In that moment, all I wanted was to be dry and warm and—
Mr.Tumnus cried from under the bed.
And now I was a bad cat mom wearing a soaked towel that didn’t even wrap around my hips.
If it were just me, I could request a new room and survive this place, but now my son’s well-being was in question.
I slipped on my smiley-face slippers and ran out the door into the parking lot where Isaac was walking past the empty pool, soft flurries landing on his shoulders.
“Wait!” I screamed. “Stop!”
He spun around and his face quickly morphed from curiosity to concern. “Are you trying to die of hypothermia?”
“I’ll do it, okay? I’ll go crash in your fancy mansion.”
He sauntered toward me, the corner of his lip twitching slightly. “I’ll help you pack.”
“I’m doing this for Mr.Tumnus,” I told him. “Just to be clear.”
He nodded discerningly. “For Mr.Tumnus.”
I’d been to the mansion plenty of times, but usually when I was here, it was crawling with crew and craft services.
This was the first time I was seeing the mansion in the way it was meant to be seen, like the front of a postcard with patches of snow on the shrubbery and the sun shining through the clouds just enough to cast a shadow through its floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Home sweet home,” Isaac said as he rolled my suitcase over the threshold with a backpack slung over each shoulder.
Mr.Tumnus let out a cautionary meow from inside his carrier as I followed Isaac through the front doors. “It’s not much, but it’ll do.”
When Isaac got to the base of the wide marble staircase, he set the suitcase upright and popped down the handle. He shrugged off the backpacks, the second one with a soft grunt. “What’s in this one? A baby manatee?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, setting the cat carrier down so I could unzip the backpack and show Isaac its contents. “I couldn’t leave the elixir of immortality behind.”
He squinted down at where the backpack opened to reveal countless pouches of fruit concentrate–based liquid. “Capri-Sun?”
“I wasn’t sure what your stock looked like.”
“I’ll have a word with the butler about laying some down in the cellar,” he said and then gestured over to the wide marble staircase. “You can stay in any room you want, but first I have to eat and so do you.”
Food felt like a good idea. I picked up the carrier and followed him past the staircase and down a long hallway that led to the airy and newly remodeled kitchen. “Where can I set up Mr.Tumnus’s litter box?”
He opened the fridge—it was the fancy kind with cabinet doors on it so that it didn’t even look like an appliance—and took out a carton of eggs. “There’s a laundry room right off the kitchen there. Will that do for the dark lord?”
“He does enjoy rolling around in fabric softener sheets,” I said as I opened the door to find a practically unused laundry room.
Carefully, I sat Mr.Tumnus down and opened his carrier so he could explore at his own pace. He poked his head out as I poured litter into his box. “Take your time, sweet boy,” I told him. “Lots of expensive furniture to sink your claws into, but let’s avoid anything that looks like it should be appraised onAntiques Roadshow.”
“Are you talking to your cat?” Isaac asked from the other room.
I walked out to the kitchen with Mr.Tumnus’s food bowl and water dish. “How else would he hear me, sad boy?”
Shimmying behind him, and trying to ignore the way my breasts brushed against his back, I turned on the faucet to fillthe water bowl only for Isaac to reach over me and immediately turn it off. “You serve the beast tap water?”
“Uhhhh... he only gets Mountain Dew as a treat,” I said with a laugh. “It’s really been a long time since you left your Malibu castle, huh?”
He retrieved a mixing bowl from a very empty cabinet. “It’s not that. I’ve just never had a pet of my own.”
“Never? Not even a gerbil?”
