Free Goodness and Light by Patty Blount Page A

ran.

Chapter Eight

    H er jaw fell open.
    She turned a corner and there he was.
    Saint Luke.
    Her heart tore down the center. She couldn’t—she simply couldn’t deal with any more of this—this taunting . She was sorry! Deeply, irrevocably sorry. But it did no good. Her mother was gone now—there could be no forgiveness, no forgetting.
    Her sin had festered—a dark spot on her soul—for over a dozen years and it had gotten worse, not better. Here she was, back in New York where she swore she’d never go again, falling for an angel with a glowing smile instead of wings who helped people in distress. Slowly, she put down the grocery bag in her arms and watched Lucas.
    Suddenly, his gaze snapped to hers and for a brief moment, she wondered why he looked so sad. Then she ran—left the bag of groceries where she’d plopped it—and ran. Ran to Kara’s building, grateful that the elevator was waiting when she reached it.
    It was one small thing that went in her favor.
    She let herself into Kara’s apartment, fell back against the door and tried to still her racing heart. When she could move without shaking, she searched for her sister, found the apartment empty.
    Kara still wasn’t home.
    Elena sighed, stared at the baby’s crib, all ready for baby’s first nap. There would be a little life form inside that crib in a few weeks. A life its grandmother would never get to see because she’d been stolen from them, and its father would not see by choice. Her hands curled into tight fists and she breathed through the pain in her chest.
    Abruptly weary of the signs and the guilt and the pain—of damn near everything, Elena nearly crawled into her air mattress, wishing Kara were home so they could just lie next to each other the way they used to when they were little and scared of thunderstorms. But the buzzer sounded.
    Slowly, she headed to the wall buzzer and pressed it. She knew it was Lucas and accepted her fate.
    Her earlier text message was a crappy way to say goodbye to somebody. She owed him an honest conversation. She opened the apartment door, waited for the elevator. She could hear it, the ding it made as it passed each floor sounding like the fall of a gavel in her sentence. When the doors slid open, she straightened her spine, and prepared to tell the most incredible guy in the world she couldn’t see him again directly to his face.

    L ucas counted the floors, not sure if he should confront Elena or kiss the breath out of her. The elevator finally slid to a stop and he shoved out of it while the doors were still opening, her bag of groceries clutched in his arms. She was waiting for him braced for battle, her back straight, her chin up—and misery filling her eyes.
    Ah, hell. Confrontation wasn’t gonna work.
    “Elena, are you okay?”
    “I’m fine,” she said, avoiding his gaze.
    Oh, sure, and the Brooklyn Bridge just came up for sale. She blocked the door and he concluded kissing her wasn’t the right decision either so he merely walked right past her, into Kara’s kitchen, and began unpacking the bag. His eyebrows shot up when he saw almost a dozen empty Nestle Crunch Bar wrappers and scooped them up. “Did you eat all of these by yourself?”
    She snatched the wrappers from his hands, stuffed them into the tiny trash can Kara kept under her sink. But she didn’t answer him. Instead, she moved beside him to unpack the rest of the bag. Milk, bread, eggs, toilet paper, a whole chicken, flour and sugar.
    And a Queen of Hearts, torn and filthy.
    Her face was pale and her chin quivered. He watched her as she carefully and deliberately put all the perishable food in the refrigerator and all the dry goods in a cabinet. And then she carefully and deliberately folded up the paper bag and tucked it in the cabinet under Kara’s sink.
    She lowered her head to the counter with a sob and he swore he heard his mother’s voice scolding him. Lucas Alexander Adair! Help that girl .
    I’m trying, Mom , he