‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,’ said Kate, letting the cat scamper free to investigate the hall, jogged by his abrupt tone into remembering that he, too, had been fostered. She hoped that after the horror of his mother’s suicide, he had passed into loving hands, but the indications were unfortunately otherwise. He obviously had no trust in maternal figures.
‘What do you know about caring for a cat?’
‘Not much, but I bought a book at the clinic, and I’m sure it’s largely a matter of practical common sense. I have plenty of that,’ she reminded him.
‘She’ll shed all over your clothes. You’ll hate that. You’re very fastidious.’
‘I’m not compulsive about it, and cats are fastidious creatures, too—they’re always cleaning themselves. Anyway, who cares about a bit of stray fluff when they’re on holiday?’
‘It’ll get on the furniture, too. The landlord might object.’
‘She’s a short-hair so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but I did buy one of those sticky rollers from Ken’s receptionist just in case,’ she admitted.
‘Boy, they really saw you coming, didn’t they? How many cat toys did you buy?’ he said, moving over to peer into the top of the bag.
‘A few,’ she said, batting away his hands and scrunching it closed to hide the embarrassing profusion of balls, catnip treats and clockwork mice. She gave him a very cool look. ‘They’re educational.’
‘She’s a cat; you’re not going to turn her into Einstein in a few weeks. She might wag her tail like a dog, but the similarity ends there. You can’t train cats the way you can train dogs.’
‘You mean some dogs. Your dog doesn’t seem to be very well trained.’
‘Oh, so we’re reduced to insulting each other’s pets now, are we? Prince is a supreme individualist—he knows what he’s supposed to do, he just doesn’t want to do it.’
‘Like master, like pet,’ she told him cattily.
‘So, I guess that makes you cute and soft and cuddly, then,’ he said, with an insinuating smile. She tossed her head at him and he laughed, banishing the last of the brooding shadows that had hung around him. ‘You bristle just like a cat, too. I always thought of you as a cool, sinuous, haughty Siamese and now I’m finding out that you’re a cosy little bundle of mixed-breed mischief. You even squeak when you’re excited. You know, that little sound you make when you—’
‘Oh, go write a novel, why don’t you?’ Kate said, shoving him towards the door. She had never blushed so much in her life as she had this last week. It had to be the over-excited hormones running riot in her bloodstream, upsetting her normal levels of biological self-containment.
‘Thanks, I think I will.’ He grinned, his eyes briefly shifting to focus on something in the middle distance, in a familiar sign of mental abstraction.
But just as she was resigned to having been eclipsed by his soaring imagination his gaze focused back on Kate’s flustered face, and he hooked her around the waist, arching her lissom body back over his arm for a long, lush, lascivious kiss. He hadn’t shaved or showered—he must have staggered straight out of the house from his bed—but Kate loved the sexy scrape of his jaw and the earthy male ripeness exuded by his hard body beneath the rumpled clothes. It made her think of long, sweaty nights of passionate exuberance and torrid delights.
‘You said you haven’t been with anyone but me since we met,’ he murmured, his warm breath feeding into her mouth as he reminded her of the words she had blurted out last night. ‘Was that true?’
‘Of course it’s true,’ she sighed, knowing that to deny it now would be a gross self-betrayal. If the truth of her fidelity made him gloat it would at least show him capable at some level of enjoying normal human possessiveness without confusing it with pathological obsession. And if it made him feel nervous or trapped by the implied commitment on her part, then he would just have to deal with it!
‘Quite a pair, aren’t we?’ She felt his smile shape her lips. ‘Free to do what we please—and what we do is please each other so well that celibacy becomes an active pleasure when we’re apart.’ He broke away from her mouth and saluted her stunned brow with a departing kiss. ‘I didn’t stop looking at other women the night we met, but I certainly stopped wanting them—it’s surprising how sexy a stretch of celibacy can be when you know what’s waiting for you at the other end, or should I say who…?’
Having made his stupendous admission with breath-taking nonchalance, he cruised out the door, careful to close it against escaping felines.
Kate felt winded—and perversely betrayed. Her proud portrayal of serene indifference to all the gossip and rumours about other women had been a wasted effort. Drake had been faithful to their relationship despite the no-strings caveat he himself had insisted upon. For months…years…she had forced herself to accept his tacit policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ when there had been nothing for Drake to tell!
It was typical of Drake to slip her a life-altering revelation about himself under the guise of flippancy, and even more typical of him to disappear afterwards. The characters in his books might be dissected to within an inch of their lives, but in reality Drake preferred his own character armour to remain firmly in place and to dole out psychological insights with miserly reluctance. He knew that knowledge was power and he was very careful not to put the balance of power in any hands but his own. He had just handed a little more over to Kate. He would now pull up the drawbridge until he felt comfortable with what he had done.
She wasn’t in the least surprised when she didn’t
see him for another day, and when he did reappear he made no reference to their previous conversation, dropping back into the safe realm of daily walks, teasing arguments and sexy banter and the occasional shared meal. There was a new physical awareness between them, however, unrelated to sexual tension that was always there in the background, and Kate knew that the next step was hers to take. She was in no hurry to make it, knowing that it could destroy the painstaking trust that they had been slowly building up, and take him away from her for ever. From attempting to seduce her at every turn, Drake was now playing a waiting game and she was slightly chagrined to recognise that she had half wanted him to take the decision out of her hands and use his sexual dominance to force her to tell him what he needed to know.
Drake continued to also hold himself aloof from Koshka’s eager pursuit of his affections and after a few days of keeping the cat indoors, on Ken’s advice, Kate was amused to see Prince as disdainful as his master of this pretender to the throne of her attention.
Koshka, however, wasn’t in the least oppressed by her failure to charm, the disparity in their sizes, or the supposed natural enmity between cats and dogs. Tail wagging, she would greet Prince with friendly squeaks whenever he appeared, trotting curiously in his shadow and ignoring his gummy show of yellow teeth when she tried to steal the scraps that fell from his food bowl. When he snored in his favourite shady spot beneath the hedge she would prowl over, batting at a floppy ear or sleepy twitch of the tail, and when he grandly ignored her teasing she would curl up beside him in a sunny spot of grass for a quick catnap before wandering off to find some fresh, feline challenge.
It was Koshka’s habit of making sudden, thundering sprints up and down the house for no apparent reason that was the reason for Kate’s literal, and figurative, downfall a few days later.
She was carrying her sun-lounger, book and water bottle down the verandah steps when a glossy black ball of lightning shot out of the house behind her and streaked between her feet, tripping her up and pitching her head first down the stairs. Her flailing hand made a frantic grab for the wooden hand-rail, but only her fingernails made painful contact with the splintered paint, throwing her at an angle over the side of the steps. Seeing the rocky garden edge looming up she desperately tried to twist and protectively curl up her body, missing the rocks but landing heavily on top of the metal bar of the sun-lounger, which had hit the ground sideways, unfolding as it fell.
She lay, dazed and breathless in a tangle of bent metal and canvas, the bar that had painfully folded her in two still jammed into her bare abdomen. It took her several attempts to struggle free but she eventually managed to roll over onto her back, weakly pushing away the wreckage of the lounger, wincing at the long scrapes she could feel on her hip, elbow and thigh. Her bikini top had been dislodged and she twisted it back into place, tiny beads of perspiration jumping out on her forehead as she became aware of an ominous, cramping pain low in her belly.