Page 14 of Just Say (Hell) No
The Ultimate Cat Gym,the sign said.
It was covered in leopard print. It also cost nearly six hundred dollars.
“No,” he told the kitten, moving on with his laden trolley. “Trial basis, and I’m not the one on trial. Perform, or be cut from the squad. I just bought you a feather toy on a pole, you’re barely the size of a tennis ball, and you don’t need a cat gym. Climb a chair instead.”
An enormous black-and-brown Bernese Mountain Dog padded by on a leash held by a girl barely bigger than he was. The dog turned a tolerant eye on Marko and the fluffball, who was on his shoulder now, and Marko thought,See?That’sa dog. A man’s dog. A working dog.The kind of dog he needed, if he’d needed a dog. Which he didn’t.
A chorus of barking rushing up from behind nearly deafened him, and pinpricks of pain ran up his scalp as the kitten climbed his head again. He put a hand up to steady her and scowled at the two yapping Jack Russells, barely held back by a stout bloke. The dogs had reared up on their hind legs in an attempt to get to his kitten, the bloodthirsty bastards. Maybe he didn’t like dogs as much as he thought.
“Sorry,” the bloke said. “They have issues with cats.” He looked more closely. “Marko Sendoa, isn’t it?”
“Yeh,” Marko said over the considerable noise of the still-barking terriers. “How ya goin’.” He took his kitten and escaped.
Was he spending the evening looking his fill, and thinking about more, at a black-haired, green-eyed witch? No. Was he eyeing the waist he longed to put his hands around, and the rest of the body he longed to put his handson,sipping on a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in an outdoor pub where the candles and the music were both soft, and watching her cheeks turn pink under his gaze? He was not.
And most of all—was he sinking into the spa tub on his patio, the warm air filled with the evening song of the birds in his back garden, with that same sweet somebody by his side, up to her pretty neck in steamy bubbles? He mostdefinitelywas not.
Instead, he was paying two hundred eighty-seven dollars for cat supplies and already thinking about Sunday. Such was the power of a woman on a man who dropped his guard.
He’d have to be much more careful.
When he pulled into the driveway in the twilight, he realized there was somebody sitting outside his front door, her back to the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest. A girl.
No, not that girl.
What the bloody hell.
The kitten had ridden home in his lap. Now, he put her carefully into the pocket of his tracksuit jacket and said, “Stay.”
Did cats know “Stay”? Could catslearn“Stay”? He didn’t know.
His cat didn’t know it, anyway, because no sooner had he loaded himself up with his first round of supplies and headed up the walk than she was climbing his back again. He said, “Don’tdothat. You’ll fall off,” but she didn’t listen. She just got to his shoulder and hung on.
By the time he got to the top of the stairs, Ella had stood up. Looking even younger than her sixteen years in her school uniform of plaid kilt, green jumper, and knee socks, her blonde hair falling around her face. He still wasn’t used to her as a blonde.
She said, “Why do you have a kitten?”
He said, “I don’t have a kitten. She has me,” juggled the Premium Felt Cat Cave as Ella picked up her backpack and an ominously large duffel, and punched the key code into the pad. “Come in,” he said. “Make a cup of tea while I bring in the rest of this kit.”
“Do you have herbal?” she asked.
“No. Why would I have herbal?”
She sighed. In exasperation. “Marko. Girls?”
“Girls what?”
“Like. Herbal?”
“Oh. No. Girls are out of luck, I guess.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll have a glass of water, then.”
“You do that,” he said. “But hold my kitten.” He reached a careful hand up for the fluffball and handed her to Ella, then went back for the litter box and the rest of it.
There’d be a reason. There was always a reason. It couldn’t be for long. She was in her uniform, it wasn’t the school holidays yet, and Tekapo was fifteen hundred kilometers and an entire island—or a world—away from St. Heliers.
He came back in with the covered litter box and bag of litter, and the kitten uttered a sound somewhere between a meow and a yowl, climbed down Ella’s leg, making her yelp, and trotted across the floor to him like a dust bunny on legs. He told Ella, “Hang on. She either loves me, or she needs to use this thing. I don’t want to wait and find out which.”
