“Not now. Now we sleep,” he commanded and at his arrogant, bossy command, I smiled against his skin
“Right,” I muttered.
“But I want you to sleep knowing how much it means to me that I’ve made you happy.”
I took in a trembling breath and to let him know I knew how much it meant, and hopefully let him know how much what he said meant to me, I pressed my lips to the skin of his throat for a kiss. Then I turned my head and pressed my cheek at its base.
He continued to hold me close.
I burrowed closer, tightening my arms around him.
And I slept.
Chapter Sixteen
Skulking
“I cannot believe we’re doing this.”
That was Meeta.
“Shh!”
That was Loretta.
We were skulking through the forest toward the main house.
We were doing this because Apollo told me two things the night before.
One, the men he was waiting for had arrived, they’d been set to patrolling and thus all of Ulfr land was now protected. This meant it was safe for us to leave the house and wander around without an escort. Apparently his soldiers had been out on leave (kind of, I had a feeling “leave” meant “leave on missions Apollo didn’t think it necessary for me to know” and I didn’t really want to know so I was okay with that) but now they were back.
Two, he’d given the children my cookies and they’d love them.
“It’s lucky I had one before I gave them to Christophe and Élan,” he’d told me, grinning. “For when I went back for more, they were gone.”
This made me happy. Not only that the kids had liked them but also that he’d gone back for more which meant he liked them.
That night, I was to have dinner with them.
Suffice it to say, I was freaking out.
I wanted to ask Apollo for one more day (or seven of them) in which I could make them a variety of things. Snickerdoodles. Chocolate fudge. Lemon meringue pie. And I wanted to do this because I wanted them good and primed to meet me.
But I’d told Apollo I’d have dinner with them that night and I couldn’t go back on that now. He was excited (in his badass other world soldier type of way) for me to do it so I had to do it.
For him.
But in thinking about it (okay, fretting about it), I decided that I couldn’t walk into a room with them and keep my cool.
Unless I saw them again.
Therefore, during dinner one night when Apollo offhandedly told me their schedule—breakfast with him, studies, lunch, outdoor activities then back to studies before he spent time with them in the evenings—I was skulking through the forest with Meeta and Loretta in order to spy on them during their “outdoor activities” (whatever those were).
For moral support, I’d brought Meeta and Loretta along.
For obvious reasons, I had not shared with either woman, or Cristiana, that I was from another world. But knowing I looked so much like the other Ilsa, in other words, their dead mother, Loretta got me and understood my concerns about how the kids would react to me (if not all my concerns about why I was the way I was about them).
Meeta, however, watched me shrewdly in a way that felt weirdly like she’d figured things out, something she couldn’t possibly do as, according to Apollo, only those who needed to know about the two worlds knew (with the warning I was to keep it that way, no matter how close I grew to the women).