Forbidden

He was pretty much keeping me in bed as much as possible, and that meant I was in my pajamas all of the time. He had occasionally let me sit in a chair for a change of pace, but other than that, he didn’t let me out of bed much at all.

I had been graciously allowed into the living room because Christopher had dropped by. He had gone by my apartment and found that it had been rented out, then had driven to the only other place he figured I’d end up, and the two of them had stood around congratulating themselves on taking care of me, and looking self-satisfied in the extreme.

I had wanted to smack the both of them, but I had refrained. At least I had gotten Anthony to let me decide whether or not I wanted pain pills, or I’d still be sleeping twenty hours a day. I was very wary of the two of them being in the same room together, but apparently they had worked out some sort of uneasy truce, because they both behaved like gentlemen, and when Anthony escorted Christopher to the door, I heard him say that he could come back any time he wanted to, and he actually managed to sound like he meant it.

But after a couple of weeks of being forcibly bedbound, I put my foot down. My casted foot, that was, on the carpet, gently, using the quad cane he’d gotten for me to help steady myself. Anthony had taken me to the doctor just that morning, and the doctor himself had said that as long as I felt like it, I could—and should—get up and move around, that the concussion had resolved itself, and that once the casts were off, I’d be fine.

Anthony hovered around me as if I were going to fall at any moment, but I didn’t. It felt wonderful to be up and about, although I did tire quickly, and didn’t spend too much time up at first.

The restaurant where I had worked hadn’t been able to keep my job open, of course, so I was unemployed and restless. Anthony came home from whatever he did for work to find me staring at the television. The housework and cooking were done by women who came in and did exactly that for him. There was nothing for me to do, and he could see that I was going crazy from boredom.

* * *

Anthony

Noticing that Raychel was becoming a bit stir-crazy, I decided it was time to enact my next plan. So, one evening while she was watching a romance movie, I cleaned out one of the spare bedrooms and set up her easel and the meager painting supplies I had brought over from the apartment. The next day, I went out and bought about ten of everything I’d seen she had—different colors of paints, more blank canvases, brushes, everything I, and the clerk at the crafts store, could think of to outfit a studio for her at home.

The next Monday morning, I prodded her up when I awoke at six-thirty, insisting she have breakfast with me before I had to leave and check in on a shipment of stolen artwork my men and I were in charge of transporting that was to arrive at the harbor early. Grumpily, and still very much asleep, she did, nearly falling face first into her oatmeal. But just before I should have been going to work, I instead helped her up the stairs to the last bedroom on the left—a corner room, with four big windows so she would have all the natural light she could stand.

I threw open the door as if I was showing her into a hotel suite or something. Raychel hobbled in and looked around wide-eyed. “Anthony! Oh, my God, this is gorgeous. I can’t believe it. A studio! Thank you!”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad you like it. I wasn’t sure exactly what to get, but I got a ton of it.”

Raychel was busy picking her way through things. “I can see that.”

“I wanted to give you something to do, and you paint so beautifully…”

“Thank you.”

“You need something to keep you off the streets now that you’re feeling better.”

Raychel shook her head. “I need to get a job as soon as I get these awful things off.”

I intended to disabuse her of that notion, but I wasn’t willing to fight that battle quite yet. I reached out and caught her on her way by me, pulling her against me and dropping a fierce, passionate kiss on her mouth that had us both panting. “I want you to promise that you won’t tire yourself out.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. I didn’t know if you’d want television in here or not, but if you do, it’s a simple matter to run the cable up here.”