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 and he looked around, alert for a fight.
“Oh, yeah,” he said to Helen as he remembered. His eyes relaxed back into a sleepy daze. He smiled up at his family and stretched until he winced, then rubbed at his sore chest, no longer in a good mood. “Little privacy?” he asked.
His mother, sister, and cousin all either crossed their arms or put their hands on their hips. Humiliated, Helen tried to untangle herself from the sheets and roll out of bed without attracting too much attention. Cassandra spun on her heel and stomped out of the room.
“Ari, help Helen,” Noel said gently as she saw Helen’s difficulty. Then she turned and bellowed angrily down the hall. “Hector! Get in here and help your cousin!”
“I’m okay,” Helen protested as she stood up on tender legs, only using Ariadne’s helping hand to maintain her balance.
She realized she was wearing that ridiculous scrap of silk Ariadne had the nerve to call a nightgown, although that detail had escaped her notice the night before when she decided to take her little stroll.
“Whoa! That’s . . . interesting,” said Hector as he arrived and saw Helen.
“What’s interesting?” Jason asked as he passed in the hallway. He poked his head in the door and saw what his brother was looking at. “Aw, damn!”
They both stared at Helen, half naked and totally busted as she got out of Lucas’s bed. Then they looked at each other, threw back their heads in unison, and laughed.
“Okay, okay. Enough,” Lucas said defensively.
“She was worried and came to check on me, but by the time she made it here she was practically falling over. I didn’t want to wake Cassandra to carry her back to the guest room, so I had her lay down with me.
Obviously, we just slept. Now, can everyone but Hector or Jase get out of my room, please?
That includes you, Mom. I need Jason to help me out of these casts so I can take a shower. ”
Helen made it back to the guest room without accepting any more help than she had to. She was so embarrassed all she wanted to do was run screaming out of the house, and to do that she was going to have to prove she was healthy.
“No thanks, I got it now,” she said to Ariadne when asked if she needed help bathing.
“Okay. Just shout if you need me,” Ariadne replied with narrowed eyes.
Twice Helen had to sit down on the shower floor to rest, but she eventually managed to clean all the itchy sand out of her hair and towel off without calling for Ariadne.
It took her ten minutes to struggle into her own freshly laundered clothes alone, but it was worth it.
All she wanted do was say thank you and slip out without drawing too much attention to herself.
When she got downstairs the whole family was in the kitchen, including Lucas.
His face lit up like Vegas when he saw her.
She automatically went straight to him and sat down, her hopes of a quiet escape ruined by what felt like a knee-jerk reaction.
She hadn’t intended to stay for breakfast, but it was almost as if she needed to be near him.
“We were just about to send someone up to make sure you hadn’t washed down the drain,” joked Noel.
“Helen’s modest. She wanted to dress herself,” Ariadne said, drizzling honey over a bowl of oatmeal and putting it down in front of Helen.
“Modest? Sure she is,” Hector said sarcastically as he passed Lucas the bacon.
“That was your sister’s nightgown, wasn’t it?” Lucas asked without skipping a beat as he served Helen and himself. Hector wisely shut his mouth.
“Yeah,” Ariadne replied for him, not getting it. “So comfortable! What? What are you all laughing at?”
“Nothing, Ari. Just drop it,” Jason said in a pained voice, a hand over his eyes. Everyone was cracking up, including Castor and Noel.
Helen was torn. She didn’t want to laugh at the joke because it was partly on her, but she couldn’t entirely stop herself.
She stifled a giggle and looked down at her full plate.
It was the kind of breakfast that was almost always followed by a nap, and Helen was dying to go somewhere and hide.
She thought about skipping it so she could get away sooner.
“I know you’re hungry,” Lucas said so quietly that Helen alone could hear him. “What’s the matter?”
“I feel like I should go home. I’ve imposed long enough. . . .” She trailed off as Lucas started shaking his head.
“That’s not the reason,” he said positively. “What is it?”
“I feel like a jackass! Waking up practically naked in your bed with half your family standing over us? Not okay,” she said through clenched teeth as a hot blush burned her cheeks. He smiled slowly as he watched her cheeks stain red.
“If that hadn’t happened, would you want to stay?” he asked, suddenly serious, his eyes focused on hers. She looked down and nodded, still blushing. “Why?” he persisted.
“For one thing, I have questions,” she said, hazarding a glance up at him. He was staring at her with an unreadable look on his face.
“Is that the only thing?” he whispered.
“Enough chat, you two. You both need to eat,” Noel called across the table, making Helen jump, which in turn made Lucas chuckle.
She and Lucas dug in with all the ferocity of two people who were literally rebuilding their bodies cell by cell.
When Helen finally looked up after a solid hour of determined chewing, everyone else was done eating but still sitting around drinking coffee and passing around sections of the paper.
It was as if they always spent half of Sunday sharing an enormous brunch, then the other half hanging out around the kitchen waiting for dinner to start.
Lost in the shuffle, Helen was surprised to find herself having a good time.
Lucas was still bent over his plate, so Helen took the sports section when Hector put it down, and read up on her beloved Red Sox, who were battling their way through September.
She must have been muttering to herself out loud because when she finally put down the stats sheet she had the attention of all the men at the table.
“‘Pitching wins pennants,’ huh?” Castor asked with a delighted smile.
“‘We’ve got too many injuries and no closer,’ do we?” Jason repeated back to Helen, then looked at Lucas. “Okay, you win,” he said cryptically.
“Thank you,” Lucas said through a shaky grin. He leaned back and closed his eyes, and Helen saw a sweat break out on his forehead. She touched his head to see if he had a fever, but Jason was already standing up.
“I got him, Helen,” he said as he came around the table. Jason went to pick Lucas up, but Lucas wouldn’t let him. Instead, he threw his arm over his cousin’s shoulder and allowed Jason to prop him up.
“Just to the stairs, okay?” Lucas asked, and Jason nodded back, the bond between them so strong they didn’t seem to need words to communicate. Helen saw Noel throw up her hands in frustrated helplessness.
“Let him find his own pace,” Castor said gently to his wife. She nodded, like it was something they had been over a million times. Then she turned her attention back to the brunch leftovers.
“Hector! It’s your turn to clear the table!”
Helen noticed Noel had a tendency to parse out her anger as judiciously as she possibly could.
She needed a good yell, but she couldn’t scream at Lucas because he was hurt, and she couldn’t yell at Jason because he was helping Lucas, so she picked the next boy she could find.
It was the same thing Noel had done when Helen was just waking up, speaking softly to Helen and then yelling for Hector.
Poor Hector seemed to get the brunt of her frustration, and from the way he slunk into the kitchen shaking his head, Helen had the feeling he’d been Noel’s favorite whipping boy since Lucas got hurt.
For a moment she almost felt bad for him, but when she saw the way Noel stared worriedly after Lucas as he winced his way out of the kitchen, she couldn’t blame her.
Lucas paused before he left the room.