Rachael felt herself drifting away. The pain was there; she didn’t want to squirm around and provoke it, but she could handle the intensity floating above it. Rio moved away from her with his curious animal grace. He intrigued her. Everything about him intrigued her. She couldn’t keep from staring at him, although she tried to think of other things. The wind. The rain. Leopards leaping at her throat.
Her lashes drif ted down. She listened to the rain and shivered. Before she had been burning up; now she felt inexplicably cold. The sound of the rain driving down on the rooftop added to her discomfort.
She couldn’t hear him moving around the house. It wasn’t that the storm drowned out the sounds, he was simply that quiet. Like a great jungle cat.
Three
Rachael forced her eyes open to keep him in sight. She felt dreamy,disconnected with reality. Rio stood several feet from her, close to the stove. Casually hooking his thumbs in his wet jeans, he eased them from his hips, slowly exposing his firm buttocks and his long, muscular back to her. She tried not to gawk as he washed up, using hot water from the stove. He was thorough about it, his muscles flexing as he worked. He reminded her of the statues she’d seen in Greece, the defined muscles and well-
proportioned ultr a-masculine body. It occurred to her that he was completely at home without clothes.
He seemed to have forgotten she was in the room, displaying no modesty whatsoever.
He lit a match and held it to the needle he’d used to sew her leg before performing the same task on his arm. Rachael heard him swear when he doused his hip with the same evil liquid he had used on her.
Evidently he kept large supplies of it to refill his little vial. He turned slightly as he sewed his hip and she got a frontal view. Twin columns for thighs and looking every bit as good or better than the anatomically correct statues.
“You have a beautiful body.” Rachael would never have called attention to the fact that he was naked.
The words slipped out before she could censor them, or maybe someone else said them. She looked around to see if they were really alone. She had said it after all, and she meant it. The honesty in her voice didn’t even make her blush or turn away when he looked over at her with his penetrating, focused gaze.
Rachael stared at him openly, inspecting him the way she might a beautiful sculpture. She smiled dreamily. “Don’t mind me. I think it’s the drugs talking. I’ve just never seen a man with a body as beautiful as yours is.”
There was no come-on in her voice, no deliberate seduction, just simple honest admiration. And that was what made it so damned sexy. He hadn’t even been thinking about sex. Or soft skin. Or full breasts. Or silky hair. She smelled like a damned bed of flowers. He hurt like a son of a gun. He was tir ed and edgy and he didn’t understand what was happening to him. And now his body was reacting to her voice. Or her words. Or her smell. Who knew? Need punched him in the gut and hardened his body like a rock. He was furious with her. With himself. With his lack of control. Now he had a hell of a hard-on and a sick woman in his bed. And damn it all, if he had to endure it, she could just look at it.
He finished stitching his hip, all too aware of her unwavering gaze. It didn’t seem to bother her that he was primed and ready and they were completely alone. Her eyes were overbright, her skin flushed with heat in spite of the continual shaking. Fortunately, the pain from the ugly gash on his hip drove the heat from his body so his lust wasn’t so brutally exposed to her.
Rio didn’t look at her but he felt her eyes on him. Hot. Staring. Devouring him. The thought made him ache all over. He swore again. Even with the pain of stitching his own wounds, her gaze, staring at his hardened body, set jackhammers tripping in his head and his temples pounding.
“Are you going to stare at me all night?” He growled the words at her. A threat. A promise. Retribution in the lines of his body. He turned his head then faced her down, allowing naked desire to flare just to scare the hell out of her.
She smiled serenely. “I’m sorry. Was I staring? It’s just that you’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. I thought if I did die, you might not be such a bad thing to take with me as a last image.”
She disarmed him just like that. The power she wielded was frightening. Nothing touched him the way she managed to. With a look, a single word. Just the tone of her voice. He was drowning and it made no sense. And it made him angry. He just wasn’t sure whom he was angry with.
She was still staring, her eyes huge. Rio stalked over to her and pressed his palm against her forehead.
“You’re burning up.”
“I know.” He was standing right up against the bed, his groin level with her eyes. Rachael thought him extr aordinary. She floated in a dreamy haze, where nothing seemed very real. Except Rio and his incr edible body. She reached out to touch him, not believing he could be anything but a dream.
Her finger tips brushed the head of his penis and nearly sent him through the roof. Her touch was feather-light, barely there, but he felt it vibrating through his entire body.
“You are real.” She sounded awed and her breath was warm along his shaft, tightening every muscle in his body. Her fingers trailed over his heavy erection, slid across his balls and down his thigh and the feeling was unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
“It’s a damn good thing you’re hurt,” he snapped, turning away from her, afraid she might go further.
Afraid he might let her. And he’d never forgive himself if he stooped that low. He had never wanted a woman so much. It was the way she looked at him. The sound of her voice. The honesty. Intellectually he knew it was the fever talking, taking away her natural inhibition, but he couldn’t help reacting.
Fever or no, she liked what she saw. Walking was torture, his body so hard he was afraid each step would shatter him, but he moved away.
Rio filled a bowl with cool water and caught up a cloth. When he turned around she was staring at him again. He sighed.
“You swear a lot, don’t you?”
“You have a way of making me feel like I need to,” he said and dragged a chair to the side of the bed.
“I have to get your fever down.”