Keep them there? Nora thought back to the bright walls, the mostly clean, impersonal spaces that now made up Donny’s apartment. You couldn’t keep kittens in an apartment you were renting out. You couldn’t watch for a possibly angry adult cat if you didn’t even live in the place you thought it might show up.

What was he doing?

He looked down at her, all stubble-faced and kitten-scratched and unwinking, and he may have had a serious expression on his face, but she felt oddly like their shared laughter still lived between them, same as the way their weeks-gone golden hour always did.

“It’s temporary,” he said, and he sounded so full of conviction—so full of something like a warning—that she really tried to take his word for it.

But deep down, she had a feeling she was about to be seeing a whole lot more of Will Sterling.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

He was starting to feel like he’d never again see the outside of this apartment.

In the four days since Nora Clarke had, once again, turned all his plans upside down, Will had found himself existing in a strange, outside-of-time universe where his daily tasks revolved around two small animals whose appetite for attention was matched only by their appetite for attempted destruction of every effort he’d made to ready Donny’s apartment for rental. During the day, he felt like he mostly worked at containment efforts—how to set them up in the room where he needed to work on completing a painting or cleaning or rearranging task, how to keep them entertained while he did. At night, he slept fitfully on the functional but deeply uncomfortable couch that’d been delivered only a few days ago, cold from the back door he left open, one ear always trained on the outside, waiting for some sound of the cat he’d done all this for.

Fool, he’d think to himself as he tossed and turned. You didn’t do it for the fucking cat.

The problem was, Dr. Taylor didn’t really care about any mother cat. He cared about finding some reason to come over at night to see Nora, probably so he could try to look down her top again, which Will had definitely caught him doing in that exam room, and then it was like his whole entire brain had turned to static. Will figured that agreeing to take the kittens was, on balance, a better static-brained outcome than punching Dr. Taylor in the throat and carrying Nora out of that room like he had some sort of claim on her.

Then again, he had also spent the last fifteen minutes cleaning up a kitten-shredded roll of toilet paper and he hadn’t seen Nora for days, so.

So it didn’t seem like any of his instincts were all that great.