Private chef Nikki Carmichael doesn’t want to be a man’s personal anything, but bachelor-about-town Jay Buchanan can’t keep away from the heat in his kitchen.

Excerpt from HOW TO KNIT A WILD BIKINI

Bleary-eyed and fuzzy-brained from lack of sleep, Jay Buchanan yanked on a pair of shorts and stumbled barefoot toward the front of his beachside house, where someone had the annoying gall to knock on his door at the early hour of—

He paused, then leaned back and craned his neck to read the clock on the coffeemaker in the kitchen. Why oh why was the carafe empty when he needed it full, and why did the digital numbers claim it was almost 10:00 a.m. ?  He’d just woken up and…oh, yeah. He’d just woken up because he hadn’t hit the sack to sleep until after 4:00. An idea for a couple of “ManTalk” columns had nagged him until he’d stopped tossing and turning around midnight and headed for his computer instead.

The idea was worth it. It was all about New Year’s resolutions and he’d had a sufficient number of words on the subject to fill the required inches for NYFM’s print edition with enough left over to offer a slightly different slant for the online version.

Not so different, actually. They both were about giving up women for the forthcoming three-hundred sixty-five days. The columns were for the January issues because magazines worked ahead—and Jay did too.

While in his latest writing for the magazine he resolved to give up the fairer sex in the new year, though it was only August he’d already made that commitment to himself.

As of today, no females.

No how.

It was going to put a hiatus on his popular “In Search of the Perfect Woman” articles, a series inspired by his discovery of his grandparents’ old Broadway cast album of My Fair Lady in the back of a cabinet. Rex Harrison rapping his way through “Hymn to Him” which asked the immortal question, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” had sent Jay on the hunt for just such a one—and his readers voraciously feasted on every account of his failures. So while he’d yet to find a breezy, sexy, sloppy-emotions-unnecessary female, now he was determined to go without looking for the rest of this year and all of the next.

There was that irritating bam-bam-bam on his door again. Obviously, the irritator wasn’t giving up. Fine, he’d send them on their way and return to bed.

The soles of Jay’s feet registered the rug in the entry, then his hand found the knob and he wrenched open the door. Heat wafted over him, as well as the scent of car exhaust and hot asphalt mixed with something sweet. The Pacific Coast Highway was as close to the house’s front entry as the ocean was close to his back one and the four lanes were already bumper-to-bumper with Angelenos out for their sand-and-surf fix.

He blinked against the bright sunlight, his gaze now taking in the leggy teen on the doorstep, her hair in two loose braids and her hands clutching some kind of lunch pail.

“Fern’s out,” he said, making the assumption about his young cousin since she hadn’t answered the knock herself. “Don’t know when she’ll be back. ”  Without waiting for a response he swung shut the door.

It bounced off the toe of a bright yellow rubber clog. “Mr. Buchanan?” the braided girl said. She had a curiously low, intriguingly husky voice. “I’m here to see you. ”

He’d written a ManTalk column last year debunking the myth of the hunch, so it was ridiculous of him to feel cold, webbed feet goosewalking down his spine. Ignoring the sensation, he inched back the door and peered again at the intruder.

Leggy. Braids. Now that he looked more closely, she wasn’t the teenager he’d first thought. He made a vague gesture to his right, still hoping he could shoo her off. “No, you can’t use the bathroom. And the public beach access is three doors down. ”  He couldn’t hold back a little grin. “Right between Geffen’s mansion and that equally overbuilt monstrosity next to it. ”

Her brows, he noticed as they came together over her small nose, were a shade darker than her brown hair that was heavily laced with lighter streaks. “What?” she asked.

It was one of Malibu’s longest-running feuds—the privacy-obsessed celebs vs. the public’s right to beach access. Newspaper articles and court battles had proven that some of Hollywood’s most liberal were anything but when it came to sharing the sand in front of their homes. Jay wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. In the summer, he’d had his share of sun worshippers trespassing while in search of showers and toilets. But even when his grandparents had built this house in the 1950s, they hadn’t assumed the beach bordering it was theirs and theirs alone.

“It’s the price of privilege,” he explained to the girl. “You get the incredible property, but you have to share it from the high-tide line to where the surf breaks. There’s a public path to the water two-hundred-fifty feet down that way. ”

Leggy with Braids frowned at him. “Mr. Buchanan, I said I came here to see you. ”

He hadn’t missed that, not really, he thought, rubbing his hand over his bare chest.  But as his mother always said, Jay was a hoper, and he’d been hoping to get back to sleep. Yet he should have known better, because nothing was ever simple when there was a woman involved. Why did they always have to complicate everything?  Leggy with Braids even looked like a complication. A man just couldn’t ignore that sweet, full mouth and she had an interesting sprinkle of freckles across her nose that—

Crap. There he went again, heading off into muddy and probably mined female territory. “What, then?” he demanded, sounding surly even though he was mostly mad at himself. “What is it you want?”

To wring his neck, if her expression was anything to go by. But she gave him a tight little smile, not a slice of teeth showing. “I want to talk to you about the private chef position. Remember, you called me yesterday?  I’m Nikki. ”

“Oh. ”  He let his gaze run down Leggy with Braids. Nikki. Nikki of the cute freckles, the slim body, that pretty, earth-and-sunlight-colored hair. “Sorry, you won’t do. ”

Without a whiff of remorse, he shut the door again.

Again, it bounced off a rubber toe.

Jay sighed. This was what was wrong with them. Women. They were tenacious and stubborn in the most troublesome ways. You tried to let them down easy, but they would never take the hint. Why couldn’t they appreciate fun and games?  Why couldn’t they accept when the fun and games were over?  But no, they’d always come back—

“Mr. Buchanan,” her low-pitched voice was forced to find its way through the narrow crack in the door, yet still he could hear it over the rumble of the traffic on the highway and the surf’s shush-and-crash at his back. The goose made another march down his spine. “You called me. Remember?”

Right. There was that. With a sigh, he pulled back on the knob to gaze on her again, girly as all get out. “Look,” he said. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just that I’ve sworn off women. ”

His last chef had worked out great. Sandy was businesslike, quiet, and a lesbian to boot. When she’d recommended her friend Nikki, Jay had assumed—which reminded him of one of his grandfather’s favorite old saws— “assume makes an ass out of u and me”—that she’d be of the same sexual persuasion.

But after studying the woman on his doorstep…well, to put it bluntly, this leggy darling was no dyke.

“Mr. Buchanan—”

He held up his hand, once again wishing like hell he’d had a cup of coffee waiting for him when he rose, which was just another reason to regret this pretty chef person wasn’t an ardent fan of The L-Word. “I’ve got enough trouble right now, okay?  Believe me, I’ve sworn off women. ”

Those eyebrows slammed over her nose again. “Then we’re even, because I don’t like men. ”

Jay stared in surprise. Could it be?  Could his lack of caffeine have impaired his usually impeccable spot-on radar?  “You…”  He shook his head, because now he noticed something even more remarkable about her. Pretty chef person, Leggy with Braids, Nikki-who-said-she-didn’t-like-men had the most amazing eyes. One was blue, and one was green. Like a mermaid, like a witch, like a…?

Could it really be?  He frowned. “You don’t like men?”

She took a breath.

He leaned forward so as not to miss her answer.

Another female’s voice found him first. From the vicinity of his back door floated a light, sugary voice that he was painfully familiar with. “Jay?  Jay, darling. I can’t go another minute without seeing you. ”

Tension tightened a strangling hand around his neck. He closed his eyes, opened them, and was distracted for a second from the sticky problem coming up behind him by Nikki’s pretty, pretty face and those witchy, witchy eyes.

Hmm. Was she or wasn’t she?

“Jay?”

Uh-oh. The sticky problem was getting closer.

“Jay, honey, where are you?”

Nikki’s bi-colored eyes were big and full of questions.

Jay had one of his own, of course. Did she really dislike men or didn’t she?  But there wasn’t time to speculate, not with the minty breath of his worst double-X chromosome mistake bearing down on him.

And then, bam, it hit him. Call it an impulse, call it a brilliant idea, call it both. He kicked aside the unsettling warning that not all his impulses or even his brilliant ideas had panned out to be oh-so-successful.

Like Mom said, Jay was a hoper.

And now he hoped to kill two birds with one stone. A single simple move—and oh, how he liked things simple—could clear up one little question as well as one big problem.

As high heels clacked on the tile behind him, he grabbed Nikki-who-might-not-like-men, yanked her across the threshold, then pulled her close for a kiss.