“Cat!” Jewel shrieked again, bouncing so hard in her chair that it scraped backward on the floor.
Startled, Brave jumped down and ran out of the kitchen.
“I spell CAT! Pa-pa! Pa-pa, I spell a word!” Her shrill voice was almost too high-pitched to identify the words.
From the hallway came the sound of rapid footsteps—the particular urgency of a father who'd heard his daughter shriek. Torin appeared in the kitchen doorway, his face tight with alarm, one hand braced on the doorframe as if prepared to launch himself at whatever threat had made his child scream.
But when he saw Jewel's radiant face—incandescent with joy, her hands clasped together, bouncing in her seat—and the three felt letters lined up on the table in front of her, his expression shifted. The alarm drained away, replaced by confusion, then dawning comprehension, and then into something so raw andoverwhelmed that Ivy had to look away to give him a moment of privacy. “She spelledcat.” Her voice caught on the words. “All by herself.”
Torin crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees beside Jewel’s chair.
His large hands—Papa Big Hands, Ivy thought, and felt her heart twist—framed his daughter's small face.
“Show me, Sweetheart.” His voice was rough as sandpaper. “Show Papa.”
Jewel pointed to each letter with a finger that trembled with excitement. “Cuh. Aay. Tuh.” She swept her finger across. “Cat!” Then she flung her arms around his neck and clung, her face buried against his shoulder. “Jewel spell word! Jewel spellcat!”
Torin gathered her in and held on. His eyes closed. The muscles of his jaw worked. He swallowed once, twice, obviously fighting for control. Opening his eyes, he kissed the top of his daughter’s head. “My clever girl.”
Over Jewel's shoulder, his eyes found Ivy’s—dangerously bright, showing gratitude, pride, and awe. And something deeper, something he couldn't disguise quickly enough before revealing his feelings and showing a tenderness directed not just at his daughter but also at Ivy.
The raw emotion on his face made Ivy’s heart clench hard enough to hurt.
“Cat,” he repeated, his voice barely above a whisper.
Now that the noise died down, Brave returned, as if understanding that the commotion somehow concerned her—she leapt onto her chair and from there onto the table, sitting squarely on the felt letters, her tail curling around her paws with an air of supreme self-satisfaction.
Jewel dissolved into giggles. “Bave sit oncat!”
“Braveisa cat sitting oncat.” Ivy laughed through the tears she'd given up trying to hide. “A cat on a cat.”
“Cat on a cat!” Jewel repeated with a chortle, as if this were the funniest thing in the world.
And Torin—the solemn, guarded, fearful man who rationed his smiles as carefully as a miser counted coins—threw back his head and laughed. A real laugh, full and unreserved, the sound of joy breaking through years of carefully maintained composure.
Ivy stared at him. The laughter transformed him even more than his rare smiles did, erasing the years of worry and grief and revealing the young man he must have been before his loved ones broke his heart.
Oh,she thought, with a sudden, helpless clarity.Oh, no!
Because in that moment, watching Torin laugh while his daughter giggled and the cat sat on the word they'd built together, Ivy understood something she'd been trying very hard not to acknowledge.
I’m falling in love with him.
Not the cautious, controllable pull she'd felt from the beginning—the flutter in her chest when he entered a room, the awareness of his presence that prickled along her skin, the way she admired his wounded-hero attractiveness. This was something deeper and more dangerous. This was love—real, inconvenient, impossible love for a man who was her employer and a recluse and the father of the child she was coming to think of as her own.
You fool,she told herself, even as she wiped her eyes and laughed along with them.You absolute fool.
But it was too late for warnings. The word had been spelled.L-O-V-E.The cat of awareness was out of the bag.
That night,lying in her narrow Jenny Lind bed beneath the eight-point star quilt Cora made, Ivy stared at the ceiling and listened to the silence of the house. Torin's room was down the hall. If she held her breath, she could hear the muffled creak of his bedframe as he settled in for the night. The sound was both unremarkable and exquisitely intimate, and she pressed the covers over her mouth to muffle the small, involuntary sound that escaped her. She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the rose sachet.
I’m being ridiculous.
She was a twenty-two-year-old spinster who’d never been courted, never been kissed. She’d spent her adult life in a house where love was as bleak as warmth in winter. She had no experience with desire and no framework for understanding the strange awareness of love that had hummed through her body all day.
But Ivy was also aware of something her other senses awakened, something she could only describe asrecognition. As if some part of her had been waiting for this particular man, this particular life, and had known it the moment she stepped through his door and dropped to her knees in front of his daughter.
Cora would laugh,she thought.She would say this is exactly what she planned.
