His expression reflected all of it back at her, the pleasure in his eyes a banked coal she wanted to carry around with her always.
She leaned back and watched him as she said, “I had good news at work today.”
He waited.
She waited.
“Go on then,” he said at last.
She took a deep breath. “They’re going to put my name on the exhibit catalog as co-author.”
“You wrote a book?”
“Half a book. And it’s only about knitting. Nobody will read it. People just buy them as souvenirs and look at the pictures.”
His dimple peeked out over that. “Nonsense. I’m sure loads of people will read it.” He pressed a kiss to the juncture of her neck and shoulder. “And they’ll all think how clever you are. But I’ll be the only one who gets to take you to bed.”
When he raised his head, he was smiling. She had genuinely pleased him. It hadn’t occurred to her that sharing her news would make him as happy as it made her. Somehow, handing this information to him was like him giving her the keys. A declaration of their mutual entanglement.
It ought to have scared her, she knew. A few hours ago, it had scared her witless. But it didn’t. She was going to trust him. For now. For as long as she could handle it, she’d trust him, and she’d see where it took them.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling back.
“Well done, Cath.”
“Thank you.”
“May I do that now? Take you to bed?”
“You may.”
For the first time, she stayed the night.
Chapter Twelve
Judith came back from her meeting with Christopher grimmer than usual. “Come in here when you’re finished with that,” she said before disappearing into her office.
Cath looked at the catalog draft spread over the table and mentally threw in the towel. In her quest to figure out the ideal placement for thirty-four separate sidebars, she’d covered the manuscript with color-coded sticky notes, and there were so many piles and sub-piles in front of her, she’d need a flow chart to keep track of it all.
She didn’t have a flow chart. In theory, she had her brain, but it was nearly five, and Nev was going to pick her up in ten minutes to take her for drinks and dinner. Nervous anticipation of this event had kept her on edge all afternoon. Judith had just tipped her over.
Whatever her boss was about to tell her wouldn’t be good. Cath could count on one hand the number of times she and Judith had sat down together in her office. Usually, Judith would issue directions through the open door, or—if they needed to work together—she’d come out to sit at the conference table by Cath’s desk. Judith had used the office to tell Cath when the funding for her temp position ran out and on a few other equally disastrous occasions. The office was for bad news.
“Spill it,” Cath said, holding on to the doorjamb with both hands and leaning in. She would prefer not to actually enter the office. That way, the bad-news juju couldn’t touch her.
“Sit down.” Judith’s mouth was set in its usual frown.
“That bad?” She moved behind the chair Judith kept for guests, bracing her hands on the back.
“Alliant has pulled its sponsorship. Apparently they’re in some financial trouble, and they’ve decided to scale back on their gifts. Christopher says that without their money, we can’t afford to publish the catalog.”
That bad. She moved around to the front of the chair and fell into it with all the grace of a chopped-down tree. “The exhibit?”
“Will still go on. We’ll have to cut back on publicity some, but Christopher decided to let the catalog take the bulk of the hit. He’s hoping the show will draw enough people that we can afford to publish the book down the road.”
“Except with less publicity, it’s not very likely,” she said, thinking out loud. “And even if it were, by the time he decided to have the thing edited, laid out, and printed, we’d have to wait weeks, at best, for it to arrive in the gift shop.”
“Yep. Sorry. It sucks.”