The Virgin and Zach Coulter by Lois Faye Dyer

he’d kissed to develop that kind of bone-melting expertise. Dozens, at least. Hundreds? Possibly.
    And that, she realized with sudden insight, is exactly why I’ll be safe working with him.
    Because no man with his experience would want aninexperienced woman in his bed—and Cynthia’s experience was zero.
    She’d lied to him when she said she had no worries about her ability to refuse him. The truth was, when he’d picked her up, settled her on his lap, wrapped her in his arms with his mouth on hers, she’d been in real danger of following wherever he chose to lead.
    She hadn’t stopped him—Zach was the one who had pulled back. And although she might deny it to anyone else, the truth was she hadn’t wanted him to release her.
    If, by chance, things did grow heated between them again, she’d have to remember to tell him no before he kissed her, since she apparently lost all ability to think when he got too close.
    And if she felt the attraction was growing dangerously near to irresistible, she’d have to confess her secret.
    She’d never slept with anyone. In a world where virginity seemed to be increasingly rare, Cynthia had held on to hers with the same strength of will that marked her drive to earn top grades in school from elementary through graduation from Harvard.
    Looking back, she’d felt she had valid, compelling reasons for doing so. Her mother bounced from one love affair to the next while Cynthia was growing up—her many affairs made her the focus of local gossip and earned her a notorious reputation.
    Natasha Deacon had been unwed when she gave birth to Cynthia at seventeen and although Cynthia had repeatedly asked, she’d never learned who her father was. Her mother refused to say and she’d finally stopped asking. She had Nicholas as a father figure and the gentle older man was wonderful.
    The fallout for being the daughter of the most scandalous woman in the county, however, was impossible to avoid. Although she’d been a shy, bookish child, by the time Cynthia was in junior high, boys assumed she would be as promiscuous as her mother. Mortified by the attention gained by her developing curves, she’d taken to wearing her clothes a size too big to conceal her body. But it was the unwanted attention from one of her mother’s boyfriends when Cynthia was twelve that made her retreat from any interaction with boys.
    With the exception of Grady Turner, who continued to treat her just as he had since he’d sat in the desk behind her in third grade, she ignored the male half of the high school population. By the time she arrived at Harvard, the habits she’d developed earlier were so ingrained she barely knew she froze men out of her life.
    The end result was that Cynthia remained a virgin at the age of twenty-eight. And though she hadn’t consciously planned to wait so long, the trauma at age twelve had effectively insulated her until the rush of raging teenage hormones had leveled out. Then it became an issue of meeting a man she really wanted to be intimate with. Not to mention the fact that she had to reveal she was a total novice in the bedroom.
    In a world saturated with magazine articles about new and inventive ways to please your man, and media that seemed to declare everyone over the age of thirteen was having sex, Cynthia couldn’t help but think her lack of experience was a huge hurdle.
    Although she’d hoped several men she’d dated wouldbe the one to solve her problem, the relationships had fizzled and she’d moved on, still a virgin. Over the past year, she’d seriously been considering how, when, where and with whom to change her status. Unfortunately, the solution still hinged on finding the right man and so far, she’d had no luck.
    And then Zach Coulter had walked into her life.
    Now she couldn’t help but wonder, and wish, that she’d met him when she was a teenager, and that