Capturing The Millionaire

She’d changed her clothes, he noticed. It looked as if she was wearing the same curve-hugging jeans, but instead of a T-shirt, she had on a green pullover sweater that played up the color of her eyes—among other things.

It took him a second to raise his gaze to her face. “How long was I out?”

She bent to pat Winchester on the head. The dog had spent the entire night at Alain’s side. There was a definite attachment forming, at least from the dog’s point of view.

“You slept through the night,” Kayla told him. She had spent it in the chair opposite him, watching to make sure he was all right. “Rather peacefully, I might add.” And then, because he’d mentioned a woman’s name during the night, she couldn’t resist asking, “Who’s Lily?”

That question had come at him from left field. Did this woman know his mother? It seemed unlikely, given that she was wrapped up with her animals, and the only animals her mother liked were the two-legged kind. In bed.

Alain watched Kayla’s face as he answered, “My mother. Why?”

“You called out to her once during the night.” She cocked her head, curious. “You call your mother by her first name?” She’d been around six years old before she even knew her parents had other names besides Mommy and Daddy. She couldn’t imagine referring to either of them by their given names.

“No, not really.” Since he couldn’t remember if he’d even dreamed, he hadn’t a clue as to why he’d call out his mother’s name, and he didn’t know any other Lily. But he was more curious about something else. “You stayed up all night watching me sleep?” Why would she do that? he wondered, feeling oddly comforted by the act.

Kayla laughed as she shook her head. “We’re a little rural here, but I’m not that desperate for entertainment. No, I didn’t stay up all night watching you sleep. I spent part of it sleeping myself,” she assured him.

In actuality, she’d spent very little of it asleep. His breathing had been labored at one point, and she’d worried that she might have given him too much of the medication, so she’d remained awake to monitor him. But she didn’t feel there was any reason for Alain to know that.

“Nothing I wouldn’t have done for any of my other patients,” she continued nonchalantly. “Even if you don’t have fur.” And then she looked a little more serious. “How’s the head?”

Until she asked, Alain hadn’t realized that the anvil chorus was no longer practicing their latest performance inside his skull. He touched his forehead slowly as if to assure himself that it was still there.

“Headache’s gone,” he said in amazement. The way it had hurt last night, he’d been fairly certain it was going to split his head open. And now it was gone, as if it had never existed. Except for the state of his ribs, he actually felt pretty good.

Pleased, Kayla nodded. “Good.” Moving away from the coffee table, she turned toward the kitchen. “Hungry?”

He was about to say no. He was never hungry first thing in the morning, requiring only pitch-black coffee until several hours after he was awake and at work. But this morning there was this unfamiliar pinch in his stomach. It probably had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t had any dinner last night, he reasoned.

He nodded slowly in response to her question. “Yes, I am.”

Kayla caught the inflection in his voice. “You sound surprised.”

“I am,” he admitted. “I’m not usually hungry first thing in the morning.”

He was probably always too busy to notice, she guessed. People in the city tended to spin their wheels a lot, going nowhere and making good time at it. She should know; she’d been one of those people for a while. “Country air will do that to you.”

Her comment surprised him. “So you consider this the country?”

That seemed like an odd thing for him to ask. “Don’t you?”

Alain laughed shortly. “Last night, I considered it Oz,” he admitted. “But usually ‘country’ means farmland to me.”

She supposed there was an argument for that. To her, any place that didn’t pack in a hundred people to the square yard was the country.

“There used to be nothing but farms around here. We’ve still got a few.” And she loved to drive by them whenever she had the chance. Not to mention that the families on that acreage were always opened to taking in some of her dogs. “Corn and strawberries, mostly,” she added.

Ariel was shifting from foot to foot behind her, silently reminding her that she had yet to be fed.Which brought Kayla full circle. “So, what’s your pleasure?”

The question caught him up short. Without fully realizing it, he’d been watching the way Kayla’s breasts rose and fell beneath the green sweater with every breath she took.

As for her question, he wasn’t about to give her the first response that came to his lips, because he doubted that the beautiful vet would see it as anything more than a come-on. And maybe it was, but he’d never meant anything more in his life. His pleasure, at the moment, involved some very intimate images of Kayla—sans the green sweater—and himself.

“Whatever you’re having,” he told her, glancing toward Winchester. The dog was still eyeing him, an unrelenting polygraph machine waiting for a slipup.

His answer satisfied Kayla. “Eggs and toast it is.” She nodded.

The choice surprised him. Somehow, he’d just assumed that Kayla would be a vegetarian. Half the women he knew turned their noses up at anything that hadn’t been plucked out of the ground, pulled down from a tree or gotten off a stalk. In addition, he would have thought that the cheerful vet would have been health conscious.

He watched her face as he said, “Don’t you know eggs are bad for you?”

She shook her head. “They’ve been much maligned,” Kayla countered. “The FDA says having four eggs a week is perfectly acceptable. Besides, an egg has a lot of nutrients to offer. My great-grandfather ate eggs every day of his life and he lived to be ninety-six.”

“Might have lived to be ten years older if he’d avoided eggs,” Alain deadpanned.

His quip was met with a wide grin. Something inside of him responded, lighting up, as well. “You have a sense of humor. Nice,” she said.

The last word seemed to whisper along his skin, making him warmer. Since the response was something a teenager might experience, Alain hadn’t a clue as to what was going on with him. Maybe it was a reaction to whatever she’d given him last night.

The way he was looking at her, looking right into her, stirred up a whole host of things inside of Kayla. His smile alone made lightning flash in her veins. She didn’t bother squelching it, because for once, entertaining these kinds of feelings was all right. She wouldn’t act on it, and at the moment, she was willing to bet that he couldn’t. By the time he could, he would be gone.

She held off going to the kitchen to make breakfast a moment longer. “I almost forgot. I’ve got some good news.”

He immediately thought of the disabled BMW. “My car’s all right, after all?”

His car. She hadn’t even looked at it since she’d pulled him free of the wreckage. It was still raining and the power was still out, which meant the phones weren’t working. There was no way to call Mick’s gas station to get someone out to look at the fancy scrap of metal.

“No, your car’s still embracing my tree,” she told him, “but your clothes are dry, so you don’t have to put on my father’s coveralls.” Her mouth curved into what her mother had once called her wicked grin as she added, “Unless you want to.”

“If I’m going to get lost inside of someone else’s clothes, I’d rather the clothes belonged to someone of the female persuasion.” Preferably with her still in it, he added silently. “No offense.”

“None taken,” she assured him.

Was it her, or was it getting warmer in here? Kayla wondered. The fire certainly hadn’t gotten more intense since she’d lit it earlier this morning.

Kayla placed the clothes that she had just gotten off the line in her garage on the coffee table in front of him. “You can put them on after breakfast, if you’re up to it. How are you feeling?” she asked, suddenly realizing that she’d only asked about his headache, nothing more.

Alain quickly took stock of his parts before answering. His ribs were still aching, but not as badly as they had last night. And while there was no headache, he was acutely aware of the gash she must have sewn up on his forehead. It pulsed.

“Good enough for me to put my clothes on now,” he told her.

She opened her mouth to say that maybe he should wait until after he ate before he went jumping into his clothes, but then she shut it again. The man should know what he was capable of doing. She wasn’t his mother or his keeper.

“Okay.” But being distant and removed just wasn’t her way. Kayla came closer to the sofa again.“Why don’t I help you to the bathroom so you can change in private?” she suggested.

He thought that was a little like closing the barn door after the horse had run off, seeing as how she’d been the one to undress him in the first place. But he didn’t raise the point, since it might sound like a protest. He didn’t have anything against beautiful woman doing whatever they wanted with his clothes and his body. What he didn’t like was the idea of being an invalid and needing help.

“I can make it on my own,” he informed her.