Chapter Twelve
Hastings was a problem.
The damn cat was everywhere Ivy wanted or needed to be.
He was in her bed, in her spot, at night and half on her head when she woke up.
He was sitting in her desk chair whenever she wanted to use it.
He wove himself between her ankles when she was on the stairs or carrying a hot cup of coffee.
She had to drink out of her water bottle because he stuck his face into any glass she filled.
And to top it all off, her parents thought he was the greatest thing that had ever happened to them and were incapable of hearing a word against him.
Because Hastings had been her shadow for days, it never occurred to Ivy when she opened the front door to pick up a package that the cat might break from her apparent gravitational pull and sprint for freedom.
But he did, the furry bastard.
“Hastings! No!”
Even if he was the current bane of her existence, her parents loved him, and it would kill her to see them heartbroken if he got lost in the snow or hit by a car.
So she tightened the belt around the thick, fluffy robe she’d borrowed from her mother, and she ran after him.
The fuzzy robe billowed behind her like a superhero cape as she sprinted through her front yard toward the Underwoods’.
There was an icy crust on the snow that felt like dozens of hot knives on the tender bottoms of her feet every time she broke through the top layer.
If she’d known she was going to be running the hundred-yard dash, she’d have dressed better.
Like, maybe worn shoes. Or pants instead of shorts, and a sweatshirt instead of a tank top. Possibly, she would have put on a bra.
Hastings was an orange streak against the white tundra of their yards, but Ivy was gaining. As long as he didn’t go up the tree—
Like a furry parkour enthusiast, Hastings launched himself at the side of the tree in the Underwoods’ front yard, scaling the trunk easily, bounding from branch to branch until he was far out of reach.
“You fucking asshole,” Ivy panted, leaning against the hundred-year-old oak to catch her breath.
“Mrow?”
She tilted her head up and made eye contact with the cat. He looked concerned, tentatively stretching out a paw to a lower branch before quickly retracting it.
“Not your day for the orange cat brain cell, huh?”
Ivy sighed. Hastings was, technically speaking, safe up the tree. He couldn’t be hit by a car or attacked by a dog. But if he fell, she had a sneaking suspicion he’d be the first cat in history not to land on his feet.
“I get my pillow tonight,” she told him, reaching for the lowest available handhold and placing her foot against the trunk. At least her feet were already numb, so the bark wasn’t as painful as it could have been.
Ivy hauled herself up, the connective muscles in her shoulders screaming in agony. New Year’s resolution for the gym: lift some weights more than five pounds. How had she done this so effortlessly as a child?
She finally got up on the lowest branch that looked like it had a chance of supporting her and reached for Hastings. Not even close.
“I hate you so much right now,” she grunted as she heaved herself up onto the next layer of branches. “If I fall and break something, I’m sending you the bill.”
Hastings had the decency not to move farther away as she inched closer. He did sing her a pathetic song, crying and meowing his displeasure at the frigid temperatures.
“You have a fur coat. I am wearing Mom’s robe and the shortest shorts in the history of loungewear. Don’t talk to me about being cold.”
Her hand made contact with the fur on his back, and she almost shouted in triumph.
“Come here, you smarmy bastard,” she cooed, gripping a branch tightly with one hand while she tried to scoop Hastings with the other. He seemed to understand that this predicament was his fault because he didn’t struggle or wiggle as she lifted him off his branch.
The weight of her new problem was almost exactly ten pounds.
How the hell was she going to get out of the tree, which had been hard enough for her to climb with two hands, with one hand supporting a wiggly orange fur ball?
Ivy nestled herself between two branches and bundled Hastings into the robe, wrapping it tightly around both of them.
Maybe it could act like a baby carrier? Slowly she let go of him, holding her hands out a few inches on either side of the lump he made in the fabric, and for a second, her makeshift sling held.
Then, like a dam breaching, the robe began to slide open, the sash unable to support his bulk.
“We really fucked up here, bud,” she said to the cat, who was vibrating with purrs against her chest. That was nice. At least he was grateful.
Hastings meowed and put a gentle paw on her cheek.
“Don’t start sucking up to me now. You make up the entirety of my shit list.” She scratched his furry little head and he closed his eyes, turning his head to lean into her touch.
“Does that mean the statute of limitations is up for me?” Grant asked. His sudden appearance almost made Ivy fall out of the tree.
“Fuck!” she shouted. “Don’t sneak up on people!”
“How could I sneak? You have the high ground.” He had his hands on his hips, neck craned to see her. Ivy tucked the loose ends of the robe between her legs so he couldn’t see up her shorts.
“Look, under any other circumstance I’d appreciate the niche Star Wars prequels reference, but I can’t feel a single exterior inch of my body, so if you’re not going to help, let me preserve the last scrap of my dignity and leave me to freeze to death in peace.”
“I don’t think your mom would give me my Cookie Palooza box if I let Hastings freeze to death,” he said, then added after she glared at him, “plus no one is ever going to beat Jack Nicholson in The Shining for best frozen corpse, so why try?”
If an Underwood had to discover her doing a bang-up impression of a Popsicle while stuck up a tree, Grant wasn’t necessarily the worst choice. At least with him, she’d already embarrassed the hell out of herself ten years ago. She couldn’t sink any lower in his esteem.
“I was going for Rose on the door,” Ivy pretended to complain.
“Why do I feel like if I was Jack, you’d have held my head underwater?”
“Anything to get you to stop talking and start rescuing.”
As Grant studied her, warmth began to spread through her body, originating embarrassingly from between her legs. Was this a previously undiscovered damsel kink? She hoped not.
“How far down can you climb?”
Ivy examined the branches and the distance between them, then the distance between her and the ground. She closed her eyes to fend off a dizzy spell. “Um, I don’t know.”
“Okay, I’m going to climb up a little to spot you, get you within jumping distance of the ground, then I’ll climb down and catch you.”
“You want me to jump?” she asked. He had to be joking.
“Do you have a better solution?”
“Yes. Dying. I’ve heard freezing to death is euphoric.”
“I’m coming up.”
Grant made tree climbing look easy. No grunting, no complaining, just practiced competence.
It was so distracting that she was somehow surprised when she could feel the warmth of his body in her space.
She swallowed hard because all of the moisture in her mouth had suddenly and completely evaporated.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, holding on to a branch near her head for support. “Hand me the cat.”
Ivy blinked in surprise. “What?”
“I’m going to put Hastings in my jacket so you can use both hands to climb down.”
She looked at his sturdy Carhartt jacket, made of much stiffer material than her mother’s robe.
“What if he falls out the bottom?”
Grant sighed, but instead of arguing or dismissing her concerns, he undid his belt, unbuttoned his pants, tucked the bottom of his coat into his waistband, then rebuttoned it.
He looked ridiculous, but the logic was sound, and Ivy handed over Hastings, who dove into the warmth of Grant’s jacket like a sea lion returning to the ocean.
There was some lumpy movement under the jacket, then Hastings’s face popped out the top.
“Room in there for two?”
That was supposed to be an inside thought, not outside.
The words hung in the air, etched in icicles, and Ivy reconsidered jumping from the tree.
It would be a quick death compared to expiration by mortification, which seemed to stretch every second into an eon.
She hadn’t thought it was possible, but her cursed confession ten years ago was no longer the most embarrassing thing she could have said in front of Grant.
“I mean… I didn’t mean— What I meant to say was— Oh, fuck me.” Ivy groaned, and her head dropped back against the tree, striking a knot on the trunk. “Ow.”
“Let’s take you inside before you get yourself in any more trouble,” Grant said.
He lowered himself carefully. Ivy told herself she was only watching him closely so she’d know the path down.
She took note of his large hands with their long, thick fingers to memorize their placement, not because her lizard brain wondered what his work-roughened palms would feel like against her soft skin.
His dark hair brushed against her bare calf, sending sparks of awareness skittering across her body.
She tightened her grip on the tree so she didn’t succumb to a cold-induced faux pas, like raking her fingers through his hair.
It was infuriating how attractive he was.
The cold. The cold was why her brain was spinning in a thousand unwanted directions. Wasn’t disorientation a sign of hypothermia?
Grant jumped the final few feet to the ground, his hands cradling Hastings through his jacket. He looked up to where she’d moved not a single inch and asked, “Are you coming?”
“What was the plan again?”
“You climb down, jump, and I’ll catch you.”
Yes, there was a damsel kink developing.