'You Are So Hot'

This allegedly is the line Rielle Hunter used to pick up that hottie John Edwards. How do we know? Well, his wife says it's so.

Elizabeth, 59, who is terminally ill with cancer, speaks in far more detail than before about her husband's infidelity in her new memoir, "Resilience," due to be published May 12 by Broadway Books. A copy was obtained by the Daily News.

Despite feeling deeply deceived, Elizabeth Edwards nonetheless publicly stood by her husband's side, lending his candidacy the aura of a warm, loving family life.

But she had actually wanted him to quit the race to protect the family. Edwards admitted the hanky-panky to her days after declaring his candidacy in 2006 - almost a year before the National Enquirer reported it.

She was afraid of the destructive questions Edwards' affair with videographer Rielle Hunter would raise.

Later events proved her right. "He should not have run," she says.

Edwards did not publicly admit the affair until last August - seven months after he quit the race, and the National Enquirer had reported he was the father of Hunter's infant daughter.

Edwards denied paternity, and his wife's book doesn't address that issue.

But it does highlight Elizabeth Edwards' anger and sorrow at being duped by a man whose four children she'd borne and whose political ambitions she'd passionately supported for so many years.

Hunter initially seduced Edwards using a worn come-on line, Elizabeth writes:

"You are so hot," Hunter told him outside a swank New York hotel. The campaign ultimately paid Hunter $114,000 to produce a batch of short films on his candidacy.

She lashes out at Hunter, now 45, whose name she never actually uses in the book, as a parasitic groupie who invaded the Edwardses' life.

Her own life may be tragic, she concludes, but Hunter's is "pathetic."

If Hunter is pathetic, what does that make a guy who cheats on his cancer-stricken wife?