Savas's Wildcat

by Anne McAllister

  “You’d better hope Harry sleeps then,” he told her.

  “I hope Harry sleeps.” She said it with enough fervency to make it sound like a prayer. “Good night.” She brushed past him to put a hand on the bedroom door. “Turn out the light when you leave.”

  He’d been dismissed, but Yiannis didn’t move. “Do you know anything about babies?” he asked.

  Cat glanced back at him over her shoulder and gave a half-shrug. “I expect I’ll learn.”

  “At Harry’s expense.”

  “We’ll be fine,” she said stoutly. “I babysat once or twice when I was a teenager, and I deal with preschoolers all the time.”

  “Harry’s not a preschooler.”

  “And I’m not a teenager. We’ll cope.”

  He doubted it. He’d just been through a three hour Harry War Zone. At least he knew what to do. And he’d done a damn sight more babysitting in his life than she apparently had. Harry wasn’t any docile cherub. He wriggled when you changed him, and he could crawl faster than lightning. She’d probably let him fall off the bed.

  “Fine,” he snarled. “I’ll stay.”

  “What? No!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Two minutes ago you didn’t want me to leave!”

  “I over-reacted.”

  “Maybe,” he said grimly. “But you haven’t seen Harry at full throttle.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “I’m not doing you any favors. I’m doing Harry a favor.”

  Cat opened her mouth as if she were going to dispute that. But apparently she thought better of it. She gave a casual lift of her shoulders and said, “If you think so.”

  In fact Yiannis thought he needed his head examined. He wanted to bed her, not spend the night with an eight-month-old. But he couldn’t leave Harry to her mercies, could he? And she wasn’t going to sleep with him anyway. Not the way she kept flashing that ring around. No, he was doing this for Harry—because she’d basically said she had no idea what she was doing. “I think so,” he said shortly.

  “Suit yourself,” she said as if it were a matter of supreme indifference. “I’ll make up the sofa for myself then.”

  And she brushed back past him to go and open the chest beneath the window next to the sofa.

  He should have turned on his heel and gone straight into the bedroom. Of course he didn’t. He did what he always did when she was around—watched her. And if he’d thought she was tempting before, the sight of Cat MacLean’s lush bottom and long legs as she bent to pull out a sheet and summer weight blanket made Yiannis’s body go on full alert.

  Don’t look, his sane sensible self told his rampaging libido.

  But it was like telling himself to turn away from two speeding trains headed straight at each other, just about to crash. Only when she straightened again and tossed the sheet onto the sofa did he manage to drag his gaze away.

  “What?” Cat demanded when he still stood there, his brain turning to mush while other parts of him felt more like hot steel.

  He turned away abruptly, clearing his throat. “Nothing.”

  “Well, then?”

  As if on cue there was a whimper from beyond the door.

  Cat’s eyes widened. “He wants you.”

  “He probably wants his mother.”

  “Then more fool he,” Cat said. Yiannis totally agreed with her. “What’s wrong with him? Is he hungry?” she asked, looking a bit nervous.

  “Maybe. I gave him a bottle about eight.” Fortunately he’d found plenty of formula when he’d gone through the cabinets. Either Misty or Maggie had thought ahead, thank God. But even so, he’d called his sister, Tallie, who had four kids of her own to ask what he was supposed to feed Harry and how often.

  Predictably Tallie had laughed. “You have a baby?”

  “I’m taking care of it. For the moment,” he’d said.

  “Moment. Yeah,” Tallie had said doubtfully. But then she’d asked him dozens of questions, most of which he didn’t know the answer to, about how old Harry was and what he was accustomed to eating. Given the little he had been able to tell her, he thought she’d given him reasonably good advice.

  Harry hadn’t cried those three hours because he was hungry. He had screamed because life was doing bad things to him—going where he didn’t want to go, taking over, spinning seriously out of control.

  There came now a long serious wail from the bedroom.

  Yiannis knew exactly how he felt.

  Crying wasn’t an option.

  But Cat rather wished it were.

  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 share
d 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?”

  On the spot, Cat knew she couldn’t back down. It mattered too much. “I want love. I want marriage. I want a family,” she said—and watched the color drain from his face.

  She didn’t need any more answer than that. As far as she was concerned, Misty could have him. She’d said so.

  “I didn’t sleep with Misty,” he told her. “She came by to pick up her sunglasses. She left them here yesterday and she wanted them before she went to work.”

  Cat had absorbed that, had allowed a flicker of hope to remain in her heart—until he said, “And I sure don’t want to marry Misty.” He grimaced at the thought. “I don’t want to marry anyone. I don’t want to get married.” He’d shaken his head. “Not on your life.” The slow shake of his head and the clear honest look in his eyes told her as much as his words did.

  She didn’t need it spelled out any more clearly than that.

  She felt a leaden weight in the pit of her stomach, but she’d managed very politely to say, “Thank you.” Then she turned and walked away.

  “You’re not mad, are you?” Yiannis had called after her.

  She didn’t turn. “Of course not.” Mortified. Humiliated. Devastated. She kept walking.

  “Good. Want to get a pizza later?”

  No, she had not.

  Even now she could still remember the hot and cold of impotent fury and humiliation that had swept over her in successive waves even after she’d left her grandmother’s and driven back to her own place. She’d named their children and he thought she was someone to share a pizza with!

  So much for enchanted evenings. So much for true love and all the rest of her song lyric pipe dreams.

  So much for Yiannis Savas.

  Less than three months later Cat took a job at a library in San Francisco.

  Gran hadn’t been pleased, but Cat had been adamant. Putting four hundred miles between herself and the man who had no interest in being her one true love seemed only sensible. Not that she’d said anything about that to Gran.

  Her stupidity was her secret, and hers alone.

  And she’d been careful to avoid him ever since because he unfortunately hadn’t grown any less gorgeous or any more resistible. And even though she was an engaged woman now—with a man who wanted exactly the same things she did—as soon as she saw Yiannis the stupid song lyric feelings were still there.

  That one single glimpse of him tonight, asleep on Gran’s bed with Harry on his chest was like a kick in the gut. Those perverse misbegotten childish fantasies were not dead yet.

  Furiously Cat flung herself over again with such force that she slipped right off the narrow sofa and landed on the floor.

  “Oh, hell!” Wincing at the thud, she scrambled up onto the sofa and lay perfectly still, holding her breath, terrified that Harry would start crying or—worse—that Yiannis would appear in the doorway to demand what the devil she was doing.

  A minute passed, then two. She didn’t move. On the other side of the wall she heard a whimper, but no footsteps. She breathed again. Shallowly. Rolled carefully onto her side.

  The whimpers were coming more emphatically now. Harry seemed to be working up a head of steam now, starting to cry.

  The door to the bedroom opened. Yiannis stepped quickly out and shut the door behind him. The crying in the bedroom continued unabated.

  Was he going to run off and leave her with a cryi
ng baby?

  He didn’t turn on a light, but padded silently across the living room, not even glancing her way. Holding her breath, Cat waited, fully expecting him to open the front door and let himself out.

  Instead Yiannis opened the refrigerator. In its light she could see his sharp profile, the shaggy hair that fell across his forehead, his firm torso and muscular legs bisected only by a pair of light-colored boxer shorts. He snagged a baby bottle. Then the door closed again and he turned on the kitchen tap.

  Cat eased her head up just enough to see past the arm of the sofa. She knew she should shut her eyes. But she was engaged now. She had a future and it didn’t include Yiannis. So where was the harm?

  Besides, the vision of Yiannis warming a baby bottle was too compelling to look away from.

  “Want to feed him?” he asked suddenly.

  Cat jerked. Then, mortified that he’d known she was watching, she tried to pretend his question had awakened her. “Wha—?” She raised up on one elbow to peer sleepily in his direction. “You woke me,” she added for good measure.

  “I’m sure.” Clearly he didn’t believe her protestation. And with Harry cranking up the volume in the bedroom, she couldn’t pretend he was wrong. He shut off the tap and shook a bit of the liquid from the bottle onto his wrist.

  “Old pro?” Cat couldn’t help asking.

  “I’ve fed a few.” He carried the bottle back into the living room and held it out, but when she didn’t make a move to reach for it, he only shrugged. “Get your beauty sleep,” he said gruffly, and walked right past her. The bedroom door opened. Harry was endeavoring to wake the dead now. Then it closed again, softening the roar.

  Moments later the crying stopped. There were occasional tiny hiccups, a slurp and a soft sigh. She heard Yiannis’s voice murmuring as well.

  It was that quiet yet deep voice she remembered from sharing a bed with him. Whispers. Suggestions. Sweet nothings.

  Cat felt all her nerve endings awaken in response. She lay still and listened—to the murmurs, to the silence, to the sound of waves against the shore. Her whole body thrummed with awareness, even as Harry grew quiet for a time and in her mind’s eye she could imagine him snug in Yiannis’s arms.