Page 24 of Monsters in the Museum (Defenders of the Light #1)
Chapter twenty-four
N ora was delighted to find that Adam snored. It was not a heavy sound that would keep her awake, but a soft fluttering that somehow managed to be endearing. She woke before him and spent several minutes listening to the sound of his breath, smiling to herself all the while, knowing that she would enjoy teasing him about it. It was the sort of intimate detail that seemed fitting to know about somebody she felt so strongly for.
After a few moments of admiring how Adam’s messy curls fell across his forehead, Nora determined that she was going to have to get herself dressed and head to work. She was just debating whether to wake Adam or to leave him a note when her conundrum was solved for her by a quiet knock on the bedroom door.
The sound roused Adam, and he was fully awakened by Nora pulling the star-embroidered comforter off the bed to wrap around her still-naked body as she padded across the room.
Cracking the door, she was relieved to see Drew’s face peeking in instead of somebody who might be more scandalized by her state of undress. Then again, the Greeks ran naked in the original Olympics, so maybe they wouldn’t even notice.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Drew said, taking her disheveled appearance in stride. “I was just stopping in to see how everything went yesterday, but it seems like I shouldn’t have worried.”
Nora felt as though she should blush, but when she glanced over her shoulder. Adam was sitting up and rubbing sleep from his eyes, and she couldn’t bring herself to feel any embarrassment. Instead, her face split in a broad grin.
Turning back to Drew, she said, “I have so much to tell you, but unfortunately, I have to get going to work right now.”
“That’s the other thing I stopped by to tell you. You don’t have to go to work today. The whole city is shut down for a blizzard.”
“A blizzard?” Nora almost dropped her blanket in shock and was forced to readjust. “But it’s barely November, and it wasn’t on the radar, was it?”
Drew shook his head. “No, but you know Chicago weather, and Odelle is always complaining about how the meteorologists at work make everything up anyway.”
It still seemed rather odd to Nora, but she brushed it off, saying, “Well, thanks for coming to tell me. Let me get dressed, and then we can have breakfast or something.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Drew shook his head, eyes glinting mischievously. “You look rather busy, and I’m going to see Thad right now anyway. We can meet up for lunch.”
Nora winked at him before shutting the door and turning back to Adam. He was sitting up with the sheets draped low around his hips, looking transcendent in the morning sun that streamed through the skylight. His tanned skin glowed, and Nora noted with pride several marks across his neck and chest that were clearly shaped like her teeth.
She wasted no time climbing back into bed with him.
“I have the day off,” she murmured against his lips after giving him a good morning kiss.
“Good,” Adam growled, pulling her with him so they were both lying down again. “We still have a lot of catching up to do.”
“Mmhmm,” Nora responded absently, kissing her way down his neck.
“I’m sure you still have a lot of questions.” Adam’s hands carded gently through her hair as her lips drifted down his chest, their planned destination even lower. “And I want to make sure you have all the answers you need to be comfortable with this.”
Nora responded by showing him that now was not the time for questioning by doing something very different with her mouth. His hands shifted from caressing her hair to fisting it desperately, and it was a long time before they picked up the threads of their conversation again. After all, Adam insisted on returning the favor, and Nora was of no mind to object.
Although Adam and Nora didn’t get out of bed for the majority of the morning, she did end up asking him all sorts of questions to satisfy her endless curiosity.
She was lying on her side, pulled tightly to Adam’s chest with her head tucked under his chin, when the gold ring on the hand intertwined with hers caught her eye. She had noticed his habit of fidgeting with it when he was anxious but had never gotten around to asking about it.
“Where is your ring from?” Nora inquired, lifting their hands to her eyes to get a closer look. Now, she could see that there were tiny stars made of sparkling stones set around the gold band.
“Oh.” Adam pressed a kiss to the top of her head as he paused. “That’s my wedding ring.”
Nora jumped slightly before melting back into his body once more. “Then why do you wear it on your right hand?”
Adam shifted behind her. “Well, I’m not married anymore. I’m technically a widower, but I can’t bring myself to not wear it at all. Besides, if I ever did find you, I didn’t want you to see it and think I was unavailable.”
“Not to mention you wouldn’t want to give other women the wrong impression,” Nora tried to joke, but the end of her sentence rose as if she were asking a question. She would be lying if she said she didn’t want to know if there was more to his romantic history than her.
Adam was silent for a moment.
“There have been a few other women,” he finally admitted. “Does that bother you?”
“I honestly would find it a bit weird if there weren’t,” Nora snorted, but she squeezed his hand to reassure him, and returned to inspecting the ring.
“We really had a thing for the star motif, didn’t we?” she commented, thinking of the silver constellations emblazoned on the canopy over their heads, as well as the tattoo of stars encircling his bicep that she had traced with her fingers and lips last night.
Adam’s warm breath stirred her hair as he nodded against the back of her head.
“It was sort of a theme in our relationship. We loved stargazing together. That’s why my sword has that inscription on it. You gave it to me as a gift.”
“We owe a lot to those weapons.”
Adam kissed the nape of her neck and murmured against her skin in agreement. “You know, stars turned out to be the perfect symbol for our love, even now. The stars give their light to the earth even though they have long since burnt out. That was you for me. You were the light that guided me through the dark parts of my life, even long after you had died.”
Nora turned in his arms and found his eyes as bright as her own. She raised his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles in acknowledgment.
“So, will you start wearing your ring on your left hand again?”
“No.” Adam paused, considering. “Not yet, anyway. I want to do this whole thing right. Give you the relationship and romance you deserve, not just rush through it because you know the truth now. I want to get to know every bit of who you are now, your past, and what makes you so intoxicatingly special.”
“Maybe this whole reincarnation thing is a blessing,” she mused. “How beautiful is it that we get to fall in love over and over again? We get so many first kisses, so many chances to remember what makes us so right for each other. Falling for you— I’m glad I get to do it more than once.”
“I could fall in love with you forever,” Adam vowed.
“Tell me about the first life we spent together.”
“Well, I know I was hopelessly in love with you when I watched you temporarily blind a guy in the courtyard for being an ass.”
Leaving the sunlight-drenched Sanctuary and walking through the portal back into the city shouldn’t have been a shock, considering Nora had been forewarned of the raging blizzard. Still, her body immediately tensed up at the frigid wind whipping at her hair and tugging her scarf from her face. Adam put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to his side to share his body heat. She turned to look up at him with a smile, and the swirling snowflakes caught in her upturned eyelashes.
They stepped out from under the Bean to catch the bus back to her apartment. She had known that she could not stay in the happy bubble of the Sanctuary forever, and tomorrow, she would go back to the mundanity of her day-to-day life. When Adam had offered to come back to her apartment with her, she had been grateful, as if she were able to bring some of the magic from the Sanctuary back to her home life with her.
She was strangely nervous to have Adam in her space for the first time. Her chest warmed, thinking about him among all her books and art and favorite belongings. The butterflies in the pit of her stomach reminded her that their relationship was still in its infancy despite all they had been through.
As she began to think about picking up some chai tea to keep at her apartment for him, her phone buzzed in her pocket. Fishing it out, she struggled to unlock the screen in her chunky mittens.
She frowned at the screen when she finally got it open.
“What is it?” Adam inquired, spotting the furrow between her brows.
“I have two voicemails from Odelle. I hate that I don’t get service in the Sanctuary. We’re supposed to have dinner tonight, and I hope she isn’t cancelling. I was going to tell her everything, and well, after this, that seems like something that should be done sooner rather than later.”
Adam nodded, stepping to the side so Nora could pause while she opened her voicemail. Her heart quickened inexplicably under her coat, wondering what was important enough that Odelle would have left multiple messages.
As she got the voicemails open and raised the phone to her ear, she froze. Her blood ran as cold as the ice under her feet as she listened through both messages. Adam’s voice asking her what was wrong sounded distant as the phone slipped from her numb fingers and fell to the pavement below.