Luca lifts my hand and turns it over carefully, kissing my knuckles with a tenderness that nearly undoes me more than the fight did. He closes his eyes for a second. “You’re bleeding.”
“So are all of you.”
“Yeah,” Ace says, exhaling loudly. “Can we please just rest for a minute before anyone has another life-changing revelation?”
A laugh slips out of me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’d love that. But first, let’s get out of this basement.”
“Best idea you’ve had all night,” Luca says softly.
“And I’ll bandage everyone up.”
Ace glances down at the blood on his shirt and gives me a tired, wicked little smile. “Well, that’s nice. Almost get murdered and end up with a private nurse. There’s a silver lining.”
Luca huffs a laugh and wipes at his split lip with the back of his hand. “Knew she’d keep us.”
North presses a kiss to the side of my head, his mouth still warm against my skin. “We adore you too, angel.”
I stare between the three of them, and my throat tightens for one quick second before I manage to say, “Someone has to keep you all functional.”
Ace offers me his hand. “Can we change first, Nurse Adelaide, or are you planning to stitch us up exactly like this? Or do you need us naked?”
I’m laughing at his fake serious expression. “Maybe down to boxers, then I’m checking all of you.”
Luca groans as he straightens his back. “God, I love it when she gets bossy.”
“You would,” I mutter.
North’s hand settles at the small of my back as we head for the stairs. “Be nice. She’s about to save your life.”
“My life?” Ace says as we start upstairs together. “I’m hoping for a lot more tenderness than that. Maybe a cool cloth on the forehead. Soft words. A strong grip on my growing?—”
“Ace!” I cut him off. I laugh, and the three of them keep watching me, grinning as if they can’t believe I’m still here. Me too.
“Keep talking,” I say as we climb. “It’ll make it easier to decide who gets the needle first.”
Ace clutches at his chest. “Threats from our nurse already. This relationship is moving fast.”
And with North warm at my back, Ace and Luca still sniping at each other in front of me, we head upstairs, bruised and bloodied and somehow still laughing. This is how I know I’m completely and madly in love with them.
29
ADELAIDE
Paradise, it turns out, tastes like chili-lime chicken wings and feels like somebody’s elbow in my ribs.
The bench table is buried in food. Wings on a paper tray, slick and red. A pyramid of Spam musubi because Ace made a pyramid of them. A steaming plate of dumplings, a huge bowl of ahi poke glistening with sesame oil. The fruit salad I cut up this morning. Six cans of juice sweating into the wood. And a tube of sunscreen that’s been passed up and down this table so many times that nobody knows whose it was to begin with.
Six of us are making what my mother would have called an ungodly amount of noise. Nearby is a beach with a few people, but the water is tranquil and calling to me.
Clio is laughing so hard she’s crying, Aura is attempting to get a dumpling into her mouth with chopsticks, except the dumpling keeps escaping, and every time it does, Luca cheers. North is at my left, not saying much, his forearm warm against mine, eating a musubi, seeming to enjoy every mouthful as he makes these delicious moaning sounds. The man is irresistible.
“Ha!” Aura gets a dumpling all the way to her mouth.
“No, no.” Luca pushes her hand sideways with his chopsticks. The dumpling hits the table. “Too cocky. Cocky gets punished.”
“Luca!” she bellows while the rest of us are laughing. “I was eating that.”
