BEACHY KEEN: Edwards enjoys some time with his love child, Quinn, and baby mama Rielle Hunter at his beach house in North Carolina this week. (
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Rielle Hunter should have titled her book, “Fifty Shades of Gross.”
John Edwards’ mistress breathlessly recalled how the former senator dominated her in the sack during their first steamy tryst — calling it the “most extraordinary night of my life” in her new tell-all tome.
“And then a moment came while we were talking when something in my heart clicked and I surrendered. I took off my teacher hat, let go of all my resistance to him and let him lead.
“And lead he did,” Hunter, 48, gushed in the book, “What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter, and Me.”
“He led me toward the most extraordinary night of my life. There was a lot of talk, a lot of laughter and zero sleep.”
Hunter introduced herself to Edwards at the lobby bar of the New York Regency Hotel in February 2006, asking to volunteer for his presidential campaign.
She went to Edwards’ hotel room after calling him “so hot, and became as helpless as a star-struck schoolgirl when he turned on the charm.
“The connection I felt when I walked in the door had only grown and the amount of energy between us was huge and unstoppable,” she wrote, according to excerpts released at RadarOnline.com.
After that first night, he fell just as quickly for her.
The disgraced senator — who once called Hunter, his baby mama, a “crazy slut” — would have long, romantic talks with her on the phone as he traveled.
“Love does evolve you and encourage you to behave differently. Was he in love with me? That night began our frequent extended phone conversations, usually four hours in length . . . He said he found me to be so refreshing and couldn’t believe how easy I was to talk to,” wrote Hunter.
She wrote that during one conversation, “We talked for two hours. He said repeatedly that he couldn’t believe how easy it was to talk to me.
“I was completely fascinated by him. Where could we possibly be headed? And was he really already changing his behavior based on our first night together.”
The affair was apparently a religious experience for Edwards, who adopted some of the New Age terms Hunter often used.
“He also told me that I was the first person in his life to give him energy instead of taking it,” she wrote.
Edwards dropped a bombshell, however, that he had mistresses stashed around the country.
“He told me that he had an entire hidden life that had gone on for decades and that he was currently involved with three different women. One lived in Los Angeles, one in Florida and one in Chicago,” she wrote.
Hunter was so smitten that she stuck with him even when he revealed that the other mistresses were a lie, meant to keep her at bay while he traveled.
“Clearly, this behavior of his was not going to change overnight . . . I also told him that if I was going to help him, he couldn’t lie to me.
“He needed to have one person in his life that was safe for him. He said that wasn’t a problem, and when he said that, I felt a wave of total relief roll off of him.”
Hunter also blasted Edwards’ marriage to Elizabeth, who was suffering from breast cancer as her husband cheated on her.
“He needed this safe place. Somewhere in the midst of our talk, long after I realized how far off the rails his marriage was, and for how long it had been that way, something happened between us,” she wrote.
And as The Post revealed yesterday in exclusive photos, the couple may still have a future together with their 4-year-old daughter, Quinn.
Hunter and Edwards, 59, spent a romantic weekend at the former presidential hopeful’s vacation home on Figure Eight Island, NC.
They frolicked in the sand and were spotted hugging and kissing.
In another photo obtained by The Post yesterday, the couple relaxed on the porch of the home with Quinn — Edwards doted on his daughter as Hunter comfortably slouched in her deck chair.
Excerpts released earlier this week showed how much Hunter despised Elizabeth, who died in December 2010.
She described “Johnny’s” wife as a “witch on wheels,” “crazy” and “venomous.”
The marriage, she wrote, was “filled with issues that clearly neither Johnny nor Elizabeth wanted to address.”
The cringe-worthy details in her memoir — which had been rejected by major book publishers — comes just two weeks after Edwards was acquitted of charges that he subverted campaign- finance laws to hide the affair.