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How could he? His perfect woman was finally in his house. Her suitcases were in his bedroom. Her scent was in his shower. She washere. She’d chosen him.
He would have to push away the fear. It was unreasonable, irrational. And it might not happen.
Not if he fed her, anyway. “Okay.” He squeezed her and began to stand. “I will find us some food. Stay here.”
“Okey dokey.” Megan wrapped herself fully in the sheets and picked up her glass of wine from the floor. “They’re right,” she said with an adorable wriggle of her shoulders. “It does get chilly at night here.”
“I’ll turn up the heat.” In the meantime, he pulled the comforter off the bed and covered her in it, making her squeak in surprise. Then he got on the floor and puffed the comforter over both of them, hiding them from the world and the chill. Megan smiled indulgently and let him crawl over to her for another kiss before pushing him away.
“Seriously, I’m starving.”
“Si, signorina.”
He opened the closet to find the LA clothes he’d left behind when he’d gone to Boston so suddenly. But he could hardly get into the closet for the rolling rack of sparkly, slinky dresses that filled it.
“Have you looked in here?” he called back to Megan.
“Yes. I saw it. I’ll deal with it tomorrow,” she said shortly.
Alessandro pushed the rack to a corner of the room and found himself a pair of pajamas. Tomorrow, as the lady said, was another day.
♦
Chapter 20
Megan woke up at four a.m. “Damn time zones,” she muttered after she’d tried not to disturb Alessandro for a whole half hour. He was apparently unaffected. A lesson he’d perhaps learned from odd schedules on movie sets. He slept against the white sheets like a dark angel. Really, his eyelashes shouldn’t be allowed.
She got up and found the thick white bathrobe in the bathroom along with slide-in slippers, then tiptoed onto the deck and sat watching the lights hidden in the trees become slowly overtaken by twilight, then dawn, then the brightening sky. The peace was absolute. When was the last time she’d taken such deep breaths?
At last, the sun broke above the trees, and she went back inside to make coffee. Befitting his historical status as the hottest barista in town, Alessandro’s coffee machine was huge, shiny, and complicated. Megan was equal to it, but her coffee just couldn’t turn out as well as his. She brought her offering to Alessandro anyway.
“Yours is better,” she admitted before he could take a sip.
He raised his eyebrows at her, took a sip, and sighed in pleasure. “You are correct. Mine is better.”
She aimed a pillow at him, but with coffee in her other hand and in his, she didn’t let it fly.
“I am glad to be better than you at something,” he said, opening the doors to the deck.
“What am I better than you at?” Yeah, she was fishing. So what? What a joy to be around a man she could tease and flirt with in total peace and safety. Alessandro had all but said “I like you. You can relax.” So that was what Megan was going to do.
He looked up at the pale-blue morning sky. “Eyeliner,” he said.
Megan burst out laughing. “You don’t even wear eyeliner!”
“And why is that, do you think?”
“Because you don’t need it, Mr. Double Eyelashes.”
He grinned. “Ah, you noticed.”
Megan rolled her eyes. He’d outfished her for compliments. Watching him stretch out on the chaise in his mouthwateringly tight underwear and an open bathrobe, Megan decided to forgive him.
They spent the morning on the deck in easy silence, eating fruit and yogurt and sipping their coffee. Megan didn’t even try to look at her phone.
When the doorbell chimed, they both jumped. Alessandro leaped up and tightened his bathrobe around himself. “Ready?” he said.
“I’m not sure what for,” she answered. “But yes.”
