Savas's Wildcat

by Anne McAllister

“I would not.”

  “You did,” he pointed out.

  “Now I have vanilla extract.”

  But he didn’t listen to any more argument. He opened his kitchen door and carried Harry straight into his bedroom and laid the baby in the center of his bed.

  Cat followed as far as the doorway. “Yiannis, this is ridiculous. I can take him home.”

  “You could, but you don’t need to. He’s out.” He straightened and nodded down at the sleeping baby. “See?”

  Cat muttered something under her breath. He raised his gaze and gave her a bland look. “Did you say something?”

  “Yes. I said, what am I supposed to do now?” He shrugged. “Read a magazine? Think about what we should have for dinner? Come and talk to me while I work.” He tossed this last out, expecting her to turn tail and run. But she said, “Will you show me the lowboy?” He saw a light in her eyes, an eagerness that he instinctively responded to. “Follow me.”

  It was so unfair.

  The man. The charm. The devilish enticing grin. But not just the physical attributes and the personality. There was the ease with which he dealt with Harry, the reverence he felt for the wood with which he worked, the way he listened to her babble on about her own work. He even asked about the puppets, for heaven’s sake!

  She should have said no, thank you. She should have just gone up to Gran’s apartment when they got home and if he’d insisted on taking Harry to his place, she should have let him work—alone!—while Harry slept.

  Instead, like some imprinted duckling or worse some besotted groupie, she followed right after him into his workshop and fell once again under the spell of Yiannis Savas.

  The lowboy was going to be gorgeous. Cat could see that from the bit of it that he was rehabilitating. The top surface wasn’t original, he told her. It had been damaged over a century or so of misuse when the heads of the family, a series of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century New York doctors, had stuck the out-of-fashion Queen Anne style cabinet in their offices and stored medicines and other paraphernalia in it.

  Someone had put a new top on in the late nineteenth century, he told her, but it didn’t look out of place to her. “How can you tell?” she asked, and he showed her all the clues in the changes and repairs over the years that told him the lowboy’s history.

  “It’s kind of like your fabric critters,” he said. “Their story is in their patchwork. The lowboy’s past is written in the changes and repairs that have been made over the years.”

  She stroked her hand over it, felt the smooth wood beneath her fingers. It felt warm to the touch, like skin almost. It reminded her of when she’d had the freedom to touch Yiannis’s skin. The thought made her cheeks heat and quickly she drew her hand away.

  “I should go. Let you get to work.”

  “Stay,” he said. “Sit and talk to me. It’s boring by myself.”

  She blinked, then stared. He’d never invited her to stay in his workshop before. He’d let her in, had showed her pieces he’d been working on three years ago. But he’d never asked her to sit down and talk to him.

  And he didn’t look at her beseechingly now. In fact, if she didn’t trust her hearing, she’d wonder if he had said the words at all.

  He had already perched on a stool by his work bench and was intently taking apart one of the small drawers. Cat watched, her interest caught equally by the man and what his clever fingers and tiny tools were doing.

  Mesmerized, she sat. She watched. She told herself she’d leave soon. But she was still there when Milos came back from surfing. She was still there when Harry woke up and clapped his hands when she picked him up out of his crib. She carried him back to Yiannis’s workshop, and she was still there when Milos said he was calling out for a pizza and what kind did they want?

  “Sausage and mushroom,” Yiannis replied, “and a small vegetarian with extra olives and artichoke hearts.”

  Cat, who had been watching Harry pull himself up on a table, looked up, startled to hear Yiannis ordering her favorite pizza.

  He met her gaze, shrugged. “How can you forget a weird pizza like that?”

  Adam could. Adam did, regularly. Or maybe he thought that by now she’d realized how much better pepperoni was because he liked it best.

  Cat didn’t say that. She didn’t mind pepperoni. And Adam was a man for the long haul.

  Not like Yiannis who was tempting in every way—except the one that mattered.

  Today had been a one-off, never to be repeated.

  But even knowing it, when she finally did take Harry back to the apartment later that evening and put him to bed for the night—having declined Yiannis’s grinning offer to come and hold her hand while she did so—Cat couldn’t help standing in the darkness of Gran’s kitchen afterward and looking down at Yiannis’s profile through his workshop window.

  He was sitting on the stool where he’d been much of the afternoon. His dark hair fell over his forehead as he hunched over one of the lowboy’s damaged legs and carefully, meticulously repaired it. She watched as his hands moved over the wood, remembered times when those hands had moved as slowly, as intently, on her.

  But then, all of a sudden, he smacked the leg down on his work bench, flung himself off the stool and disappeared from view.

  Startled, Cat stared at the empty stool, at the abandoned piece of the leg he’d left on the table, and wondered at his sudden frustration. That wasn’t like Yiannis.

  Then, before she could move away, the back door to his place opened and Yiannis came out. She stepped back from the window, so he wouldn’t see her, even as she caught her breath.

  But he didn’t look up, he yanked a jacket on and said something over his shoulder. Seconds later Milos joined him, pulling a sweatshirt over his head. Milos grinned, then said something else and made what Cat could only describe as “curvy woman” shapes with his hands. Yiannis’s brows rose. He grinned and nodded his head. They didn’t turn and come back toward the garage. Instead they went around the house toward the sidewalk out front.

  Obviously they were walking wherever they were going. And at this time of night—it was just past nine—Cat knew exactly what was open on the island—restaurants and bars.

  They had already eaten pizza with her.

  No. Nothing had changed.

  Yiannis was on the prowl. Again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THERE was no sign of Yiannis working outside when she came down with Harry the next morning on her way to the hospital. She was tempted to just keep right on going without talking to him at all.

  But she didn’t because she didn’t want to be accused of “running away”—and she needed to prove to herself that she wasn’t. So she knocked on his back door around nine-thirty. It was still overcast and had that chilly March morning feel to the air that made it seem much cooler than the thermometer actually said it was. She shivered a little in her thin jacket while she waited for him to answer.

  And shivered some more when he still didn’t come.

  She knocked again.

  “Da?” Harry said hopefully.

  It wasn’t “Dada.” Harry didn’t know anything about “Dadas”—he’d never met his own. Even so, it was a little disconcerting to hear it.

  “He’s not,” she said, just in case Harry had some erroneous notion.

  Yiannis jerked open the door, bare-chested, unshaven and surly-looking. His dark hair spiked, uncombed.

  “Oh, dear. I’m sorry. I woke you.” She wondered suddenly if she’d awakened him alone. Her face must have betrayed some of her consternation because his glower deepened, but he didn’t speak.

  “I shouldn’t have come. I just wanted you to know I’m taking Harry to Claire’s this morning.” She said it firmly, and was not going to be talked out of it this time—which was good because Yiannis growled, “Do whatever you want.”

  What Cat wanted to do was kiss him. She had always loved the look of him when he’d just woken up, had always delighted in rubb
ing her cheek against his stubbled one and dancing her fingers through his hair. The desire to do so now was pretty over-powering, but fortunately not over-powering enough to make her forget her good sense.

  What she wanted to do had nothing whatever to do with what she knew was in the best interests of self-preservation. “I will. Go back to bed,” she said, though she couldn’t quite get that out as easily as she wished because she strongly suspected he hadn’t been alone.

  There, she said to herself after she’d buckled Harry into his car seat and was pulling out of the garage. You did it.

  She had will power! She had common sense! Maybe she hadn’t done what she wanted to do, but she’d done what she needed to do. Maybe at last she was growing out of the need for musical comedy endings.

  “She’s doing very well,” Dr Singh told Cat when she ran into him during her visit. He’d checked her grandmother over, then met with Cat in the waiting area. “She’s very determined. Very eager to get back to her own home. Mrs Newell is a remarkable woman.”

  “She is,” Cat agreed.

  “She can probably begin out-patient therapy in another week. We can arrange nursing facility care for her since you say she has an upstairs apartment.”

  “Yes. Or I was thinking, perhaps I could take her back to San Francisco with me? We’d still have to find a place that was accessible for her. Mine isn’t. But my fiancé’s place is. Or I can find some place near me.” She didn’t mention Yiannis’s offer. It wasn’t her first choice—at all.

  “That is possible.” Dr Singh nodded. “It would mean connecting her with new doctors and a new therapist. But we could do it. You should talk to your grandmother. Whatever makes her most comfortable. She will work harder at getting better if she is happy while she’s doing it and sees a future.”

  Cat agreed. “I’ll talk to her.”

  She rehearsed it all in her mind as she went back to talk to her grandmother.

  “Good news,” she reported cheerfully. “In a week you’ll be able to get out of here.”

  “A week?” Gran looked appalled.

  “They’re very pleased with your progress. Dr Singh said I can start to make arrangements for you after you get out.”

  “I’m going home.”

  “That would be great,” Cat agreed. “But you won’t be able to do the steps just yet. I thought you could come and spend some time in San Francisco with me.”

  “You live upstairs, too.”

  “I can get you a place in a temporary nursing facility,” Cat said, putting on her best happy face. “Operative word: temporary.”

  But even so, Gran’s face fell.

  “Or maybe,” Cat added, “you could stay with Adam.”

  Gran pressed her lips together in a thin line. “I doubt Adam would think that’s a good idea.”

  “Of course he would,” Cat said with more confidence than she felt. Adam was stable and stalwart—a banker, for goodness’ sake. Flexibility wasn’t one of his greatest virtues. But he was reasonable. He’d come around.

  She didn’t mention Yiannis’s offer just yet. It had been spur of the moment. But then, that was Yiannis. He did things like that. But the truth was, he didn’t want his life upset any more than Adam did. And he obviously didn’t like curtailments on his freedom.

  Having Gran as a house guest would be a curtailment indeed.

  “We’ll think about it,” Cat said.

  “I’ll practice going up steps,” Gran decided.

  “When the therapist agrees,” Cat said.

  But from the mulish look on Gran’s face when Cat took her leave, she knew that Gran had already made up her mind.

  Harry had adjusted perfectly well to Claire and her children. She had two—a boy just a year old called Andrew and a four-year-old girl called Izzy. Izzy loved babies, according to Claire, and it was obvious that she adored Harry. Harry pretty much adored her, too. Everywhere that Izzy went, Harry crawled after her.

  “He needs a big sister,” Claire said, laughing.

  “Well, he isn’t likely to get one of those,” Cat replied. “But maybe he’ll have a younger one someday.”

  She wondered if Misty had connected with Devin. Wondered if she had, how things were going. She hoped well, but she had no great hopes, which made her worry about Harry. What was in his future?

  What would Adam think if she suggested Harry come live with them? Trying Gran out on him first seemed like a good idea.

  “Thanks for watching him,” she said to Claire.

  “Any time. I wish you were closer. We don’t see you now the way we used to when you were nearby. You could move back,” she added hopefully.

  “Not likely,” Cat said. She didn’t even bother to think about approaching Adam on that one. She knew his flexibility would never extend that far. He was a born and bred Northern Californian. Orange County was not in his future.

  “Ah, well. Glad to see you this time.” Claire gave her a hug. Then, as she was walking Cat to the door, she said, “Have you seen Yiannis?”

  Cat wasn’t expecting it, and his name hit her like a light punch. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Claire had met Yiannis when they’d been together. She’d commiserated with Cat when she’d broken things off. Cat had told her why.

  “There’s no future,” she’d said. “Yiannis doesn’t want to be tied down.”

  “Selfish,” Claire had summed it up then.

  Now Cat nodded a bit warily. “He’s my grandmother’s landlord,” she reminded Claire. “Why?”

  “I ran into him a few months back at the butcher shop in Newport and I was surprised when he remembered me—and asked about you.”

  “Yiannis did?” That surprised her, too. That he’d asked—and that he’d bothered since he could have found out anything he wanted to know from her grandmother.

  Claire nodded. “I thought he might have changed his mind.”

  “No,” Cat said. “He hasn’t done that.”

  He should have told her he’d take Harry.

  But damn it, he wanted his life back. Ever since Maggie had broken her hip and Cat had come back into his life, nothing had been the same.

  She’d been gone nearly three years. He’d been annoyed when she’d left, sure that she’d realize what a good thing they had and would come back. But when she didn’t, he’d shrugged it off.

  Yes, his life had been a little less bright without Cat in it. No one he knew could make him laugh the way she did. And no one else ever quite got in under his defenses the way Cat had. No woman had ever titillated his senses—before or the few he’d been with since—the way Cat had.

  Not that he’d spent time thinking about it.

  He hadn’t. Then.

  But now that she’d turned up again, the memories, damn them, had come back. They made him want her again with a passion that surprised him. They were the reason he’d convinced her not to take Harry to Claire yesterday.

  They were the reason he’d spent the day with her.

  Making more memories—which hadn’t been the point at all.

  He’d been hoping that somewhere along the line he’d decide that she was just like all the rest of the women he’d known: forgettable, replaceable.

  It hadn’t worked.

  And having her there in his workshop last night had really screwed things up. He’d been glad to have her there—had enjoyed her presence, her comments, her conversation. But it had made him remember another time he’d been working on a project and she’d come into the workshop to ask him something, and she’d barely got a word out before he’d reached for her, kissed her.

  She never had asked whatever it was she’d come for because she’d kissed him right back. And they’d ended up in his bed, hot and sweaty and sated—for the moment.

  But with Cat, there had never been satiation. There had never been enough.

  And that was exactly what had frustrated the hell out of him last night.

  She’d taken Harry and gone back to the apartment—refu
sing Yiannis’s offer to join her—and he’d been left edgy and frustrated.

  He’d worked intently on the lowboy’s split leg, trying to lose himself in the wood. He could do that. He had done it often enough in the past. Wood was always his distraction, his focus.

  But he couldn’t do it last night. Memories of Cat kept crowding in, echoes of her laughter had haunted him. In his mind’s eye he could still see the way she brushed her crazy hair away from her face, the way her freckles blended gold in the distance, the way she looked at him, her gaze warm and compelling.

  It had compelled him right into leaving the lowboy’s leg alone before he screwed it up, his fingers were fumbling so badly. It had compelled him right out the door, determinedly headed for DeSoto’s, the bar he and Milos hadn’t gone to the night before, the one where, he’d assured Milos, the girls were even prettier.

  Not that he had noticed. He’d stayed until closing, drowning his distraction in beer—and in unrelenting memories of Cat.

  The phone was ringing when Cat and Harry got back from Claire’s.

  Harry was gnawing his fist and kicking his feet and generally announcing how hungry he was. So Cat plunked him on a blanket on the floor and put a handful of Cheerios in a plastic bowl on the floor with him, knowing they would be all over the blanket before he got them in his mouth.

  It didn’t matter. She knew that now. She knew Harry now. She felt a surge of love for him and reached over to ruffle his hair even as she reached for the phone.

  “Hello?”

  There was a hollow echoey sort of sound and then a pause, followed by a young woman’s suspicious voice demanding, “Who is this?”

  “Misty?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?” the voice demanded again.

  “It’s Cat.”

  “Cat?” There was a pause, then no joy at all in the next demand. “What are you doing there?” There was a wealth of suspicion in the words.

  “Trying to get hold of you,” Cat said, irritated but refusing to bristle. “I’ve left messages.”

  “Why? What’s happened? Oh my God. It’s Harry!” There was, Cat was surprised to hear, a note of genuine panic in her voice.