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Jake heard the sound of the shower.
Once he did, he headed for his room.
Catarina could be playing games. She might have turned on the water to fool him. Even now, for all he knew, she could be huddled on the other side of the bedroom door, just waiting to make a break for freedom.
Maybe that would be for the best.
That expression on her face a few minutes ago, as if she’d seen…What? A ghost? A monster?
A man.
It was a safe bet she’d just experienced a first. A half-naked man. Well, not that he’d actually been half naked, but…
But that look in her eyes. Not fear, exactly. More like—like wonder. Curiosity. As if she were trying to imagine how it would feel to touch a man’s skin. Run her hand over his chest. Feel the difference between his hardness and her softness.
Because she would be soft, under that ugly dress.
She would be silk and satin, all warm golden skin that had never known a man’s caress. Breasts that had never been cupped by a man’s hands. Nipples that had never felt the whisper of a man’s tongue or the heat of his breath.
Jake shuddered, wiped the crazy images from his head, pulled off the rest of his clothes and got into the shower.
Minutes later, restored to sanity, wearing a pair of old grey sweatpants and a washed-out University of Michigan T-shirt, he strolled into the sitting room. His ward’s door was still shut.
Of course that didn’t mean she was still behind it.
Stupid to have left her unattended, he thought grimly…but the door that led from the suite to the hall was still bolted. Unless his charge had learned how to slip out through the keyhole, she was—
The door to her room opened. Jake swung around.
Catarina Mendes stood in the doorway. The ugly brown thing was gone, replaced by a long white nightgown over which she wore a white terrycloth hotel robe. From her little gasp of breath, he figured she hadn’t expected to find him in the sitting room, and she fumbled for the robe’s sash, brought the ends together and hurriedly knotted them. But not before Jake made some observations.
The first was that the nightgown was designed to be as sexless, as unfeminine as possible.
He swallowed dryly.
The second was that things didn’t always play out as intended. The plain, unsexy gown clung to her body in all the places it shouldn’t. He could see an outline of long, endless legs, rounded breasts and pebbled nipples.
“Oh,” she said.
Oh, indeed.
Jake swallowed dryly and dragged his gaze to her face. It didn’t help, not when she stared at him through darkly lashed eyes that held all the fear and vulnerability she’d done such a fine job of hiding until now; not when her newly washed hair fell to her shoulders in the chestnut and gold of an autumn woods.
Looking down didn’t do any good, either. Which made no sense because all he could see were her bare toes peeping out from beneath the hem of the nightgown. He wasn’t into feet—well, not unless they were encased in sky-high Manolos—so how come those toes, free of stilettos and even of polish, were having an effect on his hormones?
“I—I didn’t realize…”
Jake bit back a groan. “No,” he said, “neither did I.”
He knew they were talking about two different things, but hell, he was lucky he could talk at all—luckier still when a knock at the door signaled the arrival of Room Service.
“Coming,” he called, wincing at his bad choice of response, wincing that he should even be thinking such a thing…
Wincing because he knew it was time to stop kidding himself.
His ward, his charge, his unasked-for burden—whatever you wanted to call Catarina Mendes—was no child.
She was a woman, a gorgeous woman, untouched, unawakened, unexplored. He was charged with spending the next two months protecting her from the temptations of a century she wouldn’t recognize and from the men who’d surely come running when they saw her.
