Savas's Wildcat

Dear Lord, what a mess! Bad enough that Gran had broken her hip, that she was having surgery and would not be able to come back to her apartment for heaven knew how long. It wasn’t even clear if she would be able to be on her own any longer at all.

It was, Cat would have thought, a worst case scenario.

But apparently not worst enough. Now she didn’t only have her grandmother to worry about, Cat had Misty’s perennial irresponsibility to factor in. And not just the sort of ethereal blend of flakiness and selfishness that Misty generally wafted about in. No, this was Misty’s very solid, flesh and blood, one hundred percent real baby in the next room.

And Yiannis Savas, for good measure.

Looking every bit as handsome and appealing as he ever had. He was still—damn him—able to make her pulses hammer, her body tremble and her common sense turn to mush.

A very large part of Cat wanted to bundle her cats back in her car and head straight back to San Francisco this very moment.

Of course she couldn’t. She was Gran’s only living relative. Gran was her responsibility, a responsibility she was perfectly willing to accept. She loved her grandmother. And she owed her as well.

Gran had been a shelter of comfort and strength at the worst time of Cat’s young life. She knew she could never repay that. But she would do her best. So there was no leaving.

But there was no sleeping, either.

She should have fallen asleep the second her head hit the pillow. Instead she lay there, aware of the man in the next room, and tossed and turned for hours.

Sleep, Cat told herself firmly, trying to find a comfortable spot on Gran’s seriously lumpy sofa. But she didn’t. She thought about Yiannis.

And because that was as unlikely to be productive as ever, she forced her mind to other problems—her grandmother’s future, which was too uncertain to have any useful thoughts about, and ultimately, Harry.

Harry she would be required to do something about. Soon.

Trust Misty to dump a baby on her.

Not that she didn’t like babies—or at least, the thought of babies. But she had so little experience with them, whereas Yiannis—damn it, there he was again!—seemed to be able to deal with them. Or at least, if she credited his insistence that Harry had cried for three hours earlier in the evening, to persevere.

She would have to learn to persevere. She could. She’d been persevering with Misty ever since she’d come to live with Gran. Not the easiest of relationships, especially since Cat’s permanent arrival on Gran and Walter’s doorstep had meant Misty had had to share the limelight. Or should have.

Mostly it had meant that Misty did what she wanted and left Cat, five years older and decades more responsible, to mop up after.

Not, Cat reminded herself, determined to be fair—which Misty certainly never was—that Harry’s mother had intended for her to take care of him this time.

In fact, Misty would probably have spun in her grave, if she’d been in one, at the thought of Cat in loco parentis to her son. She knew that more than anything Cat wanted a family, and Misty had never been one to share.

Certainly she wouldn’t have knowingly shared Harry with Cat. She’d never even brought him around when Cat had come to visit Gran. Until tonight Cat had never met Harry.

And she’d barely caught a glimpse of him this time. If she recalled anything about him, she’d been struck by his thick dark hair—a trait he shared with the man whose bare chest he had been sleeping on.

The memory still had the ability to make her breath catch.

She had not expected Yiannis. Not here. Not tonight.

And certainly not on a bed, asleep with a baby in his arms.

She squeezed her eyes shut now, trying to blot out the memory. But she feared the sight would be emblazoned on the insides of her eyelids until her dying day.

It had once been the stuff of dreams.

Hopes and dreams crowded back—resurrected by the sight of him holding Harry—and pain she had resolutely put behind her, now stabbed her again. She tried to put them out of her mind, but whether it was the circumstances—he was here right now on the other side of a six inch wall with a baby in his arms—or her exhaustion, she couldn’t seem to shut them out.

Couldn’t shut him out.

“Stop it!” she muttered aloud and squeezed her eyes shut tight. But he really did seem to be on the inside of her eyelids.

She snapped them open and found herself nose to nose with Bas.

“Uh!” She picked him up and dropped him gently onto the floor. Then she sat up and scrubbed at her eyes. It didn’t help. Nothing helped.

It had been like this since the day she’d met him.

She could remember it as though it had been yesterday, the afternoon she’d seen this lean, muscular guy with the wind-ruffled black hair and stubbled jaw sauntering down the street toward her. She’d been coming back from the grocery store, her arms full of bags, eager to get to Gran’s and set them down. But at the sight of the most gorgeous man she’d ever laid eyes on, the weight of the grocery bags had meant nothing and she’d slowed her pace, wanting to look her fill before they passed on the street.

But he’d slowed, too—as if he were as taken with her as she had been with him. If an entire orchestra had risen up out of the pavement and begun playing “Some Enchanted Evening” she would not have been surprised.

Of course it had not been evening. But she’d granted fate poetic license. No one had ever accused Cat of lacking imagination. Before he reached her, she had imagined him pausing to smile and flirt a bit. They would talk, and, finding her a kindred spirit, he would ask her out. They would fall in love, get married, have three children and a golden retriever and live happily ever after right here on Balboa Island.

The trouble was, it had actually happened—the first bits. He had smiled. He’d flirted. He’d introduced himself. He had been coming to see her grandmother, interested in buying Gran’s house. He’d asked her out. Once, twice. Half a dozen times. They’d clicked. It was exactly the way it was supposed to be.

He’d bought Gran’s house.

It was perfect. Even the sex was perfect. Hot and intense and absolutely amazing. Of course it was, because they were perfect for each other. Cat knew she’d met the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with.

And then …

And then it fell apart.

It turned out that life was not a series of musical comedy song moments. Life was discovering Yiannis seeming a little distant whenever she talked about how she was longing to have a family of her own. Life was him changing the subject if the M word ever remotely cropped up in conversation. Life was him leaving for Singapore or Finland or Dar es Salaam. It was her waiting eagerly for him to come back from wherever and then getting an email saying he’d decided to spend a week on the beach at Goa and then go right on to New Zealand instead.

And then, of course, there had been Misty.

Misty had never met a man with cheekbones, a great smile and all the standard male equipment that she didn’t like—and want.

And that went double if it was a man paying attention to Cat.

There wasn’t a toy or a game or a boy or a man that Cat had first that Misty didn’t consider fair game. Cat understood that.

She just hadn’t thought Yiannis would take a second glance.

But if there had been any mistaking Misty jumping into his arms on the beach or sitting across an intimate table from him at Swaney’s bar or coming out of his place at seven in the morning, there had been no mistaking his answer when Cat had asked him point blank about where Misty stood—and she stood—in his life.

“Where do you stand?” He stared as if he’d never given it a thought.

She’d got a pretty good idea of the answer from his baffled echo of her question. But though her fingernails bit into her palms, she had nodded and hoped he might yet give her the answer she was hoping for.

Instead he’d countered with a question of his own. “Where do you want to stand?”