“Why don’t you get Marco or Gianni to help you?”
“They aren’t here to cook for me. They’re here to protect me,” he said, and I could feel the words against my skin.
I accidentally sighed. “The smoke alarm didn’t concern them?”
He reached over to the sink with his other hand, which pressed us even closer together. My heart ricocheted around in my chest. He turned the water off.
“That happened a lot while you were gone. I think they got used to it.” He was saying the most innocuous things, but every word felt like a physical caress. I should have moved. He should have moved. Neither one of us did.
I had to close my eyes against the emotional and physical onslaught when he put his hands on my upper arms. My palms were damp. Not from the water. He literally made my palms sweat. I gripped the edge of the sink.
His hands moved slowly from the top of my arms down toward my wrists, and then he trailed them over to my waist. I could feel his breath again on the back of my neck. He was going to kiss me there, and then I was going to lose all control and reason and maul him.
I’d had all that I could take. I pulled away and walked across the room, grabbing an extra dishtowel to dry my sweaty palms.
“You could teach me.”
I blinked rapidly. “Teach you what?”
He didn’t miss how high my voice had become, and he gave me a slight smile. “Cooking. So I don’t keep catching things on fire.”
I was so glad he was talking about cooking and not about anything else that I stupidly agreed. “Okay. But just know that what you were doing was not cooking. That’s called burning.”
And he already knew a lot about making things burn. Me, in particular.
He headed toward his bathroom, brushing past me, getting me all riled up again. He reached under the sink and pulled out a tube of ointment.
“I can’t believe you want to stay here,” I blurted out nervously. “This whole place is smaller than your bathroom in your palace.”
He finished putting the ointment on his burn and put the tube back down. “It is small, but there are other benefits to being here.”
He was talking about me. Did he have to have such a sexy voice? I leaned against his table and mentally pleaded with my knees to not give way. I was going to properly freak out now.
But then I saw his laptop. He had been playing World of Warcraft, and he was in an unfamiliar area.
Which wasn’t possible, because I had been everywhere and done everything in that game. “Wait, is that the new expansion?”
“It is,” he said, coming closer than I was comfortable with. There were some papers on the table, and he hurriedly shuffled them together and put them into a folder.
“How do you have that? It doesn’t even come out for another two months.” I couldn’t help it. I reached over and pulled up the map to see the names of the new lands. So unfair! I had been dying for this expansion and the new playing class it was going to introduce.
“A perk of being a prince, I guess. Do you want me to get you a copy?”
I did. I really, really, really did.
And I wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding my response. Because he suddenly looked way too self-satisfied. He knew how badly I wanted it. He was the only person I’d ever met who truly understood my gaming addiction. It helped that he had one of his own. We had instantly bonded over our mutual obsession while we were on the show. I almost smiled as I remembered the night he had snuck a laptop into my room so that we could play Mortal Kombat X. I usually felt like an oddball, because most girls weren’t into those kinds of games, but Rafe acted like it was the coolest thing in the entire world. He loved that I got something so important and basic about him. I’d felt the same.
“If not, I understand. I do have the new Call of Duty, if you’d like to play that instead.”
He turned on his big-screen TV and showed me the paused game. I never got to play console video games anymore—just the ones I could play on my computer. My fingers itched to pick up one of the controllers.
If he suddenly whipped out a plate of candy bars and a chocolate cake, there was a strong possibility I might never leave the guesthouse again.
No wonder he didn’t mind staying here.
“I actually have to finish studying, and then I have this rehearsal thing tonight at the school.”
“Speaking of which,” he said as he walked around the couch and grabbed something off the kitchen counter. It was only when he tossed it to me that I realized it was a set of keys.
My keys.
“I had your truck fixed.”
That brought me crashing back to reality. “I asked you not to do that.”
“No, you told me not to do that, and I did it anyway because it needed to be done.”