Page 68 of The Billionaires

“I’ll be fine,” he says, closing his eyes.

“You’d better be.” A surge of belated terror hits me. “That bullet could’ve struck you instead of the sconce.”

He opens his eyes, his face turning grim as he growls, “It could have hit you. I’ll make Elijah rue the day he?—”

“Don’t. The poor man is already kicking himself.”

Lucius’s nostrils flare. “As he should. At the very least, he’ll never touch a gun again.”

That’s probably a good idea. Lucius has enough money to hire professional bodyguards if he so chooses. There’s no need for an armed butler.

“Do you know where the hospital we’re going to is?” I ask.

“No. Can’t be far, though, or I imagine we’d take the helicopter.”

“What helicopter?”

He shifts his position. “The one I rented for the stay.”

I change which hand is holding the bagels before I get frostbite. “A helicopter? That sounds like a reasonable expense.”

Lucius smiles faintly. “It’s to survey the land I came here to acquire.”

Would he be this good at coming up with retorts if he had a concussion? Knowing him, probably.

I warm my free hand as best as I can with my breath, then lightly massage his shoulder. The hard muscle immediately relaxes under my touch, and the creases on his forehead smooth out, encouraging me to keep going.

Lucius closes his eyes, making me think he’s drifting off, but then he opens them. “Look, Juno…” His voice is gruff. “About what happened before Elijah interrupted. I?—”

“Don’t,” I say, a touch too sharply. If he were to say that was another round of PDA practice, I’d punch him, and then I’d feel super guilty doing that to someone in his condition. “We don’t need to talk about it.”

The creases in his forehead return, and I can tell he wants to push the issue. To my relief, he doesn’t. He just closes his eyes again, and this time, I stroke his chest, trying not to think about how glad I am that there’s no bullet hole in the warm, hard-muscled flesh.

The limo comes to a stop.

The doors open, and Elijah helps me get Lucius out.

When I turn around, I see that we’re near the front doors of a hospital. A man and a woman are waiting for us there. He’s dressed in a suit, and she’s in scrubs.

They introduce themselves, and it turns out that he is the hospital president and she—and I quote—is “the best neurosurgeon in the state of Florida.”

“Call me Dr. Brainiac,” she says with a grin. “That’s what my friends calls me, so why not people who wake me in the middle of the night, right?”

Wasn’t Brainiac a villain in the Superman comics?

“Have a seat,” Dr. Brainiac says, and only then do I notice the wheelchair.

“No,” Lucius says sharply. “I can walk on my own.”

Dr. Brainiac looks up at him skeptically. “You don’t sound like someone with a bullet in his brain.”

Lucius glares at her. “I didn’t get shot.”

Elijah studies his feet. “I might not have been entirely truthful. The bullet hit a ceiling sconce, and that’s what fell on his head. Or a shard of it, at any rate.”

Dr. Brainiac narrows her eyes. “And that’s what entered his brain?”

“I doubt it,” I chime in. “There’s a gash there, but it doesn’t look that deep.”

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