Page 58 of Baking and Angels

It made Helena’s peppy energy…annoying.

But the second she was gone, loneliness would overtake him, and he would long for herto return.

So, it was a surprise when he woke up on the third day and Helena was still there. She looked freshly showered and dressed for her day, but this time she wore jeans and a sweater instead of her work slacks.

“Good morning!” she said brightly as she ran her brush through her beautiful red-gold hair, currently darker from being washed. Waves appeared after each stroke, and he found it mesmerizing. “I have a surprise to show you. Something I’ve been working on for Scarlet Promotions.” She grinned, her eyes bright with excitement. “I want you to come look at it with me. Give me your expert opinion. Please?”

Rafferty sat up, the comforter dropping from his bare chest as he ran a hand through his longer hair. He wondered if he shouldn’t cut it to be more in line with the fashion of the times he nowlived in.

“Come on, you’ve been cooped up here for days now. Have you done anything but eat and sleep?” Helena asked, pulling clothes for him from their suitcases. They needed to wash them if they didn’t go back to her house soon.

“Watched TV,” he said, kicking his legs out from the covers as well so he couldstand up.

“Watching what?”

“Cooking channels,” he said truthfully. He had spent a lot of time on the cooking channels, of which there were many, all full ofmarathons.

“Oh my!” Helena said, as he stood, her cheeks shifting to red. “I didn’t realize you were sleeping naked.”

Rafferty looked down at himself. “How else do people sleep?”

“In… pajamas?” she offered. Then she laughed. “What did you wear when you were alive the first time? Nightgowns? Or maybe you called them nightshirts?”

He frowned as he searched his memory, surprisingly, finding a scrap. “Oui, we wore something like that. But I never did. I would either wear my clothes because I was too busy to change, or I would sleep in nothing at all.”

She giggled again as she crossed the space, sidling her hands along his sides, giving his hips a gentle squeeze as she nestled her nose into the crook at his neck. “Too bad there isn’t any time to make more of it,” she whispered, the promise of those words waking his body the rest of the way. His breathing sped up and blood rushed through him. Her lips brushed against his with a million little kisses in quick rapid succession that left them tingling even as her touch made his skin crawl. She felt like too much, too intense, and he wondered if it was always going to feel like this. He still wasn’t used to it.

Then she squeezed him around the waist in a quick hug before releasing him to hunt for her shoes. “Come on, get dressed. We need breakfast—”

Helena’s phonerang out.

Huffing a sigh, she went to pick up the errant thing. “Yes, hello?” she said into it. She gave him an apologetic smile, which he returned, then moved to thebathroom.

“Scarlet?”she asked.

Rafferty halted in place as Helena’s expression fell.

“What… what’s wrong?” The alarm in her gaze as it hit his made his heart skip a beat. “We’ll be right there.”

The doorman didn’t argue or even question Helena and Rafferty’s need to enter the towering building with its beautiful maroon canopy and decorative statuary on either side of the door.He just jotted downtheir names from their state-issued IDs (Rafferty had dismissed the idea of a driver’s license when offered until he had actually learned to operate one of the machines) and pressed a button next to an elevator to let them in, then another on the inside to send them up.

The door to the elevator opened immediately into a foyer, instead of a hallway like most buildings did. Scarlet clearly lived on the whole floor of the building. Lined up to one side of the foyer were a series of wheelchairs: folded up, clean, and waiting to be used. There was another stand beside them with various arm crutches and pushing walkers for when she had fought to move regularly under her own power. Seeing them lined up, no longer needed by the old-woman-turned-young, they seemed almost sinister. Memento mori.

Beside him, Helena tensed, alerting him to look for danger, but he didn’t see nor hearanything.

She set a hand on his arm. “Can you just… wait here a moment?” she asked softly.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice matching hers.

“I hear her…”

A crash drew their attention to the main door at the end ofthe foyer.

Helena rushed through and no request of hers was going to stop him fromfollowing.

The door led them both into the main room of the apartment, a cavernous space where the tile gave way to warm wood. The furniture was the light-colored creams of the modern era that spoke of wealth in the way brocades and jewel colors once had in the century he had been born in. Like her office, Scarlet’s apartment was also a study in the elegant ways that water and greenery could be incorporated into a space, to make it have a garden-like feel, but this one also used the floor-to-ceiling windows to make it seem almost like a terrace amongst the clouds.A haven ofthe gods.

Helena didn’t savor the view at all as she turned to the left and passed through a large alcove where a long dining set sat, looking more like it was waiting for pictures instead of dinner guests. This continued again into another room, set up with lounge chairs and a fully stocked bar, picture-perfect and untouched. Nothing about this place spoke of a real home toRafferty.

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