Софи Келли - A Midwinter's Tail

“Um, no,” I said, realizing I didn’t really want to tell him I’d mistaken his singing for some animal attacking my cat. “I, uh, guess I don’t need this after all.” I leaned the broom against the wall by the door, then crossed the room and kissed him. I still felt a little bubble of happiness every time I did that. There had been a time I’d believed Marcus and I would never be a couple. There’d been a time I would have sworn that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with him. He’d made me crazy sometimes. He still made me crazy, but he also made me very, very happy.

I dipped my head over the pot. “You made spaghetti sauce,” I said. “It smells great.”

Owen meowed his agreement from his perch on the chair.

Marcus gave the sauce another stir. “Actually, I thawed spaghetti sauce,” he said. “Hannah made a big batch before she left.”

Hannah was Marcus’s younger sister. She was an actress and she’d been in town in September as part of the New Horizons Theatre Festival.

“Thawing is good, too,” I said.

Marcus leaned over to turn up the heat on a pot of simmering water. “I’m about to put the pasta on,” he said. “You should have time for a shower.”

“All right,” I said. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”

He shook his head and a lock of his dark wavy hair fell onto his forehead. “Owen and I have it all under control.”

The little tabby meowed enthusiastically at the sound of his name.

There was a spot of something on Marcus’s chin. I licked my thumb, reached up and rubbed it away. For a moment I’d considered kissing it away, but I was pretty sure that would have led to a lot more kisses and I really did need to have a shower.

Reluctantly, I pulled my gaze away from his gorgeous blue eyes. Owen was watching me, his gray head tipped to one side. I stopped to give him a scratch under his chin.

“Cats do not eat spaghetti,” I whispered sternly.

He made a face and shook his head. I knew that meant he was planning on wheedling at least a taste out of Marcus.

There was no sign of Owen’s brother, Hercules, in the living room. Upstairs in my bedroom I noticed the closet door was open just a little.

“You can come out now,” I said, peeling off my sweater.

After a moment the closet door opened and a furry black-and-white face peered around the edge.

“I think they’ve stopped singing for now,” I said.

He scrunched up his face in an expression that looked a lot like a grimace. I bent down and scooped up the little tuxedo cat. He shifted in my arms, put a paw on my shoulder and looked at me with his green eyes. “Yes, I heard them,” I said. “I thought something had gotten in here and was torturing you two.”

He dipped his head for a moment as if he was trying to tell me that it was torture for him.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “You know that was payback from Owen, don’t you?”

Hercules immediately turned and looked at the iPod dock on the table by the bed. The cat shared my love for Barry Manilow. Owen didn’t. Somewhere in his feline brain, singing Aerosmith along with Marcus—if you could call that noise singing—was his way of getting a little revenge for all the times he’d had to listen to Hercules and me do our version of “Copacabana.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to scrub the kitchen floor this weekend.”

Herc’s black-and-white face snapped up and it seemed to me that I could see a calculating gleam in his green eyes. I often did the floors to Ultimate Manilow .

I gave the cat a kiss on the top of his head and set him down on the floor. Then I grabbed my robe and headed for the shower. Five minutes later I was sitting on the edge of the bed again, rubbing my hair with a towel. Hercules was back in the closet. More than once I’d opened the door to find him just sitting on the floor, staring thoughtfully, it seemed to me, at the clothes hanging there.

“I’ve already chosen what I’m going to wear,” I said.

After a moment I heard a muffled meow from inside the closet, followed about thirty seconds later by what sounded like something falling over.

“I picked the shoes, too,” I added.

As I got up to get my comb, Hercules came out of the closet, a dust bunny stuck to his left ear. He swiped at it with a paw, shook his furry head and stalked away. Either he was insulted by my lack of interest in his kitty fashion skills or he’d caught a whiff of the spaghetti sauce.

I pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and stuffed my bare feet into my slippers.

“Perfect timing,” Marcus said as I stepped into the kitchen. He was just about to drain the pasta, with two pairs of cat eyes, one gold and one green, watching his every move.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just sit.” He inclined his head toward the table.

I pulled out my chair and sat down while he plated our spaghetti and spooned the sauce over the pasta. There was a small dish of grated Parmesan in front of my place. Marcus must have brought that with him, because I knew I didn’t have any. A warm feeling settled in my chest at the thought of him planning all this.

The sauce was delicious—rich with tomatoes, garlic and tiny meatballs no bigger than the end of my thumb.

“Hannah’s a wonderful cook,” I said, twirling another forkful of noodles.

Marcus nodded and licked a dab of sauce off the back of his fork. “I know. She’s been cooking since she was about six.” He smiled and his blue eyes lit up. “Whenever she screwed up a recipe, she’d toss whatever she’d made over the fence and the dogs next door would eat the evidence.”

I laughed and made a face at the same time. “I’m guessing that probably wasn’t so good for the dogs.”

“They both ended up at the veterinary clinic, the whole thing came out and my dad ended up paying the vet bills.” He speared a meatball with his fork. “Hannah was limited to her Easy-Bake Oven for a long time after that.”

Marcus didn’t talk a lot about his family. It had taken a long time for him to feel he could trust me and even more important, that I trusted him. That had been a bone of contention between us as we’d danced around a relationship. But not nearly as much as the fact that I seemed to get mixed up in every one of his cases.

In the two and a half months since the two of us had become a couple, I’d been slowly learning about his family. Most of the time, Marcus talked about Hannah, his younger sister, but I’d learned that his mother was a math professor and his father was a lawyer. It was more than I’d found out in the previous year and a half that I’d known him.

“How are rehearsals going?” I asked, thinking that if Hannah’s acting career suddenly went south, she could have a future as a chef.

Marcus gestured with his fork. “She said there are some changes that need to be made to the script, but I can tell by the way she talks about the play that she’s happy.”

Hannah was in rehearsals for a play called Walking Backwards , which was going to debut in Chicago and possibly move to New York after that.

Marcus held up one hand. “I almost forgot,” he said, pushing away from the table. He crossed over to the coat hooks by the back door and felt in the left pocket of his jacket.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two furry faces eye his chair. I leaned sideways so I was in their line of vision. “I know what the two of you are thinking. Stop thinking it,” I said quietly.

Owen and Hercules both turned to look at me, blinking in wide-eyed kitty innocence. Marcus came back and handed me a small blue envelope.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Open it and find out,” he said.