Page 49 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

“I can see the resemblance.” I mean, I couldn’t. It was a cat. But what are you gonna do? And I had to admit, she was striking, being long-haired, and silver-coloured, with pale green eyes and an aristocratic better-than-you expression. “What breed is she?”

“I’m not sure—she’s a rescue cat.”

Of course she was.Of course.Nathaniel worked for charity, fixed up his house, cooked with ethically sourced products, and made me want to claw my own skin off with his oblivious commitment to being a good person. His unnaturally lovely cat could only have come from a shelter.

“I think,” he was saying, “she probably has some Maine coon blood in her. From the shape of her head and the fluffiness of her tail.”

“I can’t believe anyone would abandon her in the first place.” I’d watched a fair bit ofPet Rescuegrowing up, and catteries tended to be stuffed with sad-looking black-and-white moggies, not lofty feline princesses.

Lillie was twining herself possessively around Nathaniel’s ankles, and purring. “Well, she has FIV and people can be ignorant and cruel.”

“Eep. Sorry.”

“It’s a very manageable condition. It just means she can’t go outside or interact with other cats very much. But”—and here Nathaniel readopted his cat-voice which, I couldn’t deny, was kind of sexy in a messed-up way—“Lillie knows she’s my special girl. Who’s my special girl? Is it you? Yes it is. But Daddy has to cook now, darling.”

Okay. So. Here’s hoping I never have to hear Nathaniel refer to himself as Daddy again. While I was still processing, Lillie padded across the floor and leapt up onto the seat next to me, sitting there in the style of one of those ancient Egyptian cat statues, waiting to be worshipped.

“Hi, Lillie,” I tried. “What a pretty cat you are.”

I went to pet her ears but they snapped down immediately intohell nomode. And the next thing I knew, Lillie was a ball of electric fur, glaring at me from the floor, and my hand was covered in scratches.

“Um, Nathaniel?”

“I should probably have warned you. She can be a little nervous around strangers.”

“Sorry, but I’m um…bleeding here.”

“Oh, Lillie.” Nathaniel regarded her with an air of exasperated fondness. “What have you done, you naughty little minx?”

I would have thought it was fairly obvious. Lillie just turned and sauntered off, her tail curled smugly over her back in thathere’s my arsehole, suckerway that cats seemed especially into.

“Do you maybe have a tissue or something?” I asked. “I’m dripping on the floor.”

As it turned out, Nathaniel—on account of being a fully functioning grown-up—had a first aid kit. And I had to sit there like a kid who’d fallen over in the playground while he disinfected and bandaged me. As intimacies went, it was pretty banal, but it was still way more intimacy than either of us wanted. Unfortunately, the alternative would have been admitting our preferred level of interaction wasas little as humanly possible.

Nathaniel’s attentions were careful and impersonal as he bent, frowning in concentration, over my gushing cat wounds. But it was still too much, transforming him, very much against my will, from a plaster saint to a flesh-and-blood man. One who touched and felt, and was as real to Caspian as I was.

A different thought occurred to me. “Am I going to get cat AIDS now?”

“No, Arden. You’re not going to get cat AIDS.” For some reason, it sounded way worse repeated back to me. “FIV is not transferable to humans.”

“Good to know.”

God, I wanted to go home.

Maybe Nathaniel was thinking along similar lines, because he slid his phone out of his pocket, checked it, and wasn’t entirely able to hide a grimace. “Caspian’s stuck in traffic.”

“Yep yep.”

“I think”—Nathaniel finished packing away his gauze and antiseptics—“I’ll make those drinks now.”

Well, it was that or joint ritual suicide. “Sounds great.”

Of course, he just had martini glasses sitting in one of his cupboards. Sigh. And a cocktail shaker, which—while he didn’t fling it around or anything—he handled in a manner that suggested he knew what he was doing with it. Sure enough, a minute or so later, he was placing two perfectly made cosmopolitans onto the breakfast bar, each with a slice of lime balanced on the rim.

I was too ground down to tell him it was amazing-wonderful-fabulous, so I just drank the fucking thing, mumbling a half-arsed “Cheers” a second or two before the alcohol hit my mouth. It helped a bit—it tasted good, exactly the right mix of sweet, tart, and fruity, and the vodka was faintly numbing.

Numbing was good. Numbing was my friend.