HELENA POV
I still wasn’t sure how my legs had managed to carry me down the stairs without completely giving up on me.
They felt unreliable. Wobbly. Like they had forgotten how gravity worked after what had just happened upstairs.
That kiss.
Not a brush. Not a mistake. Not a slip.
That kiss had been deliberate. Heavy. Claiming in a way I hadn’t been prepared for, in a way that had shut off my ability to think and left me standing there with my hands fisted in his shirt, heart racing like it was trying to outrun my body.
If he had kissed me again—if he had lingered even one second longer—I honestly didn’t know what I would have done.
Probably nothing smart.
At least no one had seen my knees wobble like I’d just run a marathon on broken glass.
The kitchen was chaos when I finally ma
