Despite everything, I laughed. “You have strange standards for fun.”
The lamp beside the bed cast warm gold across her face, making her that much more beautiful. With the rain tapping gently against the windows behind her, and without the children talking constantly around us, the room suddenly felt much smaller. More intimate.
I became acutely aware that I was sitting in bed wearing a ratty T-shirt while a stunning woman occupied my armchairafter she’d spent almost sixteen straight hours taking care of my children.
And me.
Especially me.
Nobody had taken care of me in a long time. I wasn’t prepared for how much that hurt or how badly I wanted it to continue.
Winnie rose and crossed to the bed. “Do you still have a fever?”
Before I could answer, she pressed the back of her hand against my forehead. Everything inside me stuttered, the world narrowing to the touch of her cool hand against my warm skin and the smell of something herbal clinging to her sleeve.
My heart skipped awkwardly against my ribs.
And immediately afterward came the guilt. Sharp enough to almost make me flinch.
For one horrible second, sitting there in the dark while my children slept around us, I remembered how good it felt not to carry everything alone. To have someone on the same team as me, taking on a little of the weight of running a household and caring for three children. Someone to help me face the unexpected.
But the problem was—I’d had that already. And this time, it wasn’t Jade’s hand against my forehead.
7
WINNIE
It was difficult for a vampire to get sleep while caring for four ill humans, especially since I could hardly slip away to my casket parked down the road. So, I decided to improvise.
Whenever the Lawrence family napped, I slipped into the basement, which had no natural light coming in, and slept on a pallet made of blankets and pillows I’d collected from the linen closet. Billie’s old baby monitor had been stored at the top of her closet, so I hooked it up and turned the volume as high as it would go. When someone stirred, I heard it.
I’d always longed to have a newborn, but that dream had turned to dust when I was turned. Still, I knew that this was the type of sleep new parents succumbed to. They only slept when the baby slept. And right now, the Lawrence family was one big, sick baby.
Two full days after the storm hit and the house turned into an infirmary, everyone finally stopped looking like death.
Fantastic progress.
No one waswell. Well was several hills away and probably wearing clean clothes, which none of us had seen consistently since Monday. But the children were keeping down water, soup, toast, ginger tea, and the occasional honey candy Billie treated with the reverence of a holy relic.
Conrad, meanwhile, had reached the stage of illness where he kept insisting he was fine, but his tone suggested he’d made peace with death.
“You are not fine,” I told him that morning as I set a tray on his nightstand. “You’re vertical, which is better than yesterday, but that is not the same as being fine.”
He blinked at me, hair flattened on one side and wildly ambitious on the other. “I’m a grown man. I think I can tell when I’m fine and when I’m not fine.”
“Oh, is that so?” I smirked. “Is that the same intuition you use to determine whether a pancake is fully cooked?”
“You know I try my hardest to cook pancakes. You’re being cruel.”
“I’m being accurate. There’s a definite difference.”
My time with Conrad over the past few days had been interesting. I enjoyed the banter and providing care he obviously hadn’t received in many years. There was something satisfying about looking after someone who spent every waking moment taking care of everyone else. He accepted help awkwardly, usually with a joke and an apology, but he accepted it all the same. I tried very hard not to wonder how easily I could become accustomed to doing it.
That thought lingered longer than I cared to admit. It wasn’t Conrad, exactly, that frightened me. It was the picture my mind kept trying to paint—a quiet life filled with ordinary moments. Morning tea. Shared dinners. Looking after someone because they were mine to look after and letting them do the same for me. I’d spent two centuries convincing myself those dreams belonged to mortal women. Immortal vampires turned against their will didn’t get husbands. They certainly didn’t get children. We drifted through other people’s lives until it was time to disappear again. That was simply the way of things.
CJ, who had taken up residence at the foot of Conrad’s bed, lifted one finger weakly. “Winnie has become our household physician, chef, nurse, storm warden, and legal counsel. I think we should promote her.”
“To what?” Bianca asked from the armchair, where I’d tucked her up with a blanket and a book.
