“Cat.” His voice was a growl of need, of hunger. His fingers bit into her hips, to raise her and lower her again. But she sat back, wouldn’t move.
“Cat!” His tone was urgent now. Desperate.
As desperate as she felt as the feeling inside her grew and grew. Then, “Yesssss.” The word hissed between her teeth as she rose until he nearly slipped away. But before he could, she came down again, united them, drew him in.
Yiannis groaned. Moved. Surged up to meet her. Then the playing was over. There was no more waiting. No more teasing movements. Now there was only urgency.
Quicker. Faster. Frantic. Like a wave that carried them both up to the heights, then broke and tossed them over, plunging them down, and rippling away, leaving them spent, bodies slick, hearts pounding.
Cat, collapsed against his chest, could hear his thundering heart beneath her ear. Felt his hand come up to stroke her hair.
It had always been like this with Yiannis.
It was what she loved about being with him—that it wasn’t just the frenzy, though certainly the frenzy and passion were there. But at the same time they could play and tease and tempt each other. They could talk and argue and laugh. Life with Yiannis was more than just going to bed with him. It was about all of him—of them.
It was love.
She knew then that she had never stopped loving him.
She raised her head from his chest to look at him. He was smiling. Something about him reminded her of a lazy, well-fed panther. It was the dark hair, the stubbled jaw, she supposed. She really should be thinking in terms of lions. He had that very masculine smug proprietary look of the king of the beasts, as if he’d staked his claim, as if she belonged to him.
It was the truth.
Then he said, “So much for Adam.”
Cat stilled. “What?”
He shrugged his shoulders lazily. “I think we’ve effectively proved you don’t want Adam.”
She felt as if he’d punched her in the gut. Or worse, in the heart. Slowly, as if she might go up in flames if she moved quickly, she eased herself off him, wincing as she stood. She dragged a blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her so she wouldn’t feel so exposed. “This is about Adam?”
“Of course it’s not about Adam,” he said, frowning. “It’s about you.”
“What about me?”
He heard the shrillness in her tone. “What are you getting upset about?” His brows drew down. He shoved himself up against the headboard of the bed and held out a hand to her, to bring her back to him.
But Cat just clutched the blanket more tightly around her. “Did you make love to me to prove to me that I don’t want Adam?” She forced herself to spell it out. She didn’t want any misconceptions.
“No! Well, yes, but that’s not the only reason.” He dropped his hand and started to scramble out of bed to come after her.
But Cat didn’t need him proving anything else to her, thank you very much. She snatched her clothes off the floor, plunged into the bathroom and locked the door.
The door knob jiggled. “Cat! Cat! For God’s sake! Open the door.” It rattled again. “Cat!”
But Cat wasn’t listening. She’d heard enough. She turned on the shower as hard as it would go, drowning him out. Then she dropped the blanket and stepped beneath the hot needle spray of the water. Then she turned her face into it.
She didn’t want to know when the tears began.
She’d been a fool—again. She was in love with Yiannis Savas—still.
And he hadn’t changed a bit.
He wanted her just as he had three years ago. And he’d been determined to get her, to make her his, even knowing she was engaged to another man.
And he’d succeeded, damn him.
He’d ruined her for Adam—probably for every damn man in the whole wide world. But he didn’t want her for himself. Except for now—and maybe tomorrow. But not forever.
Yiannis didn’t do forever.
He didn’t do marriage. He didn’t do family. He didn’t do love.
Cat stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out. She stayed in the bathroom until her eyes no longer looked bloodshot. She didn’t stay there until she was no longer angry. That might take years.
At least Yiannis wasn’t rattling the door knob any more. He’d probably given up and gone back to his place. Why stay?
She opened the door to the bedroom, snagged her suitcase off the chair and began to toss her things in.
All at once Yiannis was in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t turn. “Packing.”
“Why?” He came into the room, started to take her arm.
She jerked away, went to the closet, took out her things and rolled them up to stow them in the case. “Because I’m going home,” she said evenly, still not looking his way.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Your grandmother needs you here.”
“My grandmother will be fine. She has a staff of doctors and nurses looking after her. I can supervise by phone. And maybe I will take her back up to San Francisco with me when she gets out.”
“She’ll hate it. You know that.”
“Too bad. I live there. I work there. My life is there. Adam’s there!” She did turn her head and look at him then. Glared at him, furious.
She wasn’t the only one. Yiannis’s dark eyes glinted. “You’re not serious. There’s no way you’re going back to him after what you just did with me!”
“Well, I’m not planning on telling him,” Cat said, goaded. “You’re right about that.”
“You can’t marry him!”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do!” She slammed the suitcase shut and dragged it out to the living room and started down the stairs.
Yiannis followed her. “You’re over-reacting. I didn’t just make love to you to prove some point.”
“Fine. It was just a happy byproduct then,” Cat said acidly. She flung the case in her car, banged the door and went back after the cats.
He got in front of her, blocked her way. “It’s true,” he insisted. “Though now I suppose you’ll go and marry him for spite.”
“Better than marrying you,” Cat muttered, elbowing past him and pounding up the stairs. Not the truth, of course. She’d have married him in an instant if he’d wanted to marry her. He didn’t. That was patently obvious. There had been no “I love you” no “I can’t live without you.” Only “You’d be making a mistake to marry Adam Landry.”
Bas and Hux were, fortunately, right where she could see them. So she scooped them up into her arms and dodging past Yiannis, headed down again.
Naturally heavy footsteps came after her. “Catriona! Damn it. Stop just a minute.”
But she didn’t stop until she had the cats in the car and the door shut. Then she turned and came right up against him. He was breathing hard.
“You don’t listen! You never listen. Listen to this.” And he grabbed her and kissed her hard, as if he were imprinting a brand on her.
She could have told him he already had. For life. For all the good it did her. Because when she listened there were no words, there were no promises. There was no forever.
She stood still under the onslaught. She felt her body quiver. But her resolve, this time, didn’t waver. And when he finally pulled back, she said, “I’m listening. What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I stopped you from making the biggest mistake of your life.”
Which was exactly what she’d thought he’d been saying. Just that.
Nothing more.
“Well, thank you very much,” Cat said tightly and she twisted away, opened her car door and slid in. “I’ll tell him you said so.”
“You’re not—”
“While we’re dancing on Saturday.” She said it to infuriate him, delighted to see the flare of anger in his eyes. Served him right.
“What about Maggie?” he demanded. “You’re just going to leave her?”
�
�Hardly. I’ll stop and see her on my way out of town. Good-bye, Yiannis.”
“Cat!”
But she’d heard enough—or, in this case, far too little of what she needed to hear. She rolled up the window and put the car in gear.
But she couldn’t think of a single good show tune to play in her head as she drove away.
Yiannis doubted there was a word in the English language to describe the maelstrom of emotions—all of them angry—he felt as Cat drove away.
He slammed into the house, banging the door behind him, and kicked the kitchen chair that stood in his way. His bare toes protested, but the pain in them didn’t begin to dull the other emotions assailing him.
Nothing, as it happened, dulled those emotions.
Not sooner. Not later.
Not that day or the next.
Yiannis told himself she’d come to her senses, that she’d realize she ought to be grateful, not blame him for ruining something that was destined to fall apart anyway.
But no phone calls of undying gratitude interrupted his solitude. She didn’t come back. She simply left him with a whole new pantheon of memories that were driving him insane.
She loved him. He was sure of it. He didn’t imagine she could have made love to him that intensely, that sweetly, with that much abandon if she hadn’t.
They had a lot to give each other if she could only see it.
But he sure as hell couldn’t figure out how to open her eyes. Talking to her wouldn’t work. And it was pretty damn obvious that she’d had enough of his actions for the moment.
Which was just idiotic, because she’d been every bit as involved as he had. He hadn’t seduced her. He hadn’t done anything that she hadn’t wanted him to do!
Every time the phone rang he hoped it would be her. But it never was. His mother rang another half dozen times. His sister called twice. He didn’t answer them He didn’t need to be bothered by family troubles now. He had trouble enough of his own.
The only people he talked to were clients and distributors—and Maggie.
He thought Maggie would be upset at Cat’s leaving. But she took it in her stride.
“I’ve kept her long enough from her life,” she told him when he asked about Cat the day after she’d left. “She has work to do. The children so look forward to her. And I think she needs them, too,” she confided. “She’s missing Harry.”
He knew that. He got Misty’s address from Maggie and told her he’d send the rabbit she’d given Harry on to him.
“Cat will like that. She loved Harry. I do hope she has children of her own one day,” Maggie said wistfully.
Not Adam’s, Yiannis thought. His jaw clenched. “Maybe she will.” He remembered the maternal look in her eyes every time she’d held Harry. He imagined what she’d look like with a child of her own.
“—beautiful dress,” Maggie was saying. “Did you see it?”
Yiannis jerked back to the present to find Maggie staring expectantly at him. “See what?”
“The dress she bought for the ball. It’s simply beautiful. Like a midnight sky with stars.” Maggie beamed. “She’ll look like a million dollars in it.”
Yiannis grunted. He hoped to God she wouldn’t be wearing it.
“I told her to get someone to take a photo of her with Adam.”
“I thought you didn’t like Adam.”
“He’s a good man,” Maggie said. “He isn’t one I’d have chosen,” she added. “But he might be right for her. Who am I to say?”
No help there, then. And saying, He’s not right for her, would take the conversation in a direction he didn’t want it going. Maggie would have questions, and he was sure she wouldn’t like the answers she’d get from him. Obviously Cat had said nothing to her. He left it that way.
He mailed the rabbit to Harry that afternoon. He put a note in it to Misty, reminding her that Cat had wanted Harry to have it. He also sent her Cat’s address which Maggie had given him. Maybe Misty would write to her, thank her.
It wasn’t much, but it was the one action he could take that might not backfire on him.
After he sent off the package to Harry, he went home, picked up his surfboard and went out on the water. It was a raw damp March day and no one else was out on the breaker line.
But the waves were decent and the weather suited his mood. And the more energy he burned off, the more likely he was to sleep, which he hadn’t done last night—or the night before.
Monday he’d been making love to Cat all night. The memories were more vivid than the waves he caught one after another until he was finally too tired to catch any more and dragged himself back to the house.
He ate a couple of pieces of cold pizza and then went out to his workshop. Last night he’d spent the night here, sanding the old lowboy he’d taken apart and was restoring for his sister. The work was supposed to soothe, but it hadn’t. It was supposed to calm, but it hadn’t done that, either.
Things weren’t any better tonight. Half a dozen times he’d had enough and grabbed his phone to punch in Cat’s number. Then half a dozen times he’d stuffed it back in his pocket again. She wouldn’t listen to him. She would only listen to her heart. And that was, of course, best.
He just hoped her heart told her the truth before she married Adam Landry.
It was nearly eleven when he heard the doorbell ring.
It was so sudden and unexpected that he dropped the spindly leg he’d been working on. It fell and bounced on the concrete floor. He grabbed it, but barely spared it a glance when ordinarily he would have been checking it for minute cracks and damage. Now he simply tossed it on the old sofa he kept in the corner and strode to answer the front door.
He was covered with saw dust, sticky with flakes of old lacquer. He hadn’t shaved. He didn’t care.
There was only one person who would be ringing his doorbell at this time of night. She’d listened to her heart after all.
His own heart was singing the Hallelujah Chorus as he flung open the front door—and stared.
“Mom?”
He blinked, squeezed his eyes shut tight and opened them again. Malena Savas stood there in the flesh, grey hair curling in the damp, a black trench coat cinched around her. A suitcase on the porch beside her.
Suitcase?
“Mom?” he said again, wary now, frowning, worried. “What the hell are you doing? What are you doing here?”
She pasted on a bright determined smile. “I’m getting a divorce, dear. I’ve left your father.”
CHAPTER NINE
“DON’T be ridiculous,” Yiannis said even as he ushered her into the living room and carried her suitcase in. “You’re not divorcing Dad.”
His mother turned on him and slapped her hand on her hips. “Don’t you start,” she said. “Not you. You’re the only one I can turn to.”
“Me?” Yiannis stared at her, dumbfounded. “Why me?”
She undid the belt of her trench coat and slipped it off. “Because everyone else in the family would be urging me to go back to him.”
“Mom—”
“Because they’re all so ‘happily married.’” She made the words sound like a curse. Then she turned and marched into the kitchen, just as if it were her own, and put the kettle on. “They don’t understand.”
Neither did he.
“But I knew you would because you don’t believe in marriage at all.”
It was his own marriage he didn’t believe in, Yiannis wanted to tell her. He believed fervently in hers. He shook his head, wondering if he was hallucinating the whole thing. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep. Maybe his brain had come un-glued.
His parents had been married over forty years. They were the bedrock of his existence. Of his siblings’ existence. Of their grandchildren’s existence. Hell, for all he knew they were the bedrock of the entire world.
“Where do you keep the cups?” she asked. She’d found the tea.
He got them out for her. “Mugs, Ma,” he said, setting
them on the counter. “I don’t have tea cups.”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Just ask your father,” she said bitterly, dropping a tea bag in each of them.
“Mom, I think you’re over-wrought.”
She spun around, her cheeks flushed. “You’re damn right I’m over-wrought. I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with that man. He doesn’t want to face reality. He doesn’t want to think he’s mortal. Do you know what he said when I reminded him about the family reunion?”
“That he had to work.” Yiannis knew his father.
“That he had to work!” His mother practically shouted his words back at him. “And not only that, but that he had to fly to Greece to do it. What is wrong with him?”
Yiannis just shook his head.
Her shoulders slumped. “I don’t know, either. But I’m tired trying to fight with him. I’m tired of trying to make him see reason. I’m just … tired.” She visibly drooped right before his eyes.
Swiftly he put his arm around her. “Mom, maybe you don’t need tea. Maybe you need to go to bed.”
“Maybe I do,” she said wearily. Her voice was so quiet now that he almost couldn’t hear her.
“I’ll get the bed ready.” He left his mother sitting in the kitchen with her tea while he made up Milos’s room for her, then carried her suitcase in and laid it on the window seat. He wondered if he ought to call his father. Did his father know he’d been “left?” Did his workaholic father even realize his mother wasn’t there?
He stuffed a pillow into a pillow case, straightened the bedding, then went back to the kitchen, hoping against hope that he’d imagined the whole thing.
“You need to talk to Dad,” he said.
“No.”
“Ma.”
“No.”
He gave her a steely look, but she just shook her head, then smiled wanly and patted his cheek, and headed for the bedroom. “I need sleep,” she said. “I haven’t slept in days.”
“Me, neither,” Yiannis murmured to himself.
He didn’t sleep that night, either. He lay awake wondering who had turned the world upside down—and wanting Cat back in his arms.
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