“I appreciate your gentlemanly effort.”

He reached for the snap on her jeans.

“I can do that myself!”

“Darn.”

“What about gentlemanly efforts?”

“In the last forty-eight hours I’ve used up my lifetime allotment of gentlemanly efforts. That was the last one I had left.” He gave a distraught glance at the shape of her breasts against the maroon-and-yellow jersey. “The least you could do is be less…voluptuous.”

Chris looked down at herself. “I can’t help it. I’m cold.” As if on cue, her teeth began to chatter and goose bumps erupted on her arms.

“You need to get into bed.” In one swift movement he had her jeans unsnapped and down to her knees. He pulled one cuff and then the other and expertly rolled her under the covers.

“You’re awfully good at removing ladies’ pants. You must have had tons of practice.”

“I practice every chance I get.”

Chris let herself sink back into the pillow. She closed her eyes and allowed Ken to tuck the feather quilt under her chin. It was awful being sick, but it was very nice to be on the receiving end of such loving care. If Edna had been home she would have trundled her off to bed with a stern lecture about “taking care of oneself.” And when Edna wasn’t looking Lucy would have brought her freshly made crayon drawings and smuggled her treats from the kitchen. A sudden wave of loneliness for the little girl washed over Chris. She felt her eyes fill with tears.

Ken perched on the edge of the bed, studying her with a concerned face. “Tears? What’s the matter?”

“I-I miss Lucy!” she sniffled. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. “Goodness, just look at me-I’m pathetic…lying here, crying for my daughter. I feel like such a boob.”

Ken smiled and stroked her hair from her forehead. “You’re not a boob. You’re just sick, and you miss your family. Why don’t we do something to take your mind off it.” He reached out and took a paperback book from the night table. “When my little sisters were sick I used to read to them. Would you like me to read to you?”

Chris looked at the book he held in his hand. It was a romance. An engraved leather bookmark innocently rested between the pages of a torrid love scene. Ordinarily, she would never have been able to put the book down at such a spot, but an especially exhausting weekend had caused her to drop off to sleep even as the hero’s hand crept up the heroine’s thigh.

Aching bones and throbbing head were not sufficient to extinguish the humor of the situation. Chris could barely control the impulse to laugh out loud at the idea of Ken reading her love scenes while she had the plague. It was 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.”