Prologue

      “I’m saving myself for marriage.”

      Fifteen-year-old Kirby Connaught uttered the words without even thinking about them, such a staple of her vocabulary had they become. Then, with an angelic, self-satisfied smile, she forked a huge bite of potato salad into her mouth and chewed with much gusto.

      Her fnend Angie Ellison, who sat across from her at the picnic table in Goldenrod Park, rolled her eyes heavenward. “Well, duh,” she replied eloquently. She fished a pickle spear from the Tupperware container near her hand and crunched it loudly. “Tell us something we don’t already know, Kirb.”

      Rosemary March, who completed the trio of tenth-grade friends enjoying the sunny September afternoon, had perched herself atop the table with her sandal-clad feet flat on the bench beside Angie. “Yeah, Kirby,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s not like this is news to anyone.”

      “It is to Stewart Hogan,” Kirby muttered, gazing suspiciously at the blond-haired, blue-eyed senior a few picnic tables down. “When we went out the other night, you wouldn’t believe what he wanted to do.”

      Angie and Rosemary exchanged knowing, wistful httle smiles that made Kirby’s face flush with heat. Her two friends had been dating since they were thirteen, and both had steady boyfriends now. And Kirby was vicariously familiar with all the things that went on with teenage courtship—the arms around each other, the hands in each other’s back pockets, the hugging, the kissing, the necking.

      She was sure her friends thought she was the biggest prude in the world because she never dated at all—the only reason Stewart had asked her out was because he’d just moved to town a few weeks earlier and didn’t know about her spotless reputation that kept most of the boys at bay.

      But Kirby’s lack of experience with the opposite sex had nothing to do with a code of morality or a cold disposition. On the contrary, she often lay awake at night wondering what it would be like to do the things she longed to do with a boy, tried to imagine the feel of a boy’s mouth and hands on her body, fantasized about experiencing for real all the scandalous things she’d read about in her favorite books by Anya Seton and Kathleen Woodiwiss and Erica Jong.

      And when she finally did fall asleep, Kirby was often plagued by the most feverish dreams, dreams that left her feeling empty and achy upon waking. Despite what her friends—and everyone else in Endicott, Indiana—thought about her, she had a perfectly healthy adolescent libido and an equally healthy adolescent sexual curiosity. But she wanted to make sure it was the real thing with a guy before she went too far. Or anywhere at all, for that matter. Simply put, she wanted to