The couch? Why was she lying on the couch? Had she taken a nap?
Context clues would tell her no. Why would Niko be telling Liam she was alert if she was taking a nap?
Niko ran his finger along her forehead, and she felt him tuck a strand of loose curl behind her ear, his finger grazed the rim. Her eyes closed, and she sighed. She loved when he did that.
“Why am I on the couch?” she asked, the cuff of her ear still tingling from his touch.
“You stood up too fast. Liam said it’s normal after you’ve basically been in bed for five days.”
Five days. It all came back to her. She needed to get to her studio.
Her eyes flew open, and she sat up. As soon as she did, everything around her spun again. Her entire world felt like she was on the Tilt-A-Whirl carnival ride.
Niko, who was sitting on the edge of the couch, put his arms out, acting like the bumpers in a bowling alley lane. “I’ve already spotted you once today, Fainting Beauty, let’s just sit for a second.”
Her breath was starting to come in shorter and shorter pants. She could feel herself starting to hyperventilate. He must have noticed because his demeanor switched. He moved so that he was on the coffee table in front of her. She’d told him about her anxiety, that she used to hyperventilate and have panic attacks, and that was why she’d started yoga in the first place.
He took her hands in his and looked right into her eyes. “What’s going on? What is making you panic?”
“I need to see how much money the business made the past five days.”
“Okay, no problem.” He glanced back over his shoulder, then back at her. “Just…will youpromiseto stay there, sitting down, if I go grab my laptop?”
She nodded.
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
He got up and went down the hallway, she assumed to the room. He was back in less than a minute. When he sat down he pulled up the program on his computer. “Here you go.”
She glanced at the numbers and saw there’d been a huge jump in income for the weekend morning classes. “What…these numbers are wrong.”
They wereverywrong. The class would have to be four times as big to get these numbers.
“No, they’re not, look.” Niko clicked on a window, and a video popped up on her studio website. She squinted, but it looked like Shayne Fox was teaching her class.
“Is that Shayne Fox?”
“Yes, the morning you got sick, I messaged Frankie to let her know that I was going to be teaching. She showed up with Shayne and Zion, who are both certified, and Shayne was going to ask if she could teach some classes because her next role is a yoga instructor.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” Niko nodded.
“But how did you get the video?”
“The day I was late to the dinner, I mentioned to AJ about you wanting to live stream. He had it set up in less than an hour. Frankie had the website and membership set up, including everything from the legal side, you know she was engaged to Tristan for seven years.”
Tristan was Liam’s younger brother and a lawyer.
“Oh, that’s right.”
“She helped him set up his law firm, so she got all that side of things worked out for you. She didn’t know what you wanted as far as pricing, but she did some market research and got it started.”
He clicked on the pricing page, then on the lead magnet page for newsletter sign-up. Then on the archived livestreams.
“AJ made some upgrades to your website.”
