Page 22 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

“You are,” he said.

“I think you’re ridiculous.”

She shifted, bringing herself beneath his arm, and that was when he felt like he had been shot clean through with an arrow.

It was like the illness itself had stripped away something. Himself, maybe, because all he could see was how beautiful she was. It didn’t matter that the first time he had seen her she had been dressed like a reindeer. And it didn’t matter that her house was ridiculous, or that she was a barrier to getting what he wanted, which normally made someone his enemy and nothing more.

Suddenly, she was a beautiful enigma.

“I think my fever might be dangerously high,” he said.

“Well, that’s concerning. But I can take your temperature.”

He narrowed his eyes. “How?”

She started laughing. “Oh, don’t worry about that. There’s no reason to get that medical. I’ll just put it under your tongue.” She guided him to the room that he was staying in. And then she disappeared.

He was suddenly overly warm, and he stripped his shirt off, then went to the closet where he had deposited his belongings earlier, and took out a pair of sweatpants. He put them on, then lay down on the top of the bed. This illness had come on like a freight train. And entirely without his permission. He was incensed. As he did not allow for things like this. And yet. Nothing was going the way that he wanted it to.

You cannot control the weather.

Hell and damn. He had controlled plenty enough for a good while now. Why was everything suddenly out of his hands?

“Oh!”

She sounded immediately like a heroine from an old movie, offended and horrified all at once, when she stepped into the room and saw him lying there on the bed, bare-chested.

“I thought that I would get comfortable,” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

Then she seemed to avert her gaze as she came to the bed with a thermometer in hand. She knelt down beside him. “Open your mouth.”

She slipped the thermometer inside, and he knew a sense of warmth and care like he had never known before.

He’d been sick as a child, of course. But there had been no hand on his forehead. There had been no concerned figure by his bedside. Maybe there would have been if he hadn’t shut them all out. If he hadn’t put so much distance between himself and his mother even then.

There was no way to know.

And he could not ask her now.

She put her hand on his forehead again. And he was... Undone. “You are very warm,” she said. “I wasn’t this feverish. I’m concerned that you have something worse.”

“It wouldn’t dare,” he said.

“The virus?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You are formidable, but I don’t think you’re that formidable. Sorry.”

“All tremble in my wake.”

Even he knew he was being ridiculous at this point.

“I am very sorry that you have been so sorely offended,” she said. “But you have to stop talking, because you’re ruining the temperature.”

He stopped. It was an old-fashioned thermometer. Glass. And it took minutes for it to get his temperature. He almost thought she was using it on purpose. To keep him quiet. But he didn’t mind, because there was something somewhat comforting about having her there, kneeling beside him, holding the thermometer.

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