CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Two weeks to Christmas Eve
Cat’s foot twitched in Noah’s lap when he tickled her bare sole. “Focus, Yates,” Cat ordered from her end of the couch. They were both wading through opposite halves of a stack of papers.
He handed her another application. “Maybe pile.”
Cat dropped it onto the stack on the coffee table and groaned. “Who knew it would be so hard to find a location for a school?”
“Literally anyone who ever tried to start one themselves,” Noah said mildly.
“We’ve got a hundred definitely nopes and like six maybes,” Cat lamented. “And not one of them feels right.”
“You may need to visit the ones at the top,” Noah mused, flipping over another application. “Nope pile.”
She tossed it onto the growing mound on the floor.
“I can’t start hiring staff until we know where this damn building is going to be.”
“And you can’t wait until you have a building to start hiring staff,” Noah said, familiar with Cat’s cyclical frustration. “Now drink your wine and keep reading.”
Dutifully, Cat picked up her wine and cocked her head. “What would you say to canning the research for the night and just pretending we’re normal people who order pizza, watch TV, and have sex?”
Noah tossed his stash of carefully organized papers in the air, and Cat laughed.
“You’re dying to pick them up, aren’t you?” she accused.
“It’s killing me. Please pretend you don’t see me putting them back in order.” He shuffled and stacked and placed them neatly on the end table.
Cat laughed again. “I’ll order the pizza.”
“You’re actually going to eat a slice and not just shovel salad into your face and whine about how good my pizza smells, right?” Noah asked as he organized Cat’s paperwork.
“I’m not filming tomorrow, so I think I can afford a slice, maybe even two,” Cat said with a wink.
Playfully, Noah clutched his heart. “Well, in that case, order a large.”
She took her wine and headed into the kitchen. She pulled the short stack of takeout menus out the last drawer of the peninsula that also housed flashlights and leftover cat treats from furry flood victim Felipe’s stay. Cat pawed through Noah’s bulletin board by the door until she found a coupon.
Noah appreciated frugality. A leftover, she assumed, from his childhood. Sometimes she pictured him, a little boy, going to bed hungry in a cold house with thin walls. His only escape from the constant fear was his town’s Christmas Festival.
This year would be one for the record books, she promised herself. She’d been determined to make it big first to prove him wrong, then to prove herself right. Now, she just wanted to give Noah a gift that he would appreciate all the way down from his city manager practicality to his little boy holiday joy. She wanted that for him. And she’d be lying if she pretended that a part of her didn’t want him to always associate her with the festival. After this year, memories of Cat King would be so wrapped up in the Christmas Festival, Noah would never be able to separate them.
That was a kind of fame that Cat could really embrace. Being unforgettable to a man like Noah.
She dialed the pizza place and ordered what had become their usual. A grilled chicken salad and sausage and pepper pizza. They’d fight over the remote. Cat usually watched competitors’ shows for research while Noah preferred documentaries on the History Channel. Each proclaiming the other didn’t know what entertainment was.
“Pizza will be here in twenty,” Cat told Noah when he entered the kitchen. He pressed a kiss to her cheek and reached around her for the refrigerator.
“Hmm, not enough time to get you naked.”
She laughed and twined her arms around his neck. “There’s always time for you to get me naked.”
He picked her up and settled her on the counter. “Naked yes. But fully exploring your nakedness? No.”
“After pizza and Property Rehab,” Cat offered.
“After pizza and Submarines of the Pacific,” Noah countered.
“Hmm, I wish Sara was here as a tie-breaker.” Cat had been joining Noah and Sara for dinners regularly, to the girl’s delight. Sara’s entertainment choices ran toward binge watching sit-coms. “That reminds me, Henry passed along some crazy recipe his mother always made him growing up. I thought we could try making it and invite him over so he could tell us how horribly we failed.”
“Sara cooking dinner for a handsome British guy?” Noah mused. “Sounds like a father’s worst nightmare.”
“Oh, then we definitely have to invite Drake, too,” Cat teased.
Noah grimaced. “Put it on the calendar. I’m sure you’ll be Sara’s favorite human in the world for another week if you pull that off.”
“Hey, have you ever thought about redoing your kitchen?” Cat asked, running her fingers through his hair. She liked it messy.
“No, but I can see your wheels turning every time you’re in here.”
Cat grinned. “Guilty as charged. Don’t take offense. I do it to every room I’m in.”
“What would you do in here?”
“I’d kill this peninsula,” she said, slapping the counter she sat on. “Put in an island, a huge one, running length-wise. Bar stools. Black leathered granite. Extend the cabinets on to this wall.” She pointed.
“What? No walk-in pantry?” Noah teased.
“I’m trying to reconfigure that too-tiny-to-be-useable powder room and the space under the stairs into something workable.”
“Your brain is a wonder,” Noah said, placing a kiss to the corner of her mouth.
“I like your house, Noah. Your kid, too,” Cat admitted.
“I like having you in my house, around my kid.”
“I’m going to miss this,” she said, feeling a pang of sadness. “When we wrap filming next week, when I’m on the road. I’m going to miss nights like this.”
“You say that like you’re confessing some deep, dark secret,” Noah said, rubbing his thumb across her lips.
“I love my life,” Cat said. She was reminding herself as much as him. “I love the hustle and the travel and the cameras.”
“But you like this, too,” he pointed out.
She nodded. “I like you a lot, Noah. More than I’ve ever liked anyone else.” She needed him to know that.
“What’s not to like about a stick-in-the-mud city manager who tried to throw you out of town?”
“You’re a good, kind, smart, sexy, attentive, interesting man, Noah Yates. Don’t sell yourself short.”
“You’re kind of okay yourself,” Noah teased.
The doorbell rang, cutting her off before she could make him understand just how serious she was.