When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

"Yeah, right," Annie snickered as she tossed the slip of paper from her fortune cookie aside. She may well require a teacher, but there were few to be found in Hunter's Mills.

Annie was sick of being the town's oldest virgin. Especially since most of the folks in town considered her the rotten apple that fell just beneath the proverbial tree.

She walked from the living room to the bathroom and discarded her clothes. A hot shower with lots of scented soap would help wash away the anguish of another bad day. Bad days that started soon after her mother returned to town.

It wasn't that life in Hunter's Mills was exciting. But mundane was a word that Annie grew to love after her mother's departure when she was seventeen. She had finished her last year of high school on her own without her mother's shoulder to cry on when no one asked her to the prom. Not that her mother would have offered her shoulder anyway.

Truth be told, even when her mother worked full-time at Mel's diner, she had been anything but supportive. When she left, Annie should have been glad. Mel let her continue to rent the apartment above the diner in exchange for part-time work.

None of that mattered now. She'd been driven from her home to find refuge in a cottage in the hills above the town. Thank God for her best friend, Eddie Handler, who offered the use of her brother's cottage.

Annie stretched and yawned as she adjusted the taps. A shower was definitely in order.

Jack Van Camp wasn't sure what he'd find when he walked into his cottage for the first time in years. For some reason, he wasn't prepared to see that very little had changed since he and his family had last been there. The open concept cottage, which he had built to suit the whims of his then-wife, seemed empty in spite of the lavish furnishings. The leather love seat and couch still circled the primitive stone hearth.

Jack found himself thinking about the numerous times Joanne, his ex-wife, had chastised their three boys for playing on the expensive furniture. He would have gone with something inexpensive so the rough play his sons frequently indulged in wouldn't have mattered.

In spite of the fact that the three boys had sprung from Joanne's loins, she never seemed to understand them.

The last time he had been to the cottage had been with his wife. They had left their sons with a neighbor with the hope of sorting out their marital problems.

Looking back, Jack knew it was more about his sons than the fact he wanted to save a marriage that was doomed from the beginning. The birth of each of his sons was the only bright spot in his twenty-two year marriage.

Jack moved around the living room with a sense of foreboding. It was time to let this place go. Joanne was long gone and with two sons in college and the third in his last year of high school, there was no point in hanging on to it.

Jack frowned when he noticed empty Chinese food cartons on the coffee table. As he rounded the couch, his foot snagged on something. His frown deepened as he crouched to examine the open backpack. A lacy pink bra peeked out over the edge of the zipper.

Jack rose and walked slowly to the kitchen. It was then he heard the running water in the bathroom off to his left. His hand hovered for only a moment before he twisted the knob and pushed the door open.

Jack glanced at the steam emanating from the running shower. The sun through the west window offered a silhouette of the person in the shower. His eyes narrowed as he gazed at the figure, definitely the owner of the bits of lace he spied earlier. The form bent from the waist to rub her long shapely legs and then rose, with her chin tilted up to allow the spray of water to slide down her body. She turned, letting the water wash over her back and buttocks as her hands glided up from her waist to her sides and then grazed over her breasts.

Jack felt his body tighten in response. How long had it been since he'd watched a woman bathe? He felt himself grow hard as he saw her reach for the taps and turn them off.

It wasn't until the long delicate fingers curled around the shower curtain and began to pull it back that Jack realized he'd be an unwanted visitor. He reached for the doorknob and began to back out of the room. Too late, she had pulled the shower curtain back and reached for a towel. Jack caught a glimpse of flesh before she noticed he was there.

He saw the towel rip from the holder and splay over her body as deep blue eyes peered at him in horror.

"Get out!" she cried as she grappled to hide behind the towel.

"I'm sorry," he said as he began to back out of the bathroom.

"You jerk!" the woman cried.

The words vibrated against the bathroom's steamy walls as Jack's hand faltered on the doorknob.

Who the hell was she to call him a jerk? He was in his own cottage and she, this luscious woman, was the trespasser.