“You won’t be able to sit up long. Here,” he said as he pulled back his covers. “You’d better lie down.”
Helen looked uncertainly at his bed. She had spent all of last night melded to him, but now it was different somehow. If she lay down with him, it would be a choice. She saw him smirking up at her, and realized he thought she was being silly. Which she was, because her knees were shaking with the effort to hold her up. She tried to sit down as carefully as she could so as not to disturb him, but at the last moment her legs gave out and she pretty much flopped into bed with him.
“Sorry,” she whispered as she gathered the covers over them.
“It’s okay. Careful of your toes—my legs are splinted,” he warned her. Helen peeked under the covers and saw that his lower body was wrapped in soft casts. “See? You’re completely safe with me.” He grinned at her in the dark and she grinned back, until the reason for her draining trek came back to her. Her smile faded.
“How bad is it? Can you even tell right now?” she asked him seriously. She propped herself up on an elbow so she could look directly into his face and scan him for any well-intentioned lies. Even in the low moonlight dribbling through the casement she could see the intense jewel blue of his eyes.
“I’ll mend,” he said so softly his lips hardly moved.
“Completely? Will you still . . . you know . . . walk and run and . . . fly and all that?”
“Yeah,” he whispered before she had even finished talking. “Good as new in another day.”
It occurred to Helen that all she had to do was lean down and she would be kissing him. It seemed like such a natural thing to do—as if she should be kissing him—that she was halfway to his mouth before she stopped herself and pulled back, stunned by her lack of self-control. She saw him swallow hard.
“Lie back, Helen,” he told her, which she immediately did to hide her confusion.
For a few minutes they were both breathing a lot faster than they should have been, but after a while, Lucas relaxed enough to take her hand and hold it under the covers. She watched his chest go up and down in a way that was familiar to her now, and smiled herself to sleep.
Chapter Seven
Because I didn’t want to wake up Lucas!” a frustrated voice hissed.
Helen had no idea how Ariadne had made it to the tea table at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ariadne couldn’t fly.
“Why are you fighting me on this?” Cassandra pleaded quietly. Hmm. Helen couldn’t be on top of the Golden Gate Bridge so she must be in bed, but she couldn’t figure out what Cassandra was doing in bed with her. If she could only open her eyes and see.
“I don’t doubt you. But what can we do?” asked Noel.
“We should leave. Now. Pack up the house and go back to Europe.”
“You’re overreacting,” huffed Ariadne, not even bothering to whisper.
“Two nights in a row, Ari. They ate the same food. Shared a roof and a bed, and now they have witnesses!” Cassandra said just as loud.
“But they haven’t done the most important thing!” Ariadne shouted back.
“Girls!”
Even though she was still so tired she felt glued to the mattress, the yelling made Helen’s eyes open. She saw Ariadne, Cassandra, and Noel standing over her bed. Correction, they were standing over Lucas’s bed and Helen was in it. Her eyes snapped open and her head whipped around to look at Lucas. He was frowning himself awake and starting to make some gravelly noise in the back of his throat.
“Go argue someplace else,” he groaned as he rolled over onto Helen. He tucked himself up against her, awkwardly fighting the drag of the casts on his legs as he tried to bury his face in Helen’s neck. She nudged him and looked up at Noel, Ariadne, and a furious Cassandra.
“I came to see how he was and then I couldn’t get back to my bed,” Helen tried to explain, absolutely mortified.
She gasped involuntarily as one of Lucas’s hands ran up the length of her thigh and latched on to the sloping dip from her hip to her waist. Then she felt him tense, as if he’d just realized that pillows weren’t shaped like hourglasses. His head jerked up