Overexposed. Leslie Kelly

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      “No, thanks.” She fell silent. If she opened her mouth again, she might do something stupid like throw out a dumb, “Wow, what I wouldn’t have given for you to look at me like that when I was a teenager,” line, which she so didn’t want to do.

      She zipped her lips. She’d be Izzie the uninterested mute. Which was better than Izzie the lovesick mutant.

      “How about at a table?”

      “At a table…what?”

      He smiled again, that sexy, self-confident smile that had probably had woman on five continents dropping their panties within sixty seconds of meeting him. “We can sit at a table while you wait for your order.”

      God, she was an idiot. “No, I’m fine here, thank you.”

      She had to give herself a break for being so slow. After all, Nick Santori had been scrambling her brains since she was ten—right around the time her sister Gloria had started dating his brother Tony. And though he’d always had a way with females, he’d never looked twice at her that way.

      Especially not since Gloria and Tony’s wedding. The one where she’d tripped on her ugly puce gown—which hugged her tubby hips and butt—while they were dancing the obligatory wedding party waltz. She, the kid who’d been in dance lessons since the age of three, had tripped.

      Maybe it wasn’t so shocking. She’d been worried about what he’d think of her sweaty palms. She’d been terrified that her makeup was smearing off her face and revealing that she’d had the mother of all break-outs that morning.

      Nervous plus terrified times the pitter-patter of her heart and the achy tingle in her small breasts from where they brushed against the lapels of Nick’s tux had left her dizzy. So dizzy she’d stepped off the edge of the slightly raised dance floor and crashed both of them onto a table full of cookies and pastries made especially by her parents for the wedding.

      It hadn’t been pretty.

      Colorful candy-covered almonds had flown in all directions. Her butt had landed on a platter of cream puffs, her elbows in two stacks of pizelles. Her dress had flown up to her waist to reveal the panty girdle she’d worn in an effort to hide her after-school-cookie-binging bulge.

      The icing on the five-tiered Italian cream wedding cake—which she’d somehow managed to not destroy—had been Nick. He’d gotten tangled up in her dress, and had landed on top of her, sprawled across her chest.

      And right between her legs.

      It was the first—and last—time she’d figured Nick Santori would be between her legs, which both broke her heart and fueled some intense fantasies throughout her high-school years. Shocked by the unexpectedness and the pleasure of it, she’d been slow to part those legs and let him up. Slow enough for the moment to go from embarrassingly long to indecently shocking.

      She’d thought her mother was going to kill her afterward.

      But that wasn’t all. Because Izzie had the luck of someone who broke mirrors for a living, the incident had also been the money shot of the whole day. The videographer caught the whole thing on film, creating a masterpiece that would taunt her throughout eternity.

      She’d been a laughingstock. Everyone in the crowd had whooped and clapped and teased her about it for months afterward. She might as well have worn a banner proclaiming herself, “Lovesick pubescent girl who crushed the cookies and dry-humped the groomsman at the Santori-Natale wedding.”

      “I haven’t seen you in here before,” he said, finally breaking the silence that had fallen between them.

      “I come here a couple of times a week,” she replied.

      He shrugged. “I’ve been gone a long time.”

      “In the military.”

      “Right. Things have definitely changed around here in the past twelve years.”

      “Maybe in some ways,” she said. Then she glanced around and saw a minimum of five people she knew—all watching intently as she talked to Nick. Frowning, she muttered, “In some ways it’s still the same small town hell it always was.”

      She surprised a laugh out of him. “I somehow think we have a lot in common.”

      His laughter softened his tanned face, bringing out tiny lines beside his eyes. It also made him utterly irresistible, as several women sitting nearby undoubtedly noticed.

      Nick had been incredibly hot as a teenager. Lean and wiry, dark and intense. As a thirty-year-old-man he was absolutely drool-worthy. Not that he’d changed a lot—he’d just matured. Where he’d been a sexy guy, he was now a tough, heartstopping male, big and broad, powerful and intimidating.

      She didn’t suspect he’d changed on the inside, though. Once a Santori male, always a Santori male. The men of that family had always been good-hearted.

      Honestly, looking back, if Nick had been a jerk about what had happened at the wedding, she might have gotten over her crush a lot sooner and this moment might be a lot simpler. She could tell him to f-off, remind him he’d once laughed at her and added to her humiliation. Only…he hadn’t. Curse the man.

      He’d been very sweet, carefully helping her up—once she’d released her thunder-thigh death grip from around his hips. He’d gently wiped powdered sugar and cream off her cheek. He’d helped her pull her dress back down into place without making one crack about her chubby thighs or her panty girdle. He’d pretended she hadn’t practically assaulted him. And he’d helped her back up onto the dance floor and continued their dance. Absolutely the only annoying thing he’d done was to start calling her Cookie.

      As her mother often said, he’d been raised right. Just like his brothers. He was every bit a gentleman—a protector—and he’d never given her a sideways glance that hadn’t been merely friendly. In his eyes, she’d always been Gloria’s baby sister—the chubby ballerina who looked like a little stuffed sausage in her pink tutu and tights and he’d treated her with nothing but big-brotherly kindness.

      Until now.

      Fortunately, though, she wasn’t sweet Izzie the cookie-gobbling machine anymore. He hadn’t seen her for almost a decade…she no longer blushed and stammered when a hot guy teased her. And she no longer even tried to imagine she could have been a ballerina with her less-than-willowy figure.

      Once she’d stopped eating pastries and hit brick-shithouse stature at age eighteen, she’d known her future as a dancer would come from another direction than the ballet.

      She’d also learned how to handle men.

      Now, she was in the driver’s seat when it came to seduction. She’d been running the show with men for years. And it was high time to let Nick Santori know it.

      “So, when you offered to serve me…what were you talking about?” she asked, swiping her tongue across her lips. It was a move she’d perfected in her Rockettes dressing room. Men used to come backstage, trying to pick up the dancers and they all went for the lip-licking. God, males were so predictable. She held her breath, hoping for more from this one.

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