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any of that; they preferred to
bitch about it. Nevertheless, it was the God’s honest truth that
Michael Raney had once been the biggest geek on the planet. A nerd
through and through, a stupid little moron growing up in the
Illinois foster care system.
    He’d passed through six foster homes in all,
never truly integrating into a single one of them. His many foster
siblings had glommed on to the tough kids and shied away from the
science-loving nerds like him. And the foster parents? Forget
it—they usually had so many kids to deal with that he’d been lost
in the shuffle. He and his Erector set had been left alone.
    Yet that wasn’t the thing that ate at his
adolescent self. What ate at him was that he was essentially
invisible to girls, too. He didn’t score as much as a kiss until he
was nineteen years old. Hell, he didn’t get as much as a look
before he was twenty-four. But then, by some miracle, he had
morphed overnight from a nerdy, lonely kid into a man who women
flocked to. Why or how, Michael had no idea. It had just happened,
and he damn sure hadn’t asked a lot of questions. From that moment
on, there had been no looking back.
    The only thing that had really mattered to
him was that it never end, because Michael Raney loved women.
Absolutely loved them. Loved the way they thought and talked and
walked and laughed. Loved the way they felt under him when he made
love. Loved how delicate they were, how they smiled, how they
smelled, how they always picked up after him and complained about
his empty kitchen.
    He’d been lucky enough to date women across
the globe. He’d lived with a diplomat in Paris, an artist in Spain.
He’d hooked up with a doctor in Ghana and a teacher in Australia.
He’d had numerous flings with actresses at all levels, but the
little nerd in him never ceased to be surprised when a woman was
truly into him.
    Now, here he was, coming full circle around
to the one truth he’d figured out about himself: He really did want
to cherish one woman above all others. He really did want to make
babies with one woman and grow old with her. And out of the many
women he’d been involved with one way or another, there had been
only one who had stood out, only one he still thought of, only one
for whom he wished he could go back in time and redo it all.
    Leah.
    They had clicked from the start—she liked to
laugh, liked weird things like off-the-wall indie films, just like
him, and Thai food, just like him. She claimed to have morphed from
a gangly geek into what she was, just like him. Unfortunately, he’d
blown it all in a pretty spectacular way. The night he had walked
away from her for what he thought would be forever sat like an ugly
scar across his memory. He dreamed of it—in his dream he was always
trying to take it back, but he could never catch her to tell
her.
    At the time, he thought he was doing her a
favor. She didn’t really know who he was or what he did—their whole
relationship had been predicated on a lie. Hell, what he thought he
knew of himself hadn’t even been the truth. But in hindsight, after
five more years of trotting the globe and playing with its women,
he had come to another conclusion—Leah Kleinschmidt was the one
woman who had the power to push him over the finish line.
    He just never thought he’d see her again,
and it never occurred to him that he would see her in the flesh, in
L.A. On one of his sets.
    Now, the Extreme Bachelor had absolutely no
idea how to proceed.
    His uncertainty added to an already
difficult day that got only more difficult after lunch, when they
took the ladies out on a ropes course, a series of hurdles designed
to test their endurance and their teamwork.
    He lost sight of Leah completely during the
afternoon, as he had one woman or another in his face constantly.
One got rope burn when she fell and did not let go of the rope. One
caught her hair on a swing and shrieked so loudly you would have
thought she’d been impaled. During a