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mouth.
    One of his big hands moved up her back to the center,right between her shoulder blades, and he held her with just that one hand and his mouth on hers.
    She was completely his prisoner. Nothing mattered to her except that this moment didn’t end. That his mouth stayed on hers.
    And that frightened her. This embrace scared her. She was successful because she didn’t let men or relationships of any kind interfere with her job. And that had always been easy for her, because no man she’d met had threatened that resolve.
    Part of it she imagined was simply because no other man had felt right—the way that Steven did. He’d been the one to change her with that one overheard comment. And she’d realized that even though her parents had always told her they loved her and she was beautiful the way she was, that men saw that differently. That a chubby woman was almost invisible to most men—or rather to men like Steven.
    She had to be careful, because the way she felt right now, she knew she could easily lose herself to him. In him. And the really scary part was that she wouldn’t mind. She drew back from him and he slowly released her mouth.
    She put her fingers over her lower lip, which was still tingling. She wasn’t herself. This was surreal.
    “That was…”
    “Incredible?”
    She shook her head. There was a lightness to his tone that she wanted to embrace but she sensed the steel underneath. “Intense.”
    “Surely a woman like you has been well-kissed before.”
    She started to shake her head but she didn’t want Steven to remember the chubby girl no man had been interested in.That was part of her past, she thought. His kiss had made her vulnerable enough. She didn’t want to show him that kind of emotional vulnerability.
    “Nothing like that,” she said at last. She couldn’t lie to him about that. She wasn’t a very sophisticated woman when it came to bedroom matters. She might be able to hold her own with temperamental photographers and celebrities, but with this man she couldn’t. And she wasn’t going to pretend that this was an everyday occurrence, even if that would have been better for her.
     
    Ainsley sat quietly next to him as he drove through the city to her home. She lived in the posh neighborhood of Notting Hill. “What made you choose this area to live?”
    She flushed and looked over at him. “The movie with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. They made it look charming and quaint.”
    “Is that how you decided to become a magazine editor? You saw someone in a movie doing it?”
    She shrugged. “There are worse ways to find a job. What about you?”
    “Not so fast. You didn’t tell me why you chose your profession.”
    “You can park there on the street.” She pointed to a space halfway down the block.
    He pulled into the spot and turned the car off, but he made no move to get out and neither did she. “Which movie was it?”
    “ His Girl Friday. Have you ever seen it?”
    He hadn’t. He wasn’t much of a film buff. He’d spent his life out doing things. Trying to prove he was better than his ancestry, and most days he was sure he succeeded.
    “No. What’s it about?”
    “A newspaper editor—Cary Grant and his ex-wife and star reporter Rosalind Russell…it’s just great. They made working at a newspaper look like so much fun. I knew I wanted to be a reporter.”
    “But you’re not,” he pointed out.
    “Once I graduated I found a different path. But I would never have thought of writing for a living if not for that movie.”
    She sparkled with passion when she talked about writing and he wondered why she’d given it up. He knew she’d said that the new job better suited her but he still couldn’t believe she’d give up her passion for money.
    “How old were you when you made the decision to be a writer?”
    “Twelve,” she said. “What about you? Did you decide early on that you wanted to rule the world?”
    He laughed out loud at her wry question. “Pretty