'Falling In Love With You Could Really F--k Up My Plans for Becoming President'

That may be the most truthful thing the Silky Pony has ever uttered. Who knows, if he's dealt the wrong cards he may even wind up in prison one of these days.

John Edwards' mistress has revealed for the first time how the illicit lovers fell in lust and slept together the night they met -- and claims the presidential candidate predicted the wild romp would cause his premature ejection from politics.

"Falling in love with you could really f- - - up my plans for becoming president," Edwards told vixen videographer Rielle Hunter after their sexual tryst at Manhattan's Regency hotel in February 2006.

In her bombshell interview with GQ, Hunter says:

* Her first words to him were "You're so hot" -- and they had sex later that night in his hotel room.

* Edwards was scared to death of his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, fearing if she knew the truth, "he would be pummeled."

* The then-presidential candidate hoped Hunter, pregnant with his child, would get an abortion.

Contrary to various accounts of their affair, Hunter, 45, told the magazine she met the former North Carolina senator on the corner of 61st Street and Park Avenue in February 2006, and did not pick him up at a bar.

She had spotted him earlier in the lounge of The Regency hotel, but they did not speak.

"I did not know who he was," Hunter said. "The John Edwards I saw in 2004 on TV I believed to be a disconnected, two-dimensional geek kind of guy. And the man sitting across the room was not that at all."

After learning who he was, she gave her business card to one of Edwards' aides.

"It said, 'Rielle Hunter. Being is free,' " she recalled.

Edwards, 56, later looked for her at the lounge and was disappointed she was gone, she said.

"So when he walked around the corner [again] and saw me standing there, he lit up like a Christmas tree. And I thought his reaction when he saw me was just so cute," she said. "I mean, he looked like a little kid at Christmas. And I just uttered to him, 'You're so hot.' And he said, 'Why, thank you!' And he almost jumped into my arms. Literally."

Later that night, Hunter said, he invited her to his hotel room.

She said she told the friends she was with, " 'I won't sleep with him.' And so I went over to his room, and I walked in. And I. Was. Terrified. Because I had never experienced anything like what was flowing between us."

"Come closer. I won't bite you," Edwards beckoned.

Can this sordid tale get any weirder? You bet.

When Edwards denied he was the baby's father in interviews and his aide Andrew Young came forward to claim paternity, Hunter said she was heartbroken but understood.

Edwards "was traumatized," she said. "Because he had been living a life that was now exposed. A hidden life, when it is exposed, is a traumatic event for the person going through it. And they're not in their right mind."

She said Young was willing to take the fall for Edwards because "Andrew was in love with Johnny.

"In love with him. Beyond. And I believe he loved Johnny more than he loved [his own wife] Cheri, so Johnny was the third person in their relationship."