Love's Nine Lives
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She wasn’t quite sure what.
Or maybe she was.
Though she firmly ordered herself not to, Bridget drifted over to her front window and peeked around the edge of the curtain.
She watched as he leaped into a truck that she probably would have needed a stepladder to get into.
Despite her firm orders to her mind not to think about his body, she remembered it in sharp detail: him sitting on her couch, the large muscle in his forearm jumping every time he took a sip of tea, his jeans molded over the ridged muscles of his thighs, his chest huge and solid under a stained T-shirt. He had probably done that on purpose, made those muscles leap, the swine.
“Well, who is swooning over the swine?” she demanded of herself. The truck started with a roar and pulled away from the curb in a spray of gravel.
He would do everything too fast. A blush heated her neck and her cheeks as her mind flew with that one. “I just meant,” she told herself sternly, “that Justin West is a man of rough edges and no refinement whatsoever.”
He had insulted her and treated her like an idiot.
“I’ll show him,” she told Conan. “You wait and see.”
Conan opened an eye and regarded her, looking unconvinced.
But Bridget went right to the phone book and made a list of every contractor in the county. In the morning she would check them out with the Better Business Bureau. Within a week she would have a cat door, and Justin West would be a faint, unpleasant memory.
Only that wasn’t quite how it worked.
Because a week later she was no closer to getting Conan his cat door. After submitting her prospectus by fax or courier to over a dozen contractors, she had been laughed at, sworn at and hung up on.
Even when she reluctantly retired her SOW, no one had the time to do such a small job. The one quote she was given seemed outrageous, and it didn’t even include an automatic cat-door opener. She was reluctantly grateful that Justin had given her a guideline for the pricing of her project.
To make matters worse, Conan seemed to be getting fatter. How could he be gaining weight? She was only putting out a limited amount of the diet food, and he barely seemed to be touching that. She could see the poor cat was depressed. She now saw he needed to be outside.
“Oh, Conan,” she said, touching his head. “The hair will grow back where the bandages tore it off. And you lost a whole two ounces this week. I’m sure of it.”
The cat seemed to know she was lying, just as her inner self knew it was totally untrue that she had not found Justin West just about the most maddeningly attractive man she had ever met.
The house was in darkness and Conan lay sprawled on Miss Daisy’s favorite green Victorian armchair, relishing the amount of orange hair he was successfully grinding into the fabric. Some things were off-limits even to him—this chair and the countertops to name a few—but he considered his trespass a legitimate part of his ongoing protest campaign. As soon as he was certain she was asleep, he would make his nightly raid.
Meanwhile he contemplated how life had deteriorated from the dieting doldrums to just plain hell. Starving wasn’t good enough. Oh, no, now he had to be bald, too. The bandage removal from his head had taken huge patches of his head fur with it. It was an absolute assault on his dignity.
As if coping with the diet and hair loss were not bad enough, Conan could feel the most subtle shiver in the air since that nasty nail pounder had made his appearance to discuss the cat door. The man had been rather dirty, he’d been rude and he’d been unreasonable to poor Miss Daisy. Still, Justin Pest meant trouble, Conan sensed that as easily as he could sense the coming of a storm. Why else would his fifteen-minute collision with their lives still be creating ripples?
And creating ripples it was! Since that unfortunate incident, Miss Daisy had not been herself. She seemed constantly agitated, possibly because her attempts to “show him” had been largely unsuccessful. Conan had gotten to the point where he crept into the other room while she did her nightly relay of phone calls to yet more contractors. Her humiliation was painful.
Mostly since it meant she had forgotten on three and a half separate occasions to fill his food dish. Even if it was with diet gruel, the oversight was unnerving. So was the fact that she had been neglecting to scratch his belly on demand and wandering past him as if in a trance, her rumpled list of contractors clutched in one hand.
Judging by Miss Daisy’s volatile reaction to the barbaric cat-door contractor, most inexperienced cats would say that Justin Pest didn’t stand a chance of worming his way into her life. But cats were equipped with a sonar called instinct, and Conan had felt something powerful, perhaps even untamable, in the air between Miss Daisy and the nail pounder. The man did possess a certain powerful ease with himself that a cat had to admire.
History had an unfortunate way of repeating itself, and Conan had lived through this particular scenario before. In his past life, he’d lived satisfactorily with a female of the human species, too. Oh, she had been no Miss Daisy—rather a washout in both the affection and culinary departments, actually—but she had been adequate. She’d opened and closed the door of her trailer home pretty much on demand, kept the litter box reasonably clean and kept the food dish full. Bargain-basement cat food, but at least not diet.
Then some canine-reeking slob had begun to make appearances. And then he had moved in. Before Conan had really adjusted to that, along came that nasty, smelly, screaming baby. And out went the cat.
“Babies and cats don’t mix,” his previous owner had told him as she’d tossed him from the car into a dark, filthy alley. “Cats have a history of smothering babies, so you have to go.”
Of course, this statement was totally unfounded. Conan blamed that particular vicious rumor on those witch-hunting activists four hundred years ago. They had actually published a falsified drawing of a cat sucking the life out of a baby. Human history was rife with wackos! Not to mention barbarians.
Needless to say, although Miss Daisy’s reaction to Justin Pest had seemed void of potential for the type of relationship that created yucky, stinky little humans, there was something about her behavior Conan found disturbing.
Among a cat’s many, many strong points was superior intuition. And Conan’s intuition had gone on red alert when Justin Pest had entered the room. It was not like Miss Daisy to be so fidgety. And what had he glimpsed in her eyes every time her gaze had locked onto one of that man’s many bulging muscles? Hunger.