Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(19)
“Are you sure?” Tess asked, her gaze finally stopping on him.
He nodded. “Absolutely. Anyway, it’s only for a few weeks, so if I make you want to pull your hair out, you just have to remember that it won’t be forever.”
She pushed up her glasses and gave him a hard look. “Okay, but we need to get some things straight first.”
“Hit me.”
“This is just temporary. No funny business. No shotgun wedding. No more nights spent naked together—no offense, but this”—she gestured between the two of them—“was a one-time thing.”
“We got weddinged,” he said, repeating her words from that morning back at her.
“Exactly.” She nodded, her chin-length curls bouncing. “Can you agree to my terms?”
He nodded, trying to unwind why the declaration of her conditions hit like a puck grazing his balls. Still, he couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t like this had been her plan, either.
“Good,” she said, her brass-balls facade slipping just a bit when she let out a shaky breath. “Let’s do it.”
“Finally,” Fallon said with a sigh. “If that had gone on any longer, I would have had to hit you both with a delay-of-game penalty.” She dipped a half step back into the apartment and reemerged with a wriggling black and white kitten. “Now, Phillips, take Kahn.”
He lowered the suitcase to the floor and took the kitten. It was tiny and soft and it had big eyes and teeny tiny teeth that—he winced—sank with expert efficiency into his thumb.
“Why am I holding a kitten?” he asked.
“That’s Kahn,” Tess said with all the love in her voice. “He’s coming, too, but I don’t have a cat carrier yet, so you’ll have to hold him.”
“No.” He shook his head and tried to hand off Kahn to Blackburn or Fallon—both of who just grinned and refused. “No cats.”
“I’m not abandoning Kahn,” Tess said, her voice wobbling again. “I don’t do that.”
“It’s just a cat.” Okay, a really soft, small cat but still a cat. And his house was a no-animal zone—a rule that stupid trash panda raccoon kept ignoring.
“Exactly.” Tess blinked quickly and inhaled a deep breath. “It’s not like he’s a crocodile. But watch out for his tee—” Satan’s fur ball bit him again, this time the side of his palm. “Oops. Don’t worry—he’ll grow out of it.”
“Really?” It sure as hell didn’t feel like it.
“Probably not.” She did that shaky-breath, fast-blinking thing again. “But I’ve got hope.”
And he had a big L in the win/loss column right now because Kahn the Biter was coming home with them.
“As long as there’s that.” He adjusted his awkward hold on the evil animal that just ended with teeny tiny little spike claws embedded in his palm. “He doesn’t scratch things up, right?”
“Nope.” She let out a cough that sounded like it was more than that, but her face remained neutral. “That’s totally a myth that cats do that.”
“Good.” He’d moved around too much growing up to have any pets, even a goldfish, so he couldn’t call her out on what seemed like a straight-faced lie, so he didn’t. “I’m glad to hear that.”
Okay, he could make this work. He’d just set down the ground rules. It would be fine. Kahn picked that moment to bite Cole’s thumb again. God, he hoped that wasn’t a sign of what was to come.
Chapter Six
Kahn was missing.
Tess was barely awake the next morning and yet she was already in super-silent panic mode. Why quiet hysteria? Because Cole’s house was a museum where every exhibit was dedicated to something the color of cold oatmeal. It was so clean, she could practically smell the bleach, and even the idea of speaking above a whisper seemed out of place and weird. So a kitten wandering around free to claw its way to satisfaction on what was probably a ten-thousand-dollar taupe-colored leather couch? Yeah, that was the kind of situation that definitely called for dying-to-pee-but-still-twenty-minutes-from-the-next-interstate-exit urgency.
“Kahn,” she whisper-yelled, following the words with the soft click of her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
Usually those two sounds got him to respond, but this time nothing happened. She’d already checked under the bed, in the window seat overlooking the evergreen-tree-filled backyard, and in every nook and cranny in the bedroom and its attached bathroom. Kahn had disappeared—or more correctly, he’d wandered out beyond her room.
Fuck.
She should have known better. It wasn’t that she’d planned to let her adorable little terror loose in the Louvre, but that was starting to feel like the story of her life lately.
She hadn’t planned to get knocked up. She hadn’t planned to have the ceiling above her bed collapse. She hadn’t planned to move into Cole’s very nice, way-too-fancy-to-touch-anything house. But here she was, even if her kitty was missing. There was a joke in there somewhere and if she wasn’t about to drown in a cold sweat, she would have found it. Right now, though, she had to find Kahn.
She’d left her bedroom door open just a crack this morning when she’d come back from the kitchen with a mug of hot tea and a piece of toast slathered with raspberry jam. The idea being she’d snuggle and snack in bed for a little bit with Kahn before starting to actually wake up, since normally the first two hours of the day were a hazy mess for her. A morning person she most definitely was not—which explained why it took her a minute to notice the tiny raspberry-colored kitten paw prints leading out her bedroom door.