we were very busy...both working extra hours..."

Christy's relationship to s.e.x had always been weird. She'd been a late bloomer. She'd had other things on her mind, like slowly killing herself, for example. No time for little pesky things like dating or love or s.e.x, G.o.d forbid. It'd taken her forever to get her act together, but when she finally did, she thought she was ready for intimacy. She had a brand-new life, one that was working out pretty fine. Surely she could make intimate relationships work too. Everyone else did. Besides, she was past all her s.h.i.t. She had successfully rewritten herself; she was a new person, right?

Wrong. It hadn't worked. She had a new life, true, but that old one had left a bunch of roadblocks she didn't know how to get around, let alone eliminate.

"When he suggested we wait until after the marriage, that it'd be romantic, I agreed. It suited me just fine. I thought we'd ease into the intimacy with the marriage...that it'd get less awkward."

He stared at her for a long second, then shook his head.

"Mental," he said under his breath and continued dragging her along.

After a short ride, Cole turned the engine off and set the kickstand. They were in one of his favorite spots in the whole of Alden: a secluded viewpoint atop a hill near his home with a great backdrop of the lake, now illuminated by the fireworks.

She was perched at his back, her arms wrapped around him in a tight embrace. For a couple of seconds he stood still, letting her heat sink into him. Having her close felt good. d.a.m.n good. After taking off his helmet, he covered her hands with his and gave a squeeze. "We're here, honey. You're missing the fireworks."

Breaking the embrace, she got off the bike. He missed her closeness right away.

"Oh, wow. Beautiful," she said in a whisper, taking off the helmet, her hair spilling all over her shoulders.

That long neck, that mane of brown hair falling over her like a thick cape, those bangs almost reaching her eyes. The swell of her t.i.ts straining over her shirt. Man, he could come just from looking at her.

"You cold, baby?" It was summer, but at night it got chillier, especially while riding a bike. She shook her head, but she shivered and hugged herself. "Come sit here with me so I can keep you warm."

She looked at him doubtfully, then glanced around, probably searching for a bench. No bench, just trees and dirt. He sat back and, offering her an innocent smile, patted the leather seat in front of him.

As she came to sit, he took both helmets, placed them on the handlebars, and then surrounded her with his arms. At first she was stiff, but soon her body relaxed and burrowed into his, like a d.a.m.n kitten seeking heat.

"So weirdly quiet here, don't you think? Without your giggling, bouncing, t.i.ts-on-a-stick horde of groupies around hara.s.sing you," she said with a smile on her lips.

Yes, it was.

He so missed his days in the marines. He could put his men in line with a glare, but these women? He could glare at them until h.e.l.l froze over, but it didn't make any difference.

"If you'd played along, sweetheart, there would have been less hara.s.sing."

She snorted and looked at him, those d.a.m.n witch eyes turning his insides into mush. "Play along? What was I supposed to do, strip and jump on top of you?"

"For example," he whispered, tightening his embrace. Now that he'd broken his don't-get-within-one-hundred-yards-of-Christy rule, he couldn't stop himself from reaching for her at all times.

She laughed, totally relaxed. He liked that. She'd been so stiff after their last conversation. And he'd known she'd felt uncomfortable on that picnic, so taking her away from there had been a priority. He didn't understand much about eating disorders, but Christy had seemed very agitated, and he hadn't wanted to add to it by asking. Besides, he'd seen in her eyes she thought he was going to mock her; at the very least she thought he wouldn't understand her issues, which he didn't. But he wasn't a total moron, and he'd seen plenty of soldiers battle addiction. Some of them got discharged because of it, others got into it full-blown after the military. Some were hooked on a substance like drugs or alcohol, whereas others were simply adrenaline junkies. How had she put it? Medicating her feelings with food? Yes, medicating one's feelings with a substance or a behavior was something he could easily relate to. It had actually taken him twelve years of blowing things up and risking his neck in the marines to work through his s.h.i.t.

"Your performance today at the picnic left a lot to be desired, but I'll let it go as it was the first. Next date I expect, one, more skin showing, and two, more pa.s.sion."

Her giggles rumbled through his chest. "Dream on. You just keep teasing me, and I'll tell Rose you call me by her name when we have s.e.x. Let's see how that helps your case."

He chuckled and, moving her long hair aside with his chin, nuzzled her neck. She smelled like warm, sweet woman. Vanilla and cherries. He wasn't going to be able to eat cherry pie again without getting a hard-on. "I can f.u.c.king a.s.sure you, when we have s.e.x, her name will be the last thing on earth coming out of my mouth."

She pretended she didn't hear him, but he felt her legs tightening and her heartbeat picking up. She wanted him. Maybe not as much as he wanted her, but he could get her there.

"Let's get real here," she said. "The fake-date scam won't work. You don't need a date; you need a bodyguard. A seven-foot, three-hundred-pound lump of pure muscle. A possessive-looking bald guy clad in black leather. Maybe that would derail them."

"So your solution to the situation is for me to pretend to be gay? Sorry, baby, it won't work."

"How come? Ah, I see. You've hooked up with too many women in town for them to believe you've gone YMCA all of a sudden."

He said nothing. Since first becoming s.e.xually active and discovering how great s.e.x was at burning adrenaline, he'd never had trouble getting women. Then he'd enlisted in the marines after that juvenile rescue operation that had landed his sorry a.s.s in jail, and he'd only visited Alden while on leave. There had been plenty of meaningless, no-strings-attached s.e.x then. Lately though, he'd tended to go outside of Alden for his exploits. It was...less complicated.

"I have nothing against gay people. I have my quirks like anybody else, but I'm one hundred percent straight."

Christy visibly tensed. "Quirks?" she asked, suddenly out of breath. "What quirks?"