Page 24 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

Her cheeks turned pink. He supposed it was very bad form to say something like that when she was trying so hard to take care of him. But he found he couldn’t help himself.

“I think you can rub your own chest,” she said.

“But it sounds nicer to think of you doing it,” he said.

“Are you trying to flirt with me?”

He chuckled. For some reason that was funny.

“I don’t flirt.”

“No?”

“No. If I want a woman I simply tell her. And then I have her.”

“I see. Do they need to want you to?”

“They always do.”

She moved away from him then. He wished that she hadn’t.

“I’m going to come and check on you again soon. I’ll just...get more water. And get more cool cloths. Hot water and cold water. Everything.”

And then, when she left, he found himself drifting out of consciousness again. And dreaming of her hands.

CHAPTER SIX

SHECOULDN’TBREATHE. Being in the room with him when he didn’t have a shirt on like that was... It was terrible. Because he was half-delirious, it was obvious. The stories that he had been telling about his childhood didn’t make any sense. She had tried to figure out what the truth of that could possibly be, what the whole truth could be from the little bits and pieces that he had tried to tell her.

There was something in his words that was just so tortured. Whether everything he’d said was true or not, she didn’t know, but it made her chest hurt.

He was just so... He was so gorgeous and masculine and feral, and she had never seen anything like him. He was like an old-fashioned movie star. Broad-chested and muscular, dark hair sprinkled over golden skin. She had wanted to rub his chest. That was just a mess. She couldn’t be lusting after a man who was half out of his mind.

A man she didn’t even like. Yes, it was nice that he had taken care of her while she was ill, and now he was ill probably because of her, no matter that she had tried to blame it on outside forces, but that didn’t mean that she should be... Thinking about him that way.

Her grandmother would be shocked. Shocked to know that her granddaughter was alone in a house with a man, first of all, and second of all, ogling his bare chest.

She had always been so well-behaved where men were concerned.

Because you never met one that you wanted.

Well, what good did it do to want this one? He might be beautiful, but he was... Incomprehensible. He thought that caring about things, that sentimentality was a defect of some kind.

He clearly cared for nothing and no one.

And then when he had talked about women...

They always wanted him? He was so incredibly full of himself.

And yet, she could believe it. That, she didn’t think was from illness delirium. That, she was afraid, was the truth of it.

That women were quite interested in him, everywhere he went, always. And that if he said that he wanted them, then... Well, then he could have them.

What would you do if he wanted you?

She shoved that aside.

He couldn’t consent right now. He was half out of his mind.

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