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“Wonderful,” he said.
What was wonderful was his Cat. How could he give her up? She was all a man could hope for, and more.
Everything was so new for her today. She’d never seen snow until the other night, and now New York had obliged with an honest-to-goodness blizzard that had brought the whole city to a standstill.
She’d never been with a man before, either, and he’d obliged by taking her innocence.
He’d had no right to it but, damn it, he had no regrets. Making love with her had filled him with happiness. She was amazing. She’d held nothing back; she’d given him everything. Her joy at being in his arms. Her passion. Her sweetness.
He’d imagined what it would be like to make love with Cat but nothing he’d fantasized compared with the reality of making her his.
Except she wasn’t his. She couldn’t be.
“Jake, do you see that? That woman with the big black dog? Oh, he’s adorable! He’s trying to bury his muzzle in the snow.”
“I see it,” he said gruffly, tightening his arm around her, but in truth what he saw was what had to happen next. The men he’d have to introduce to Catarina. The search he’d have to organize so that he found her the proper husband.
Pain, sharp as a surgical blade, sliced through his heart.
No. He couldn’t do it. How could he let her give herself to another man to meet the terms of two wills that should never have been written? How could he see her with that man and know that she’d never be his again?
“Jake?” She swung toward him, eyes wide and shining. “Could we go to the park and make a snowman?”
No. Hell, no. The only place he wanted to go was back to bed, to stay there forever, make the real world go away until it was just Cat and him.
“I know it’s still snowing, but please could we?”
He swallowed and managed a smile. “Sure we could, honey,” he said, but first he took her back to bed and made love to her again.
She was enthusiastic, insatiable and inexhaustible—in bed and out.
All of it was catching.
They didn’t build a snowman; they built a snow family. They’d raided the fridge before they went downstairs, so they made a guy with a carrot for his nose, a lady with half a cucumber for hers, a little round blob of a snow baby with a pair of radish eyes and another blob, smaller and squatter, that Cat solemnly christened Lassie.
Maybe you couldn’t change the future, but on a magical day like this you could keep reality at bay.
“Lassie?” Jake grinned as she put the finishing touch to the mounded snow. “What could you possibly know about that collie? She hasn’t made a movie in years.”
“I know that ‘she’ was a ‘he,”’ Cat answer
ed primly. “And I saw a whole bunch of Lassie movies. The school ran them on Friday nights.”
“Along with lots of other smash hits, I’ll bet.”
“You’re just jealous because I got to watch old movies.”
Jake’s smile tilted. “I’m just jealous because you got to watch them without me.”
Cat stood up and moved closer. “You know what I always wanted to do?” she asked. A smile—a teasing, sexy smile—curved her mouth. She rose on her toes so her lips were almost at his ear. “I always wanted to watch movies in bed.”
His body reacted with such speed he was glad there was nobody near enough to notice. He reached out, slid his arms around her and pulled her against him.
Her little gasp of surprise told him she noticed, but that was exactly what he’d intended.
“Then this is your lucky day,” he whispered. “I just happen to have a DVD player, as well as a bed.”
“You do?”
