He took a breath, his tongue finally touching the roof of his mouth at the behest of the damned tomcat, and before he could utter a single warning, the white cat’s claw touched the fish head that was not hers.
And he pounced.
“Squalor!” both young women shrieked as the orange cat turned and used his beefy shoulder to propel the white cat forcefully to the side.
She recovered quickly, rolling with a delicate thunk and hopping back to her feet as though nothing had happened at all. She flicked her ears and took two confident steps back toward her intended object of theft.
Then there were three rapid cat sounds of indignation and the white cat went over the side of the dock. She almost went cleanly, but her front legs came up, narrow and snowy pale, grabbed the tom around the neck, claws digging into his scruff, and took him down with her.
There was a splash.
“Hubris!” Philippa Templeton-Rath cried. “Oh, heavens! Oh, no!”
Both cats emerged, spitting and hissing and thrashing in the wet dock waters, which were deeper than the rest of the stretch around this area.
Too deep for housecats. Or ship cats. Or whatever the Devil these were.
“Oh, damn,” Jasper muttered, and before he could really think about it, he was in the water too, diving in after the damned cats.
He emerged, eyes stinging, with the tomcat completely limp and spitting out saltwater like a bad foie gras under one arm, and the white cat going absolutely mad on the bruised side of his face with the very sharp tips of her claws as he attempted to use his feet to propel them toward the shallows.
It wasn’t until he got his soggy shoes into the shingles beneath the water that he could see them all staring down at him from the dock.
Even the harbormaster.
He opened his mouth to say something reassuring, but Hubris the cat slapped his lips with the full force of her open claw before he got the chance.
“You know,” said Libba in her Xandine accent. “I know a happily married pair who met in exactly the same way.”
“Oh, my babies, my sweet ones,” Miss Templeton-Rath exclaimed, sloshing into the water, her skirt water-logged as she reached out toward them.
Jasper, squinting at her through the salt sting in his eyes, attempted to hand her the orange cat first as the other one was currently attempting to carve her name into his throat, but the woman shook her head and took the white cat instead.
“Oh, Hubris.” She sighed as the cat immediately went slack and curled up against Miss Templeton-Rath’s chest like the best-behaved feline in Brighton. “You really don’t know when to stop.”
Jasper looked down at the orange cat, still shin-deep in the water.
Squalor looked up at him too.
And then vomited, all over his borrowed waistcoat.
Chapter Eleven
The morning hadnot gone in any of the twenty-seven directions Libba had previously accounted for: a fact that would likely irk her for years to come.
First, and perhaps most disastrously, Jasper was too soggy for an immediate invite to breakfast or some other such intimacy-building social call following his feline rescue showcase. Though she supposed ithadimpressed the Templeton-Raths enough to immediately extend an invitation to dinner.
To both of them.
A week from now.
And then, by necessity, they’d all been forced to go their separate ways almost immediately.
It wasn’t quite a disaster, but she couldn’t think of another word for it just yet.
She knew she ought to go directly to the Odalisque and change back into her normal clothes, but she was so agitated, so full of bristling, snapping, static energy, that she found herself marching toward the boardwalk and plastering herself against the glass window in the glossy, red door at Miss Persephone’s Oddities and Curiosities until Seph, still bleary, still wearing a set of men’s pajamas and her dressing gown, and clearly not ready to open shop, had found her there and let her in.
Two cups of tea, a discarded cloak, and two meetings of her forehead to Seph’s cool, wooden breakfast table later, Libba found that she’d somehow verbally unloaded the whole of her current barrel of schemes on the other woman, who was simply staring, nodding, and stirring her own tea, like Libba had just come by to express frustration with a late order from the laundress.
