Her face was six inches from the nicest set of buns she'd ever seen.

Not that she was an expert on buns. Well, all right, she was. Miss Emma Jean O'Riley did, after all, own a bakery. But as for buns of the male variety, to say she was a little behind the times would be an understatement. She didn't make a habit of studying the male anatomy, but since the world's finest male butt was now in plain view, she wondered why she never had before.

He was leaning over the chaise lounge adjoining her own, on deck of The Skipper, applying sunscreen to a topless brunette who didn't seem to mind his touch.

If his touch was anything like his buns, Emma didn't blame her.

It was rude to stare. It was wrong to watch the muscles in his derriere bunching and flexing, rippling like she imagined the waves over the siderail were doing beneath the huge cruise boat. But for some reason, some insane, mind-numbing, hand-shaking, breath-hitching reason, she couldn't tear her chocolate brown eyes from that tanned skin.

It looked so smooth. She had to resist the urge to reach out and run her palm slowly, admiringly, over that warm flesh. She knew it would be warm from the sun, just as she knew that it would be soft, yet hard, firm, yet smooth. As Emma's heart beat faster and the spit dried in her mouth, she could almost feel that unyielding flesh marking an imprint into her hand.

She watched in disbelief as her hand moved, surely of its own accord, from her side to within a hairsbreadth of that outstanding display of maleness. She wasn't going to touch him. She wouldn't touch him.

And then she touched him. Laid her hand flat out on the man's ass, and as her brain went haywire and her toes curled, as the heat unfurled in her belly, she watched the man attached to the buns turn slowly to stare at her.

His eyes were bluer than the ocean, his hair blacker than ebony. He had a dimple on his chin, and to Emma's horrified realization, a smile on his face.

"Honey," he drawled, "that ain't no handrail."

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