Page 57 of So This Is Christmas

Apparently her ogling had not been subtle enough. Mr. Benz’slip quirk had become quirkier. “Perhaps I should have warned you that Eldovia tends toward the German practice of nudity at spas. We’re not as dogmatic about it, but for the most part, the feeling is that bathing attire in a place such as this is not called for.”

“Mmm.” She nodded.

“Nudity is not considered sexual by default the way it is in America.”

“Oh, totally.” She laughed as if to communicate how silly those prudish Americans were. But then something terrible occurred to her:Was Mr. Benz naked under his robe?

“Shall we? Do you have a preference as to temperature?”

“As hot as possible.” Perhaps that way she could attribute her flaming cheeks to the heat.

He led her to a small pool at the back of the property that was labeled with a sign that read “40 degrees.” She did some quick math in her head to convert to Fahrenheit. Wow, they didn’t mess around here.

She eyed Mr. Benz. They were about to get naked and/or half naked in front of each other.

In a totally nonsexual way. Because Americans were the only ones whose immature minds would go there.

“I’ll hang up our towels and robes if you’ll give me yours,” he said, making her realize that she’d been standing there like a slack-jawed idiot.

“Thanks.” She tried to be unobtrusive about watching him as he hung her robe at a row of pegs built into a charmingly rustic wooden lean-to and began shrugging out of his.

Her cheeks wereon fire. Dear god. Was she going to seeMr. Benz’s butt?

He dropped the robe and...

Nope.

She heaved a shaky exhale. He wasn’t even wearing a tiny Speedo, as most of the not-naked men here were. Mr. Benz was wearing trunks.

Which was good!

They were on the shorter end of what would be considered normal in the United States, though, and they were actually pretty tight across his—Stop it. What was shedoing? She needed to get a freaking grip. Without waiting for Mr. Benz to make his way back over, she turned, slipped out of her spa-issued rubber sandals, and stepped into the water.

“Oh my god,” she moaned. The heat was nothing short of glorious.

“It is rather wonderful, isn’t it?” Mr. Benz reappeared at the edge of the pool wearing those little trunks—except this time she had a frontal view—and Cara’s head nearly exploded.

She thought back to their unplanned meeting in the hallway at the Owl and Spruce. Her mind had jumped to wondering what he slept in and then on to wondering what he looked like naked.

Well, now she knew. Kind of. Mr. Benz wasn’t a bodybuilder or anything, but all those horsey sports must have done their work on him. He was lean and had a gently sculpted torso and arm muscles and sturdy, muscular legs.

She was discombobulated. It was the “What’s wrong with this picture?” feeling of being face-to-face with Mr. Benz in his skivvies. He had seemed to her like the kind of man who was born in a three-piece suit. It was taking her a moment to adjust to the fact that Mr. Benz was hot.

Mr. Benz was hot.

Wow.

But okay. The world was full of hot people. She needed to accept the fact that Mr. Benz was one of them and move on.

Mr. Benz heaved a huge sigh of his own as he stepped into the pool, and the skin on his chest pebbled as he sank into the water. When he was all the way in, he tilted his head back so it was resting on the edge of the pool and closed his eyes.

So she let herself keep looking.

They didn’t speak for a while. Cara reflected on how many different kinds of silences she had shared with her Eldovian tour guide. There had been awkward ones when neither seemed to know what to say, fraught ones when one or both had said too much, companionable ones when no one felt the need to speak. This was one of the companionable ones.

He righted his head and caught her looking at him. “There was a fall from grace because my father was, unbeknownst to us, a gambling addict who managed to gamble away our house, my parents’ savings, a good chunk ofhisparents’ savings, and every asset we had—every car, every horse, every piece of jewelry. He even lost a first edition collection of Rilke’s poems that had been given to me by someone I greatly admired.”

He was answering her question from before, the “What happened?” he had previously brushed off, returning to it unbidden, as if the glorious heat of the water was loosening his tongue as well as his muscles. She wasn’t sure how to respond. She wanted to acknowledge that he’d told her something real, that her assumptions about him had been incorrect.

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