the ultimate practical joke. I’m an awful person, she thought. His offer to read to me is such a sweet gesture…and here I am snickering over the inevitable outcome. She slid deeper under the covers, hoping to hide the horrible smile that kept creeping across her mouth. “Mmmm,” she mumbled, “I’d like you to read to me.”
He opened the book to the bookmark and scanned the page. Chris watched him closely, but his face remained impassive. He flipped back a few pages. “Would you mind if I started at the beginning of the chapter? I’ve never been any good at walking into the middle of a movie…or, in this case, starting in the middle of a chapter.”
Chris gave silent assent. She closed her eyes in deference to the pounding headache and lay perfectly still, hoping to diminish the nausea. Ken read in a low, velvety voice that drifted soothingly through the fog of fever. The story was already familiar to her and required little concentration. She heard only a few disconnected sentences before falling into a restless sleep.
Chris opened her eyes to find sunlight splashing across her comforter. There was a moment of panic until she realized it was Saturday and she could oversleep legally. A memory of the preceding night sifted through the sluggish drowse. “Oh no. Oh darn.” She groaned softly, attempting to rise to a sitting position. She propped herself up against the headboard and broke out into a cold sweat from the effort.
“Are you okay?”
Chris turned toward the familiar rumble of Ken’s bedroom voice to find him slouched casually in the overstuffed club chair in the corner of her room. He half reclined in the chair with one sock-clad foot on the floor and one resting on the ottoman that matched the chair. His red plaid flannel shirt hung unbuttoned and untucked, giving silent testimony that he’d slept in his clothes; and, from the dark smudges under his eyes, Chris guessed that he’d slept very badly. He stood and stretched, unconsciously displaying an intriguing patch of dark hair under his shirt and a tantalizingly masculine bulge behind his zipper. Chris managed a weak smile and decided she must be feeling better. Really sick people didn’t get that much plea sure just from ogling a bulge.
Ken sat at the edge of her bed and lay his hand against her cheek. “Glad to see you feeling better. You had me scared for a while there last night. You were really sick until about two-thirty, and then your fever broke.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You kept calling for Bruce. Who the hell is Bruce?”
“Bruce was my dog when I was a little girl. We were inseparable. He was a huge, shaggy sheepdog that loped after me wherever I went. He died from old age when I was nine years old.”
Ken looked disgusted. “You mean I spent the better part of the night being jealous of a dog?”
“Were you really jealous?”
“Um-hmmm.” He covered her hand with his.
“I think I fell asleep while you were reading to me.”
“You didn’t even make it to the good part.” He smiled roguishly. “That’s some book. I always thought romances were for delicate, frail lady types. Do you know there are pages and pages of sex in that book?”
Chris bit back a smile. “Gee, I’m sorry I missed it.”
“That’s okay. I marked my favorite pages.” His eyes sparkled dangerously. “When you’re feeling better we can read them together.”
“You marked your favorite pages?” She looked at the book lying on the floor beside the club chair. White strips of paper fluttered throughout. “You read the whole book.”
He looked embarrassed. His swarthy complexion colored red under the black beard. “You were so sick…I was afraid to leave you alone, and it…uh…it gave me something to do.” He stood up suddenly and plunged his hand into his pocket. “Well, hell,” he grinned good-naturedly, “the truth is…I enjoyed it.” His eyes raked across her nightshirt. They crinkled into laugh lines and his teeth flashed white in a dazzling smile of laughter turned inward. “You can’t imagine how frustrating it was.”
Chris wrinkled her nose and frowned. Didn’t the man ever do anything rotten? How could she kick him out of her life when he was such a good sport about everything? How could anyone not love Ken? “Damn.”
“Damn?”
She slumped into her pillow. “I practically snickered myself to sleep last night knowing you would be in a state when you got to all those juicy love scenes. And now instead of getting grumpy and testy, you have the nerve to be adorable about it.”
“Adorable? Hmmm. I’ve never thought of myself as being adorable. Puppies and baby dresses and stuffed animals are adorable. Garfield is adorable.” He straightened his spine. “I’ve always thought of myself more as… irresistible.”
Chris responded with a heavy-lidded smile. Yes, she thought, you’re irresistible. But there are times when you’re also adorable, and I find it every bit as incongruous as you do. It’s amazing that anyone so masculine and so virile could have kept enough little-boy vulnerability to make him adorable.
Ken straightened the comforter and tucked it in around Chris. “What’s the verdict? Is this a case of major flu? Or is this one of those twenty-four-hour things?”
“I think it’s just twenty-four-hour. I’m not nauseous, and I don’t think I have a fever.” She held her head with both hands. “Just residual headache.”
“And from the white pallor of your otherwise glowing complexion I would guess you’re pretty weak.”
Chris sank lower into her pillow. “Nothing two or three days’ worth of solid sleep wouldn’t cure.”
“Do you think you should see a doctor?”
“No!”
He nodded his head. “Okay. How about some tea and toast?”
“I’d rather have coffee and a waffle.”
His eyebrow quirked over one eye in reprimand, and he sauntered from the room.
Sunday morning Chris swung her legs over the side of the bed and reveled in the glorious feeling of being healthy and rested. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee washed over her in warm, tantalizing waves. Her man was in the kitchen. Her man. The phrase almost knocked the wind out of her. She rose from the bed on shaky legs, knowing it wasn’t flu that made her tremble-it was the anticipation of seeing Ken. For two days he’d brought her flowers and books and meals. He’d brought a TV into her room, and he’d gotten movies for the DVD player.
He’d stayed with her, sharing her recuperation in a quiet, comfy way, sitting on the bed or in the club chair, and he kept an atmosphere of companionable silence, allowing her to doze and leaving time for her to think private thoughts-mostly of him. Mostly thoughts she had no business thinking. Thoughts about a man in her future. A man who would be a real father to Lucy, teaching her soccer and softball and grilling prospective suitors. A man Chris could talk to in the privacy of her bedroom. Not sexy talk-just regular talk, like “Vicki Jamison drove me nuts today,” or “Orange juice was half-price at Super-Duper, so I bought twelve gallons.”
It was easy to imagine Ken as such a man. He was the stuff dreams were made of-and she loved him. Lord, how she loved him. It was a bittersweet, lump-in-the-throat sort of love. It was a love she would have to guard closely and keep in her secret heart of hearts because fear of another betrayal knotted her stomach and fluttered wildly in her chest. It was irrational and ungrounded, she told herself, but it was real.
She padded to the top of the stairs and called down to Ken.
Instantly, he appeared at the bottom step with a wooden spoon in his hand and a cookbook stuffed under his arm. This was going to be impossible, Chris thought, grinning. How could any woman resist this guy? She grasped hold of the stair rail to keep from flinging herself into his arms and struggled to assume a cheerful voice.
“Look at me. I’m actually a human being today.”
“So I see,” he murmured, his eyes full of lazy seduction. “And looking very good.”
Ken was peeking up her nightie. She stumbled backward, feeling inexplicably shy. She waited for the rush of excitement to subside in her stomach before speaking. “What are you making?”
“It was supposed to be a surprise. I was going to bring you breakfast in bed.”
“No!” Yesterday he’d made rubber Jell-O that couldn’t be cut with a steak knife. He had permanently fused two inches of cooked, congealed, totally burned oatmeal to the bottom of her best saucepan. And he had cooked a pot roast for three hours before discovering it was wrapped in cellophane.
His face grew quizzical at her adamant “no.”
“I’m feeling better-I’ll make breakfast this morning,” she insisted. “Give me a minute to shower, and I’ll be right down.”
