Time After Time by Kay Hooper

Cal, I have all my teeth. And nobody put a kitten in me. Show me a lioness, and I’m afraid I’d want to do more than just wash her face. But I’d never hurt her, Alex. I’d never hurt her.” His blue-gray eyes were very direct and very steady.
    She remembered the soldier in blue and someone else, someone holding a Gypsy girl on a bed of green moss. She didn’t know what it meant, or if it meant anything at all. But she knew what she felt. And caution was only a dull ache pushed aside.
    “Why don’t you set the table?” she suggested, the restlessness gone. Decision made and confronted. Instinct, she knew, might well conjure up her whip and chair, but she would never again knowingly hold Noah at a distance.
    He lifted her hand briefly to his lips, still wearing that half smile. But his eyes were brighter, as if he knew or sensed a difference between them. He went to set the table.
    Alex watched him for a moment, then turned back to her burned bacon. And her burned bridges.

    By the time breakfast was finished, the workmen had arrived with the usual clatter. Alex barely had time to nip up the stairs and hide Cal and the kitten she’d begun calling Buddy, for want of a better name, in one of the empty lofts and lock the door securely.
    Within an hour the building was ringing with the sounds of shouts and hammers and the clashing of ladders and paint cans. Traffic jams began occurring on the stairs as masons arrived to finish repairing the remaining fireplaces, and men came to measure for carpet, and landscapers kept popping inside to ask Noah where he wanted a particular bush or tree.
    Alex had to sneak Cal and the kitten out of one loft and into another at one point because the masons were about to move into the one they had been inhabiting. She managed the feat, but couldn’t control a startled jump when she ran into Theodora Suzanne Jessica Tyler at the bottom of the stairs.
    “Oh, hi,” Alex managed lightly. “Noah’s around somewhere.”
    “I don’t want to bother him.” The redhead smiled brightly. “I just wondered if he’d mind me wandering around inside the fence out back.”
    Alex shrugged casually. “You’ll have to ask him, Miss Tyler. I’m just the hired help.”
    Shrewd brown eyes studied her, but the friendly smile remained, “Call me Teddy; the rest is too much of a mouthful.”
    “Sure. I’m Alex.” The last thing she wanted to do was spend too much time with someone who could take Cal away from her, but Alex was reasonably certain this lady was no quitter; she wouldn’t give up easily. And if you couldn’t get rid of an enemy, you turned her into a friend.
    It might even work.
    Cheerfully Alex confided her own impossible name, and the two were laughing over the trials and tribulations they had endured, when another voice echoed down the stairs.
    “Sprite! Where
is
that woman?”
    Watching Noah come down the stairs towardthem, Teddy murmured, “Just the hired help?” to Alex. Before she could respond, Noah had reached them.
    “Hello, Miss—Tyler, isn’t it?”
    “That’s it. Call me Teddy. I just wanted to ask if you’d mind me wandering around out back, Mr. Thorne.”
    He looked blank. “It’s Noah. And, no, but why? Nothing out there except trees and weeds. The landscapers haven’t gotten that far yet.”
    “I’m still looking for my lion,” Teddy said brightly. “An animal that big usually leaves some signs. I have to check out everything, you understand—rules.”
    “Of course.”
    “Thanks for the cooperation. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
    “Do that.”
    “See you, Alex.”
    Alex nodded, her smile firmly in place, and watched the redhead leave the building briskly and head around back.
    “Will she find anything?” Noah asked.
    “If she knows what to look for.” Alex drew a deep breath. “Cal’s been sharpening his claws on the trees.”
    “I couldn’t say no without arousing suspicion, Alex.”
    “I know.” She smiled up at him.