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wonderful,” she sighed, fighting off a stab of guilt because she was holding hands with her sister’s ex. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe he had a vein of kindness under that hard shell. She closed her eyes and dug her feet deeper into the sand.
    â€œThey have this stuff in California, too,” Tad said. “It’s all over the beaches there. Maybe you could check it out some time.”
    â€œMaybe,” Mandy mumbled, but just thinking about returning to the office, where she was going to have to replace Luna’s bookings and redouble her recruiting efforts, made her feel exhausted.
    She pushed the thought from her mind and focused on the feeling of holding hands with Tad Eckholm, something she might never experience again. Maybe it would be all right to forget, just for a moment, that he’d been Luna’s boyfriend. His mere presence did things to her. Delicious, naughty things, and didn’t she deserve that? Even if it was just for tonight?
    She made up her mind to quit overthinking things, and tugged on Tad’s hand, leading him across the sand toward the water. He lagged, not even trying to keep up, and so she dropped his hand and started running. “Race you to the water!” she yelled, once she had a healthy head start.
    There was no way she would beat Tad in any kind of fair race, but she was still surprised when she heard him laughing right behind her, steps from the tide’s edge. He was fast, and he moved like a trained athlete—he’d done a television ad for athletic shoes in which he had sprinted through manufactured rain—so when he slammed into her, lifting her off her feet just before she reached the water, she knew it was on purpose.
    â€œI win,” he said solemnly, spinning her in a slow lazy arc. His arms were wrapped around her waist, which was five and a half inches larger than her sister’s (Mandy ought to know; she was the one who had the composite cards printed). But if Tad noticed that Mandy weighed nearly thirty pounds more than Luna, he didn’t seem to mind.
    â€œYou didn’t win,” Mandy protested, a little frantically. If he didn’t put her down immediately, there was no way she was going to be able to remember he was off-limits. “If you hadn’t tackled me, I would have touched the water first. That’s the rule .”
    â€œI’m not putting you down until you concede,” Tad said. Now he just sounded bored again. Mandy kicked at him experimentally. The problem was that she could feel the hard ridges of muscle in his arms against her skin. And she could feel his breath against her breasts—which were almost smashed up against his face.
    Mandy wondered when Tad had last been that close to real, natural, and generously proportioned breasts. The kind that jiggled and swayed; the kind that most certainly didn’t set off sample sizes to their best advantage.
    He adjusted his arms and she fell against him, her bosom muffling his face and her hair grazing his shoulders. “ What about Luna ?” a shrill little voice in her head demanded.
    â€œWhat about her?”
    Oops. Mandy had spoken out loud, and her voice sounded indignant, even to her own ears. Why should Luna have everything? Why should she have anything at all when she didn’t care about it, didn’t take care of it, didn’t keep it happy and certainly didn’t bring out the best in it?
    And by ‘it’…she meant him , as in Tad, as in the man who seemed content to burrow gently against her bosom even as he continued to hold her aloft, making a deeply satisfied humming sound in his throat. Out on the water, the moon settled into the horizon’s edge. Stars twinkled. Faint music wafted over from the manor.
    Tad let her slip slowly down to her feet, her body sliding against his the whole way down. But he didn’t let her go. When her toes dug into the sand again, he held her around her waist, and