Remington Steele

“HEY, GISELLE, CAN you come home with me tonight and give me a private? My belt test is Friday.”

Giselle sighed without letting Andrew see. He wasn’t paying her enough for all the tutoring he needed. Talented, he was not. She was about to say she had stuff to do, but hesitated.

“Okay. But you have to take me home after.”

That made him hesitate. He didn’t like taking her home from the dojo because she wouldn’t let him in her apartment, where he very much wanted to be, but Giselle’s roommates did not want him to be. He didn’t like taking her home from the house he shared with Knox because he thought Knox should be the one taking her home. He had no reason to take her home except basic courtesy and that wasn’t his forte.

It made her mad.

“Look, Andrew,” she burst out. “You don’t pay me enough—” Sebastian would be pissed at how little she charged, especially when Andrew was so desperate and no one else would tutor him. “—we can’t stay here—” The dojo closed up at 9:30 and she didn’t have a key. “—and you won’t give me a ride home. There is nothing in this for me, so give me a ride home or I’m doubling my fee.”

“Fine,” he muttered, capitulating because he had no choice if he wanted to pass his test. He drove her to his house, but they rode in silence. They didn’t really like each other, but he did pay her and she was the only person in the dojo who could tolerate him that long.

Thus, when they went inside, it wasn’t hard to put him on his knees immediately.

“Hey!” he barked. “You didn’t have to ambush me.”

Giselle sighed, closed her eyes, and rubbed the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “The whole point of martial arts is to be prepared for an ambush.”

Knox, sitting at the dining room table, snickered.

Andrew resentfully stood and held his arm out for Giselle to demonstrate this once again. He was almost as intelligent as he was talented, and she couldn’t fathom how he’d gotten into law school.

She had him on his knees again before he could sort himself out, his wrist bent back to its limit, keeping him there while she lectured him—again—on how to correctly execute the technique.

Her untied canvas gi jacket floated over her tee shirt and around her hips. Her sleeves snapped the air properly when she moved quickly enough. Knox sat staring through them as he waited for his study group to arrive. She took Andrew’s other hand to emphasize the importance of the ability to do a technique left- or right-handed.

Again she made him bark in surprise and the tiniest amount of pain.

“See, Andrew, that’s why she has the brown belt and you have the blue one.”

“Oh, ha ha ha. Screw you, Hilliard.”

“You’re not going to get a green one if you don’t figure out how to do this before Friday,” Giselle muttered.

The front door opened to admit the first of the law students Knox expected. Giselle’s attention was distracted for a second—and her breath caught in her throat.

At least six feet, four inches, and two hundred-plus pounds of solid muscle poured into tight worn jeans, a black tee shirt, brown leather bomber jacket and black cowboy boots. Black hair cut excruciatingly short. Angular face, olive-tinged skin almost as fair as Sebastian’s. Small black-rimmed eyeglasses.

She continued to talk to Andrew, to explain the finer points, had him recreate the technique on her so she could demonstrate where he needed to change his execution. He did well enough to put her on her knees, but, since he wasn’t enough of an asshole to want to hurt her, he was reluctant to keep her on her knees She stood, still talking, still teaching … She risked another quick glance.

The romance novel hero standing in the doorway staring at her with an expression she recognized immediately, for all she’d never seen a man look at her that way before: Lust.

Blatant, unadulterated, hot.

She decided to cut Andrew’s lesson short to make certain she had an opportunity to let the beautiful stranger know she reciprocated his lust fully, but out of habit, she checked his left hand.

Sixty seconds. It’d taken her sixty seconds, a glance, to fall head over for a married man.

Turning her attention back to Andrew fully then, she tried to breathe normally, to put aside that stabbing pain behind her sternum, to ignore the sick feeling in her belly. She smoothly maneuvered Andrew so that her back was to the door and she could no longer see him.

How could it be—and at BYU yet? Married men didn’t look at women other than their wives that way, or at least, if they did, they successfully kept it to themselves.

More to the point, men didn’t look at Giselle that way at all.

She left as soon as the time came for Andrew to join the study group. She told Andrew not to worry about a ride home—

“But I am raising my rates.”

He snarled at her.

—but refused Knox’s offer with a wave. With her heavy duffle slung over her back, she ran the mile from his house on Tenth East to her apartment on First East, hoping to kill some of the pain.

She curled up on her bed, still in her gi, still sweaty. She shoved her fingers through her coarse, frizzy curls with a vicious yank as if the pain would distract her, and let the tears drip silently into her pillow as she confronted the truth of the matter.

Her hand drifted to her pudgy belly, then over her wide hips to explore—not for the first time—the broad expanse of butt that her gi couldn’t hide. Strong, athletic, graceful. And fat. She couldn’t diet it away; she was already starving. She’d even tried making herself throw up, but that was nasty and worked even less effectively than starving. Sebastian would have a fit if he knew and it didn’t matter he lived half a world away. She didn’t dare let Knox find out because he’d feed her himself. She couldn’t exercise it away; she got stronger, more muscular, but no leaner.

It didn’t matter with Knox; Knox needed her constant presence to mitigate his growing frustration that no LDS girl would go out with him once she found out he hadn’t gone on a mission—and he didn’t want to taint any possible relationships with the details of his inheritance. Giselle needed his constant presence to make her feel as if she weren’t, as Aunt Trudy had told her more than once, “the most hideous girl I’ve ever seen.”

Without Knox, she would have no male companionship at all; with Knox, she had an excuse. It had been enough until that man looked at her like that.

It was more than she could bear, that wedding band on his finger. The only man, a gorgeous one to boot, to look at her as if she had some sexual worth—and he was married.

“How could you?” she whispered, her faith shaken. “I’ve done everything you asked me to do. How could you do that to me?”

Heartbroken, she touched herself … there … and, for the first time, did what she knew she should never do.

Nobody else would.

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