Gladys’s expression suggested she wasn’t buying a single word of this, but she moved on. “There’s something else. That damned cat—the white one—have you seen it?”
My heart stuttered. “Cat?”
“What cat?” Farley asked in the most unconvincing tone I’d ever heard from him.
“The stray. Fluffy thing, white as snow, eyes that don’t match.” Gladys pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her nose preemptively. “Been skulking around the cabins all month. I’ve been trying to catch it before winter really sets in.”
“No,” I said. “No cat. Haven’t seen any cat.”
“Not a single one,” Farley agreed.
“What would a cat even be doing up here?” I added, which was one sentence too many, because Gladys’s stink-eye intensified to a level I hadn’t previously known was possible.
“Uh-huh.” She looked between us like we were two children who’d clearly stolen cookies and were still holding the jar. “Well.If you do see it, call me. I don’t want the thing freezing to death in this blizzard. I’ll take it to the shelter in town.”
“The shelter,” I repeated.
“That’s what I said.” Gladys was already stepping back from the car. “Stay safe up there. And for God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid like try to drive down the mountain once the snow starts.”
She marched back toward the office, and Farley raised the window. Neither of us spoke as he pulled back onto the road, continuing up the mountain toward our cabins.
The silence was different now. Heavy with unspoken words.
“A shelter,” Farley said finally.
“She can’t—Purrsephone can’t go to a shelter.”
“I know.”
“She’s not a stray. She’s—” I stopped, because what was Purrsephone, exactly? Not ours. Not technically. Just a cat who’d decided we were worth visiting, who slept on my bed and sat on Farley’s coffee table and looked at us with those mismatched eyes like she’d chosen us for reasons only she understood.
“She’s ours,” Farley finished quietly.
The word ours hit me somewhere in the chest and stayed there.
We pulled into my driveway first—Farley’s cabin was another hundred yards up the road—and I saw her immediately. Purrsephone, sitting in my front window like a queen surveying her kingdom. The late afternoon light turned her white fur golden, and her mismatched eyes—one blue, one green—tracked the Range Rover as we parked.
“There she is,” Farley said.
“There she is.”
We sat there, engine idling, watching the cat watch us. My coat was still crumpled over the illicit cat food in the back seat.Gladys was probably already planning her shelter call. And in less than twenty-four hours, we were going to be trapped in our respective cabins by two feet of snow.
“We can’t let her take Purrsephone to a shelter,” I said.
“We absolutely cannot.” Farley turned to face me, and something in his expression had shifted—softer, more open, like the careful walls he’d built were starting to crack. “We’ll figure it out. Together.”
Together.
The word hung between us, full of possibility.
I looked at Farley Davenport—sharp-tongued, wounded, beautiful Farley Davenport—and thought about option one and option two and all the sensible reasons I should keep my distance. I thought about the three weeks I had left in Virginia and the career crisis waiting for me in LA and the fact that I still didn’t know who I was without Dr. Brock Blaze.
And then I stopped thinking altogether.
I leaned across the center console, closed the distance between us, and kissed him.
It wasn’t a careful kiss. It wasn’t a tentative, testing-the-waters kiss. It was the kiss of someone who’d spent days wanting and waiting and wondering, and had finally run out of patience for all three.
