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researcher, I know how to gain expertise. I read thousands of pages on dog care, and everyone stressed that dogs shouldn’t eat from the table. It’s bad for them and fosters bad habits.” She thunked her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I know this. But—just look at him. He pulls at your heartstrings. How can I resist?”
    Max leaned over. Doggy Max swivelled his muzzle to him, suddenly alert to the fact that maybe another chump was at the table. Someone else to scam.
    His tail thumped more slowly now, as if his energy had been suddenly depleted. He whined and shivered, looking pathetic, whipped. He inched closer to Max, but cautiously, as if Max might have a hidden stick with which to beat him, and wasn’t the man he’d spent the entire day with, playing on the beach.
    As Max watched, the dog slowly, tremblingly lowered himself to the floor, laying his muzzle on his front paws, as if too weak to hold up his head.
    Max raised his head. Paige met his gaze then rolled her eyes.
    “Don’t tell me, I know.” She sighed. “You’d think he just came out of some concentration camp where they whipped and starved him. Instead of having just been fed.”
    “You fall for it, though,” he accused. “Hook, line and sinker.”
    “Over and over again,” she agreed. “What can I say? I’m a total wuss.”
    They met each other’s eyes again and burst out laughing.
    It surprised Max. The laugh came straight up from his belly. Genuine, carefree, unstoppable. The first time he’d laughed, really laughed, in… in years.
    And hard on the heels of that laughter, something else, something sharp and alive, moving fast, like a shark in the water. Dangerous. Subterranean.Irresistible.
    Sexual desire, of a nature and intensity he’d never felt before, whooshing in like a tsunami onto a dry beach.
    He watched her at the table—so pretty and alive, so whole, so easy to be with—with her golden-brown hair and eyes the color of the Pacific a few steps outside the door. Her light golden shoulders gleamed. They were covered by the thin straps of her dress with no signs of a bra. Was she wearing one? He didn’t dare lower his gaze but he had excellent peripheral vision. He didn’t think so.
    Oh God.
    Just a thin layer of cotton covering those breasts. Perfect, round breasts. His palms itched with the desire to touch them, run his fingers over that smooth, smooth skin.
    Everything itched. Desire skittered under his skin like fire, so intense it was almost painful. It was as if he’d never had sex before, every molecule of his body turning around and aligning itself to hers, like iron filings to a magnet.
    “Don’t tell anyone at work that I have no backbone when it comes to my dog,” Paige said, pouring some more wine into his glass. “I have a reputation as a hard-ass.”
    She looked up at him and froze, her eyes widening, that pretty mouth rounding into an “O” at the expression on his face. It was the exact moment he imagined that mouth around his cock. He gritted his teeth against a groan at the image in his head.
    Paige was no dummy and she was a woman. They seemed to have a whole slew of extrasensory perceptions that went into alleyways where men couldn’t follow and which allowed them to read men’s minds.
    His mind wasn’t hard to read. What he wanted, fiercely, was right there on his face. He wanted her .
    He was as hard as a rock, so hard it felt as if his dick were a separate thing, not part of his body. A stone cylinder glued to his belly, heavy and intractable.
    He didn’t plan what happened next—it just surged up out of the moment, unstoppable, irresistible.
    Reaching out, he covered her hand with his. Her skin was as soft as it looked, the hand warm and delicate. At the touch of her hand, he became even harder, more blood racing to his cock. It felt like his entire body simply went off-line as his dick came online.
    Everything he’d0emthing h felt this past year—pain, anger, despair—vanished in