Angry, Kate turned back. He looked so smug, so infuriatingly content. “No, I wouldn’t worry. God usually makes a point of looking after fools.”

Grinning, he set the tray on the floor beside the bed. “Maybe I’d like you to worry, a little.”

“Sorry I can’t oblige you.”

“Your voice gets very prim when you’re annoyed,” he commented. “I like it.”

“I’m not prim.”

He ran a hand down her loosened hair. No, she looked anything but prim at the moment. Soft and feminine, but not prim. “Your voice is. Like one of those pretty, lacy ladies who used to sit in parlors eating finger sandwiches.”

She pushed his hand aside. He wouldn’t get around her with charm. “Perhaps I should shout instead.”

“Like that too, but more…” He kissed one cheek, then the other. “I like to see you smile at me. The way you smile at nobody else.”

Her skin was already beginning to warm. No, he might not get around her with charm, but…he’d distract her from her point if she wasn’t careful. “I’d be bored, that’s all. If I have to sit here, hour after hour with nothing to do.”

“I’ve got lots of books.” He slipped her nightshirt down her shoulder then kissed her bare skin with the lightest of touches. “Probably lay my hands on some crossword puzzles, too.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“There’s a copy of Byron downstairs.”

Despite her determination not to, Kate looked toward him again. “Byron?”

“I bought it after you left. The words are wonderful.” He had the three buttons undone with such quick expertise, she never noticed. “But I could always hear the way you’d say them. I remember one night on the beach, when the moon was full on the water. I don’t remember the name of the poem, but I remember how it started, and how it sounded when you said it. ‘It is the hour’,” he began, then smiled at her.

“‘It is the hour’,” Kate continued, “‘when from the boughs the nightingale is heard/It is the hour when lovers’ vows seem sweet in every whisper’d word/And gentle winds, and waters near make music to the lonely ear’…” She trailed off, remembering even the scent of that night. “You were never very interested in Byron’s technique.”

“No matter how hard you tried to explain it to me.”

Yes, he was distracting her. Kate was already finding it difficult to remember what point she’d been trying to make. “He was one of the leading poets of his day.”

“Hmm.” Ky caught the lobe of her ear between his teeth.

“He had a fascination for war and conflict, and yet he had more love affairs in his poems than Shelley or Keats.”

“How about out of his poems?”