The warm, wet cocoon of the deep hot tub’s embrace, as snowflakes tickle my face, is one of those surreal experiences that only my hot, wildly irresistible fiancé’s mouth can top.

And oh, how it does.

We’re slippery and slick, naked bodies moving against each other with a joyful desperation that would make me smile if I weren’t already moaning. At least, I assume that’s me making those sounds. Less than two minutes into this sweet soak after a long day of skiing, we’ve just started with the naked preliminaries before moving on to the main event.

Er, before I move onto Andrew’s main event, I should say.

“It’s so beautiful,” I whisper between kisses, tiny dots of white appearing from the sky, drifting onto Andrew’s nose and cheeks, landing on his eyelashes and disappearing like Cupid in icy form.

His face lights up with a smile, brow and hair wet from immersing himself fully when we climbed in here, his hair starting to freeze in an adorable pattern across his strong brow. Eyes the color of rich brown fur meet mine, eyes I’ve grown accustomed to waking up to every morning, lust and love mingled together most days. Whether they’re wide or narrow, covered by a knitted brow or stretched by a smile, emotion shapes them.

Right now, though, most of Andrew’s emotion is reserved for a very big, shall we say, main event that presses against me, patiently waiting to be ridden.

“You’re so beautiful,” he counters, kissing my hand, lips on the giant diamond ring he gave me when he proposed last year. In the muted light, the sun covered by the gentle snowstorm that gives us this sweet snow show, the diamond doesn’t glitter. It just is, imperial and imposing, a weight on my finger that is a daily reminder of his love.

And how he, you know, lost the first ring in Walden Pond, along with his car key, while pretending to be Mr. Darcy, but let’s not dwell in the past. The very real present is a little more pressing.

A lot more pressing.

Who knew that you could frolic outside in February in northern Vermont, soaking in a steaming hot tub on a second-story deck with a view of the rolling, wrinkly Vermont mountains, jutting out of the landscape like my own personal show?

“The Cheeto-marshmallow treats with the chardonnay are just the cream on top,” I murmur, in heaven as I finish my wine. Nothing tops having your favorite freak food enhanced by alcohol.

“The sommelier at the wine store was pleased to be presented with a challenge. ‘What pairs well with orange salty-sweet?’ is its own category.” He kisses me again, tongues tangling as all my muscles sink into him.

Kissing Andrew is like the Fourth of July, all celebration and pride, fireworks lighting me up across a broad band of sky.

Even with my eyes closed I can see them. Even in the daytime, the white layering of vertical snow making a new dimension, I can see them.

Flash! Flash! Flash!

Wait a minute.

Those aren’t fireworks.

Andrew turns first, his lips breaking away from mine, the shock of cold Vermont air bracing my skin, making me shiver as I straddle him. Any sudden jolt in this particular position, when we’re both naked and shoulder-deep in bubbling water, is cause for careful consideration.

We’re normally carefully calibrated for pleasure.

But the protective centers of my amygdala make all the blood in my body flow to my arms and legs, ready to fight or flee, because what I see when I follow Andrew’s lead makes freezing the only option I absolutely cannot follow.

Paparazzi.

Flash! Flash!

“Hey!” Andrew shouts, his voice deep and angry, the rumble of surprise bubbling up out of his chest like a new jacuzzi jet we hadn’t noticed.

“Amanda!” calls out a man’s high voice. “Look here!”

A tight band of Andrew’s forearm locks around the back of my neck as I get a face full of wet chest. “Don’t look,” he hisses, turning to the protocol I’m just starting to remember.

Flash! Flash! Click! Click! Click-click-click-click-click!

Sounds remarkably like machine gun fire.

Paparazzi follow us everywhere now. Everywhere. You know all those pictures on the front of tabloid magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle? Or the myriad websites devoted to celebrity gossip? The paper magazines are bad enough, but the websites are a separate category.

People make money from running advertising on those sites. Which means they need a constant stream of pictures to draw eyeballs, to make a micro-cent per ad on the page.

That’s right.

I’m eyeball lure. Someone, somewhere, wants to see a picture of me without makeup or kissing Andrew or climbing out of a limo without underwear or buying a rival company’s products, or just being.

My presence in Andrew’s life has turned my very existence into money for someone else.

And a picture of me and Andrew, naked in a hot tub, will draw so, so many eyeballs.

“Is my side-boob showing?” I murmur against his nipple, which is now taut with either protective stress or the seventeen-degree air. Not sure which.

I do know that the main event has turned into a not-so-main event. So much for afternoon hot tub sex.

“Sweet tits, Mandy!” one of the photographers shouts. “Show ‘em to us, baby! Don’t let Andy have all the fun!”

Mandy. Andy.

Oh HELL NO.

A ferocious growl starts in Andrew’s throat, reverberating through him as he pins me closer. Panic floods me. Bad enough I have recurrent nightmares about being naked in public, but having a photo of my boobs on the internet – monetized – is pretty much anyone’s biggest nightmare.

Aside from taking an exam in a class you forgot you were enrolled in.

“GET OUT!” Andrew commands, dropping his legs slightly, making me sink deeper into the water as he holds me up. The girls bob like apples at a kids’ Halloween party, though, uncooperative in remaining hidden.

“Turn this way!” someone else shouts. I can’t help myself. That voice is different. I start to turn.

Flash! Flash!

“Don’t look,” Andrew commands. “Gerald’s on it.”

“Is there more than one?”

“Looks like three of them, and one is on some kind of ladder, because his face is right there. ”

Flash!

The voice is very close, so close I look up to find a grinning asshole with a simple phone, snapping photos as fast as he can, thumb on the camera button so it autoclicks.

“You two look so hot,” he says. Click. Click. Click. Click.

“Go away!” Andrew says, peeling me off him. “Stay under water. Hide yourself.”

“What are you doing?”

“Going after him.”

“What?”

“Gerald!” Andrew shouts.

“Got it!” booms our bodyguard’s voice from the right as Gerald makes a running start and gets to the camera dude, grabbing the phone out of his pocket, tossing it into the hot tub, then grabbing the two sides of the ladder.

“Hey!” the photographer squeaks, shaky and grasping the top rung with a look of sheer terror. “You can’t!”

“I can.”

“I’ll sue!”

Gerald shakes the ladder. The guy drops something, looks down, then looks back at Gerald, who has the face of a middle school spelling bee judge.

Less than zero emotion.

“You can’t do this!” the guy screeches.

“Just did.” Gerald looks over at Andrew, whose legs are now tensed and ready to lunge. I am preventing that from happening by the simple act of being in his lap. The feel of so much coiled power in his muscles is an aphrodisiac.

I must say something. Now.

Leaning in, I nip his earlobe and whisper, “You’re really hot when you’re protecting me.”

He jolts, his head moving away from my bite. Andrew’s staring at Gerald and the photographer, but he moves his cheek against mine and says, “Really? You have to share that fact with me right now?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re turning me on.”

“You – you’re turned on by having the paparazzi take pictures of us naked in a hot tub?”

“No. I’m turned on by how your legs and chest and abs and -- ” I use hand gestures to indicate a different body part-- “feel right now.”

“Duly noted.”

“I think you’re doing more than noting that fact,” I say, as said body part rises to the occasion.

“Amanda,” he warns, voice half angry, half aroused.

“What?” I pretend to be innocent. I’m really good at it. I’m a former mystery shopper, after all, and most of the job involves pretending to be stupid.

Gerald’s bent over the ladder. It looks like the photog is backing off, though I hear muttering about lawyers. A part of me wants to get up and see what’s happening, but as Andrew peels me off him and floats to the other side of the hot tub, grabbing a bottle of bubble bath and pouring some in to provide more cover for our nudity, I realize getting out of the tub means even more exposure.

In seventeen-degree weather, literally. If I’m going to lose my nipples, I want it to happen during some kinky sex thing, not because some paparazzi made me freeze them off out of fear.

Bzzzzzz.

That’s not a phone. The buzzing has a weird echoing sound, and just as I look laterally for the source of the sound, Gerald looks up, grabs a walkie-talkie from his belt and barks orders.

Andrew looks wildly around, as if searching for a really big wasp.

“Get the photographer in the white coat. Male, early twenties, Caucasian, wearing hipster glasses. Drone spotted. Warn the local law enforcement.”

Drone? Did he say drone? Like an Amazon Prime delivery? Why would there be a drone?

Gerald looks over the edge of the deck. I hear loud arguing.

“What’s going on?”

“Mr. Lawsuit cut wires at the main gate to get in here. We’ll have him arrested.” He looks up. I look up.

Some kid’s remote control helicopter is flying overhead, about twenty or thirty feet above us, just hanging out.

“Is that a helicopter?”

“Worse,” Andrew says with a snarl. “Drone.”

“Is it delivering something?”

“Hell. It’s delivering hell. Gerald, can we shoot it?”

“SHOOT IT? With a gun?”

“DON’T SHOOT IT!” calls a voice below us. “That’s a thousand-dollar drone!”

Gerald and Andrew share a look, the kind of evil, mischievous grin that gives me a glimpse into what our son might look like as I watch Andrew’s eyes gleam.

“Do it,” he tells Gerald.

Gerald’s just following orders, right?

As he trains his sight on the drone, a screech from above pierces the air, then a whooshing sound follows as the drone suddenly, shockingly disappears off to the right with a speed too sudden to be propelled by any man-made motor.

Slowly, Andrew stands in the hot tub as some guy below us starts screaming obscenities. Wordlessly, Gerald hands a very naked, wet Andrew his robe, and as Andrew shrugs into it, Gerald discreetly hands me mine, turning around, snapping at someone on his walkie-talkie while looking over the edge of our deck.

Sprinting through the patio doors and into the house, Gerald takes off, followed by Andrew, as I watch from the balcony, tempted to follow them. Within seconds they’re in the yard, Gerald a black-suited streak running after the second photographer, who is screaming obscenities as he runs, shouting about lawyers but also taking pictures with a phone held high above his head, pointed toward us.

He goes down face-first in the snow as Gerald tackles him. I quickly pad through the house and down the stairs, stopping at the downstairs patio door, Andrew a physical shield between me and the outdoors.

“Don’t. Don’t give them a chance to photograph you.”

I look around the room and spot ski goggles and a helmet, slipping my half-wet head into the helmet, leaving the chin strap undone. I hold the goggles up to my face and move next to him, craning my head.

“Nice look.”

“I aim to please.”

Andrew steps out onto the heated-brick patio, wet feet on warm stone. I join him, marveling at the technology in one corner of my mind but mostly fixated on the sight of a stoic Gerald covered in bits of snow, yanking a very uncooperative paparazzo through a foot of powder. Gerald is like a Zamboni, moving slowly but steadily through the terrain, dragging two hundred pounds of pissed-off anarchy in human form.

“Fuck you,” the photographer spits out as Gerald walks past us with him.

“Have fun in court,” Andrew says, crossing his arms over his chest, giving the guy no quarter.

Just then, a flutter of activity from above makes us all look up. The hawk does a drive-by, the drone in his mouth. The bird drops a load of guano. Gerald shoves the photog just in time to avoid getting hit.

The photog takes it in the face.

“Good work,” Andrew tells Gerald as he re-secures the photog, who is now apoplectic.

“Thanks. Photographers zero, Anterdec two.”

“You got lucky, asshole,” the photog screams.

Andrew turns around, shutting the door, leaving his security team to manage the rest. “Lucky. Right.”

“He’s got a point. Who would have guessed that hawk would come out of nowhere and grab that drone? I thought they only dive-bombed little dogs.”

“That’s a trained hawk, Amanda.”

“A trained...hawk?”

“Trained to disable drones.”

“You can do that?”

“I can hire someone to do that. It was Gerald’s idea after he saw an article a few years ago about Kanye West worrying about paparazzi-controlled drones.”

“Gerald’s job is that involved? I knew he wasn’t just your limo driver, but...”

“Security takes many forms. The best security is invisible. It fits like a glove so you don’t even notice it. Costs more, but it’s worth it. It’s how we have to function.”

How we have to function.

“Is this the new normal?”

“New? It’s not new to me. The drones are, sure. And the level of paparazzi interest in us is definitely greater, but new? No.”

“It’s new to me.”

“Yes.”

“My every move is going to be cataloged if they can get access to me.”

“I’ll make sure they don’t.”

“But you can’t protect me 24/7.”

“My team absolutely can.”

“I don’t want that.” Panic starts to grow deep in my belly.

“I don’t either, but it looks like it’s becoming a necessity.”

“Because a bunch of assholes want to use us to make money?”

A strangely bitter laugh, so unlike him, pours forth. “How is that unique?”

“It is to me, Andrew. I’m nobody. I don’t live a life where people do this to each other.” I frown. “And I’m sorry you do.”

Flash!

I see the light out of the corner of my eye, deeper in the woods. Andrew grabs the patio door handle and, with a mighty shove, goes into fight mode.

I am barefoot. Wearing a white bathrobe, a ski helmet, and holding goggles. Andrew takes off on foot in the snow, bare feet a blur as he races to get the new photographer. I grab the nearest weapon – a ski pole – and run after him. He’s in fabulous shape, ninety minutes of personal training a day obvious.

I only run when I’m hiding from staff on a mystery shop, I’m not wearing a bra or panties, and after about a hundred feet I feel like Mother Nature has given me an icicle as a tampon.

By the time I catch up to him, he’s got the photographer on the ground, pinned face down in the snow.

“Grab the camera,” Andrew commands. “Run it upstairs and throw it in the hot tub.”

“No!” The muffled protests of the photographer come through the snow. It’s a woman’s voice, and it makes Andrew relent in shock, jumping up. If he’s going to be on top of a woman while wearing practically nothing, it damn well better be me.

The sound of shouts and footsteps to the left makes me turn and look. Gerald, flanked by two security guards I don’t know, comes running toward us like a suited superhero. He’s rough with the woman, grabbing her by the upper arm and yanking her to her feet.

She’s a kid. Not technically a kid, but definitely no older than college age.

“What the hell?” Andrew barks, reaching for his robe and tightening it. I start shivering, because when your jiggly bits are covered by a thin bathrobe and your nipples turn into popsicles, the body has to do something to preserve itself.

“You’ll be hearing from my lawyer!” the photographer shouts as Gerald hauls her away with a loud sigh.

Andrew bends down and grabs her camera.

“You give that back!” she shouts. It’s a tiny little thing, smaller than a phone, and upon closer inspection I see there’s a head strap. It looks like a coal miner’s headlamp.

“Probably live streaming,” Gerald shouts back to Andrew. “Turn it off however you can.”

Without another word, Andrew marches back into the house. I follow on bare feet made of ice. He goes into the small guest bathroom off the living room. I hear a toilet flush. Andrew emerges, shaking his head, no camera in hand.

“Took care of it?”

“Oops. I dropped it.” His hands go up in mock contrition.

“If that really was live streaming -- ”

“Then they got an eyeful.” He rakes his hair, eyes angry. “Might even find Dory somewhere in the sewer system.” His jaw pulses with tension. “It’s just getting worse.”

“So I’m not imagining it? It feels worse now.” I wrap my arms around my waist and shiver.

“Let’s get back in the hot tub. Gerald’s got this covered.” His arms slip around me and he tenses. “You’re an icicle,” he says, voice low and angry. “Those assholes. I need to get you back in the water.”

We have radically different ways of processing stress. Maybe it’s evolutionary. Fighting the paparazzi battle has made Andrew pumped up and charged, and I can feel he’s hard and ready to work out these overflowing stress hormones on, well, me.

I, on the other hand, am shut down, my brain’s pleasure centers completely closed off because you can’t have sex while you’re fleeing a hungry bear. Literally. The logistics are impossible.

Or something like that.

I’m trying to remember how it all works from my evolutionary psych class back in college as Andrew reaches into my robe and cups one breast, his palm impossibly warm against the iceberg of my nipple.

“You want sex? Now?” I pause before the staircase, really not interested in anything but some coffee. Or wine. Or a sensory deprivation chamber.

“You ask that as if I shouldn’t.” His touch is light, expression turning from determination to openness, reading me.

“How can you be interested in sex after being stalked by paparazzi while we’re naked and nearly being exposed?” I flatten my palm against his bare chest.

“A few minutes ago you were just fine in the hot tub, surrounded by paparazzi.”

“That was pre-drone. My primal brain felt safe enough to let my arousal system kick in. I don’t get how you -- ”

He moves my hand lower. “That’s how. My arousal system is always on.”

“The mechanics are easy to understand. It’s more your psychological state. How do you go from having our privacy utterly invaded to wanting sex? Don’t you need to process what just happened?”

“Sex is how I process what just happened.”

“Climbing on top of me and burying yourself inside is how you process a drone-stealing hawk?”

“If that’s an action plan, then yes.” He frowns. “How do you process what just happened?”

“With coffee and conversation. Lots of talking. For instance, why do people like that -- ”

He silences me with a kiss.

“That was neither caffeinated nor conversational,” I admonish, breathless and pulsing from his mouth.

“It also wasn’t sex,” he says, pretending to pout. “Neither of us is getting what we need.” Separating from me, he crosses the room and draws the curtains closed.

He walks me backwards to the couch, which is turned away from the patio doors. My need for privacy is heightened, the push and pull of Andrew’s desire and my own freakout at war inside me.

Mostly at war between my legs, which is generally not a battleground.

We’re here to work, but also to have fun. Our rude interruption doesn’t have to end the pleasure, right?

“I might need a little more convincing,” I murmur against his neck, feeling him tense with arousal, then inhale slowly, the sound and fire in his throat making me warm up all over.

“Persuasion, you say? Need a little Austen?”

“I could certainly use a little Mr. Darcy right now.” I mean, who couldn’t?

“‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,’” he quotes as he nips my ear.

“In want?” My hand makes it clear I can feel his want, wrapping my fingers around it.

“I certainly do have good fortune,” he rasps as his hand slips down my ribcage, resting on the curve of my hip, his skin so warm, mine quite chilled.

I stroke him. “A big fortune.”

He groans.

I smile.

We find our way.

Evolutionarily.