“Okay.”
Leaning down, he slipped his arms beneath the enormous bed and lifted it as easily as he would a freaking pillow.
Kayla let out a squawk of surprise and gripped the covers as he raised the bed until the headboard nearly touched the high ceiling. Then he lowered it with as little effort.
She stared up at him. Okay. That was a lot of strength. She had been gardening in her front yard when this bedroom suite had been delivered a few years ago. The deliverymen had both been big, burly guys with even more muscle than Nick. And she’d watched them struggle to carry the heavy bed frame and headboard in before it had even been assembled. She’d seen how they’d huffed to get the huge mattress inside, then the box spring. And Nick had just lifted the whole lot of it with her on top as if he were lifting a frying pan. He wasn’t even sweating or winded!
He shifted uneasily. “I’d prove it by taking you downstairs and lifting my car over my head, but Eliana took it to pick up Becca, and Oliver’s is gone.”
“You can lift a car? Not just the trunk, but the whole thing?”
“Yes. Easily.”
She didn’t think even steroids could account for that. “How else are you different?”
He scrunched his face up in a way she ordinarily would’ve found cute. “I’m fast.”
“How fast?”
“The Flash kind of fast.”
Her heart sank. Nick thought he was a superhero?
She opened her mouth to reply and gasped instead when Nick suddenly disappeared.
“Hi.”
Yelping, she spun around and found him standing on the opposite side of the bed. Kayla gawked at him.
He disappeared again, but this time she caught a blur of motion.
She swung around again and found him standing where he had started.
Her heart began to pound.
“I’m going to ask you to do something,” he said softly.
Her eyes began to burn with the need to blink as she wondered if maybe her head injury had made something in her brain go haywire, something that might result in her shorting out on occasion and losing time so it would appear as though Nick had moved as fast as the Flash when he really hadn’t.
“I want you to go to the window and look outside,” he instructed. When she hesitated, he added, “Please.”
All the questions and concerns clamoring in her brain made it so difficult to think that Kayla went into autopilot. Slipping out of bed, she backed away until she reached one of the windows.
“What do you see?”
Prying her gaze away from him, she glanced outside. “My house.”
“What else?”
She glanced down. “A little bit of your yard, the fence that separates it from mine, and most of my yard.” Solar floodlights illuminated much of the latter.
“Keep your eyes on your yard.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to count to three.”
Why? What exactly did he want her to see?
“One. Two. Three.”
A thud sounded downstairs. A blur swept over the fence. Then Nick stood in the middle of her yard, staring up at her.
Kayla swung around to look behind her. Upon finding the room empty, she faced the window. Nick slipped his hands into his pockets. Kayla gripped the windowsill until her knuckles whitened. Her pulse raced as madly as it did when she worked out on her MaxiClimber.
That was impossible. What Nick had just done… It was impossible! No more than a second had passed! One second. And he had run downstairs, unlocked and opened his door, crossed his yard, jumped the fence, and landed in the middle of hers in that one second? It would take her longer than that just to race down the stairs!
“What the hell?” she whispered.
Nick removed his hand from his pocket and held up three fingers, then two, then one.
He disappeared in a blur. A thud sounded downstairs.
Kayla whipped around and found Nick standing a few feet behind her as if he had never left.
Gasping, she backed away without any thought and ended up tucked in a corner of the room.
Pain flashed across his handsome features. Then a stoic mask dropped over his face. Those beautiful dark brown eyes of his began to glow with amber light as though someone had lit a candle behind his irises.
Her heartbeat pounded like a drum in her ears. “Y-Your eyes are glowing.”
Swearing, he closed his eyes and reached up to rub them. “I’m sorry. It’s another way I’m different. Immortals’ eyes tend to glow anytime we experience strong emotion. It’s involuntary. And…” He released a resigned sigh and lowered his hand.
“And?” she asked hesitantly.
One broad shoulder lifted in a miserable shrug. “And the fear I see in your eyes cuts like a knife.”
Guilt trickled in. Nick had always been kind to her, had always been warm and friendly and funny. He’d never done anything to make her fear him in the past. “I’m sorry. I’m just…” She told her heart to settle down. “It just caught me off guard. With the accident and… waking up here and…” She shook her head, trying to force her tight muscles to relax. “This is sort of a lot to process all at once.”
“I know. But I needed you to understand what happened before Becca arrives.”
He and his friend had healed her and saved her life. That’s what had happened. They had saved her vision. Had probably saved her career since vision loss would have interfered with her editing. They had saved her weeks, if not months, of recovery time, of painful physical therapy, not to mention enormous medical bills.
This time she was the one who nervously rubbed her hands on her pants. “You said you’re sort of immortal. What does that mean exactly?”
“I heal very quickly.”
“How quickly?”
He turned and strode through a nearby doorway. A light came on, revealing a very nice bathroom. Far nicer than her own, which hadn’t been remodeled since the house was built in the eighties. The light flicked off as Nick returned.
Her gaze dropped to the items he now carried. His left hand clutched a towel. The other held a straight razor.
Fear made a quick comeback.
He stopped on the other side of the bed, his eyes still bearing an amber glow. “As I said, I heal incredibly fast. Don’t panic, okay?”
Trepidation rose. “Why? What are you going to do?”
In answer, he bent his left arm up as if he were doing a partial bicep curl so the hand clutching the towel faced the ceiling. Then he pierced the skin near his wrist with the razor and dragged the blade up his muscled forearm, carving a deep gash that must be a good seven or eight inches long.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Kayla shouted.
Nick tossed the crimson-stained razor onto the bedside table. Blood pooled in the gash he’d carved and slithered out like lava from a volcano.
Hurrying around the bed, she yanked the towel from his hand and pressed it to the ghastly wound. What the hell?
“It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’ll heal.”
Why was he so fucking calm? He could’ve hit an artery. Wouldn’t he bleed out if he severed an artery?
“Sit down,” she ordered, panic riding her hard.
Nick obediently sat on the edge of the bed.
She braced a foot on the big bed frame’s side rail, stepped up, and sat beside him, careful to place her body between Nick and the razor blade. Her hip pressed against his as she cradled his injured arm in her lap and applied pressure to the wound. “Do you think you hit an artery? Should I call 911?”