by Lucy Gilmore
But the fact that Sophie knew it and on less than a day’s acquaintance…
“I’m not going to buckle you in, but you have to promise to sit perfectly still,” he commanded. He set Bubbles down on the cracked vinyl seat and slid in next to her. Since it seemed as good a time as any to try out those training commands, he gave her a stern look and said, “Stay.”
The puppy’s response was to leap nimbly into his lap and stare up at him. Her paws made almost no indentation on his leg, her weight so slight he hardly felt it. She was warm though—a little ball of heat pressed against him.
Since his body temperature usually registered cold due to the lowered amounts of insulin in his blood, he kind of liked it. But, “No, no, no,” he said, his voice deep and firm. “That’s not how this is supposed to work. You sit next to me.”
He set her aside once more only to have her leap into his lap again, this time with a nervous shake to her little body. He remembered what Sophie had said, that Bubbles was still skittish, and gave in. She might be able to tell this poor, quivering dog to behave herself or else, but Harrison wasn’t that strong.
“Only this one time, okay?” he said as Bubbles licked gratefully at his hand. He stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, pausing to check on the puppy’s response as the V6 engine roared to life. “And you have to sit quietly and behave like a lady, or I’ll end up driving us both off the highway.”
She did neither of those things. Sitting seemed to be beyond her as all the glories of the world passed them by, and no lady he’d ever known would have been lolling her tongue out the open window as though she’d never tasted fresh air before.
The Vasquez domicile was located in the heart of Spokane, which meant that it wasn’t too bad, having a tiny puppy hanging out his truck window while the speed limits remained well within the thirty mile per hour range. As he hit the highway leading north, however, which provided him with the quick, half-hour commute to Deer Park, the speeds increased dramatically.
Too dramatically.
He cast one anxious glance down at the puppy in his lap and touched the brakes. Veering quickly to the right, he turned onto a side road that demanded all drivers amble along at twenty miles per hour or risk heavy fines.
A car coming the opposite direction honked, startling them both. With a light curse, Harrison dropped his left hand and held Bubbles around the dainty bones of her ankles to keep her in place.
“Don’t you dare jump out when I’m not looking,” he warned.
The only answer Bubbles gave was a happy twitch of her nose.
“What has that woman been doing to you, anyway?” he muttered. “You don’t get any snacks, she never takes you on fun road trips, you have to put in eight hours of hard work a day…”
Bubbles turned and licked his face before resuming her windswept survey of the scenery around her.
Which was why it ended up taking him well over an hour to pull up the dirt drive that led to his house.
“All right, you minx,” he said as he slowed the truck. There was a light coating of dust over Bubbles’s fur, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. “We’re finally here.”
He didn’t know whether it was him speaking that spurred her to realize it, or if the stopping vehicle tipped her off, but she leaped off his lap. Whatever else had happened in her short life, she knew what was coming next.
Home.
Except home was hardly the word he would have chosen to describe the decaying heap of wood and concrete that greeted him as he swung open the truck door. Sure, the huge, rambling farmhouse had walls and a roof, and it was filled with childhood memories that no amount of time would be able to erase. But to Harrison, it had never been anything more than a place to rest his head. In fact, he’d have gladly consigned the whole thing to flames if it weren’t for the fact that he spent his life fighting against that very thing.
Some things are meant to burn.
“Well, Bubbles. This is it. Home sweet home.” He lifted the puppy and gently set her on the ground. It was still early enough that he didn’t fear the raccoon under the porch coming out to make friends, so he didn’t bother with a leash. Not that it would have mattered anyway. Bubbles took one look at the unfamiliar surroundings and latched herself onto his leg.
Or his foot, rather. She didn’t reach very high.
“You can’t stand there, or I’ll step on you. Is that what you want? To be crushed underfoot?”
The answer, apparently, was yes. As he moved to the truck bed and hoisted the box of doggie supplies, Bubbles remained stubbornly near his toes. It didn’t bode well for their future together. When Harrison was on the job, he barely had time to remember his own name, let alone worry about his service animal running under the stomping feet of several dozen firefighters.
And what would happen if she got caught in a tangle of fiery underbrush or stuck behind a felled tree? It wouldn’t take more than a twig to knock the poor creature down.
“I’ll bet Sophie didn’t even think about that,” he said, oddly triumphant. “She has no idea what it’s like to be out in the trenches.”
“Who the hell are you talking to?” an irascible voice called from the front porch. “Have you gone and lost your mind on top of everything else?”
“No, Dad.” Harrison scooped Bubbles up and placed her inside the box of supplies. The soothing scent of a twenty-pound bag of puppy chow seemed to bring her commensurate happiness, so she stayed put. “I’m talking to my new dog.”
“Eh? You really went through with that?”
Harrison trudged up the steps to find his father standing in the doorway, looking like an extension of the house in faded overalls and a work-worn shirt. As he also had a red-stained apron tied around his waist, it was an interesting picture. “I don’t have a choice, unfortunately. Oscar won’t let me go back to work unless I play along.”
“What’d you get?” His dad leaned to peer around him, a frown crossing his grizzled face when no frisky Great Dane followed in his wake. “Huh. It must not like you. Damn thing ran away already.”
“No, she didn’t.” He turned the box so the puppy’s tiny head faced his father. “Dad, meet Bubbles. My new lifeline.”
To be fair, his dad’s response was about a hundred times better than his own had been. Hearty, chest-heaving laughter might not be the ideal reaction to a service dog, but at least his dad retained the capability of speech.
“That’s not a dog,” he said between wheezing laughs. “That’s a rat in a Halloween costume.”
Bubbles, unaware that her appearance was being denigrated in the extreme, panted a friendly hello.
“She’s a Pomeranian,” Harrison explained. “They’re very good at scent detection, apparently. And according to my, uh, handler, she’s also very portable.”
“What? Are you going to carry her around in your pocket?”
It wasn’t a bad idea, actually. Except for the part where she’d fall out the first time he bent over to dig a ditch.
“I haven’t worked through the logistics yet.”
Harrison moved the rest of the way into the house and set down the box, taking in the strawberry-scented air with a grateful sigh. Today was a good day, then. Those had been few and far between since his dad’s retirement three months ago. For Harrison, being forced to take a temporary sabbatical from the Department of Natural Resources had been a blow. For his dad, leaving a forty-year stint as a highway patrol officer over a bad back had been nothing short of a tragedy.
“You’ve been busy,” Harrison added in a voice he hoped was nonchalant. “Preserves?”
His dad grunted. “The damn strawberries are taking over the backyard. I had to do something with them. You hungry?”
Harrison was, but he needed to check his blood sugar levels first, and he had to figure out where he was going to put Bubbles for the night. Instinct told him that no matter what he decided, the puppy would have her own ideas about where she wanted to be.
Small and sweet, she was also manipulative as all hell. He blamed the eyes. Raisins were the cesspit of the food pyramid, the shriveled waste that no one wanted anywhere near their cookies, not the windows to some tiny creature’s soul.
“They’re not even real food,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” his dad called.
Since admitting how close he was to losing it wasn’t going to do him any favors in his father’s eyes, he said, “I was just warning you that the dog isn’t allowed to have any table scraps.” His father might not have been as susceptible to this puppy’s charms as Harrison, but he wasn’t going to put anything past the wily creature. “And, um, there’s going to be a woman coming by tomorrow. All the tomorrows, actually. Apparently, most of the training has to take place here.”
“Here?” Although neither Harrison nor his father was what you’d call “house proud,” there was something about inviting another human into the dusty, haphazard mess they lived in that caused an automatic recoil.
One look at the living room alone was enough to reveal why. Stacks of books sat next to his father’s favorite armchair, most of them cracked along the spine and in various states of disrepair. The bookshelves, conversely, held boxes of broken electronics, most of which would never work again and, if they did, would be at least twenty years out-of-date. Even the furniture was old and mismatched, chosen more for comfort than for looks. On its own, the place suited them just fine. Compared to Sophie’s house, however, it was downright deplorable.
Every few months, Harrison tried to fix it up, but his efforts were usually met with resistance at best and outright hostility at worst. To let in light and air would be to let in the possibility of happiness—a thing no respectable Parks man had done for decades.
“Are you sure she can do that?” his dad asked. “How is it legal?”
Harrison had to chuckle. “Because I invited her, Dad. It’s part of the process. She comes highly recommended.”
Which may not have been true in so many words, but there was no denying that the Oscar seal of approval didn’t come cheap. For whatever reason, his boss trusted Sophie. Therefore, Harrison would trust Sophie too.
But not too much.
“And she’s going to train the dog?” his dad asked, eyeing the puppy warily.
“So I’ve been told. Both Bubbles and I need a lot of work.”
That, at least, got a crack of laughter. “If there’s one thing I’ve been trying to get through to you for years, it’s that. What happens if I step on it?”
“Her. And don’t.”
“What if I can’t help myself?”
“Help yourself anyway.”
His dad held his stare, long and careful and full of meaning. His father liked the idea of having a dainty puppy around the house almost as much as Harrison did, which was to say not at all. But if there was one thing the two of them had learned, it was that life rarely worked out the way they wanted it to.
“Well, I’m not feeding it.”
Harrison didn’t bother correcting the pronoun this time. “No one is asking you to.”
“And I’m not cleaning up any dog messes.”
Harrison refrained from pointing out that he hadn’t cleaned messes of any kind in the past twenty years. “You’ll barely know she’s here. I promise.”
As if to remind him that she had a will and an agenda of her own, Bubbles let out a yap of protest.
His dad stared at the puppy, hoping—Harrison was sure—to stare her into submissiveness. It didn’t work. That stare might work to intimidate neighborhood Girl Scouts and door-to-door Bible salesmen, but it had no effect on a puppy who’d just enjoyed an hour of pure bliss in the front seat of his truck. Bubbles stared back with all the innocence of one who knew herself to be adored.
His dad gave up with a shake of his head. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Son.”
“Or what?” Harrison couldn’t help asking. As far as he could tell, they were both being punished enough already. What else could you call two bad-tempered men living alone in the woods without even the promise of their careers to sustain them? “What will happen if I admit that I don’t have a fucking clue?”
He got no answer. Apparently, his father didn’t have a fucking clue either.
In other words, they were both screwed.
* * *
If Harrison had thought the transportation question was a tricky one, it was nothing compared to the small matter of where Bubbles would sleep.
And, yes. He meant small in every sense of the word.
“I already gave you three pillows,” he said, staring down at the puppy over the edge of his bed. “There aren’t any more. I’m literally sleeping on my sweatshirt.”
Bubbles didn’t offer a single yap of reproach. She didn’t even whimper a protest. She just sat on her throne of pillows and looked at him as though her heart were breaking.
“Do you want a blanket? Are you cold? Is that it?”
The last thing Harrison wanted was to wake up his father or have to answer a series of questions as to why he was up half the night catering to a puppy’s wordless demands, so he lifted one of the pillows and shook it out of its case. The floorboards in this house creaked something fierce, so it was in everyone’s best interest that he stayed exactly where he was.
“There,” he said, arranging the pillowcase so that it wrapped around Bubbles. She looked like a fluffy, brown cherry atop a swirl of ice cream. “Now you can be warm and settle down.”
All he got in reply was another one of those mournful blinks.
“Goddammit, Sophie didn’t say anything about you sleeping in the bed!”
Since the words had been uttered more forcefully than he intended, he reached down and scooped up the puppy—pillows and makeshift blanket and all. Almost immediately, Bubbles emitted a small, contented sigh and tucked her head in the crook of his arm.
“Ten minutes,” he warned as he lay back on the bed. Bubbles stayed exactly where she was, stuck to his armpit like Velcro. “You can be up here for ten minutes, but then it’s back to the floor where you belong. I can’t have you up here with me all night. If I roll over the wrong way, you’ll die.”
Apparently, death by his crushing weight held no danger as far as Bubbles was concerned. She’d spent the entire last hour fighting sleep and shivering on the floorboards only to fall asleep within seconds of being cradled against him.
“Goddammit,” he said again. This time, it came out more like a whisper. “What am I supposed to do now?”
At least he had his pillows back. Moving carefully so as not to dislodge the sleeping puppy, he arranged things so he was more comfortable. Even then, he only had the flattest pillow of the lot under his head. The other two he set up along the mattress’s edge as a kind of barrier. Babies rolled. Did puppies roll? Hell, for all he knew, he wasn’t supposed to have pillows in here at all. What if she suffocated?
“I’m going to give that woman a piece of my mind tomorrow,” he said, careful to keep his voice low. “In fact, I’m going to start making a list of all the things she forgot to tell me. Does she think we’re all born knowing how to take care of dogs? I wasn’t kidding about that goldfish thing. You’ve seen this place—who would willingly bring anything living into it?”
Bubbles gave a twitch of her small body.
Harrison tensed, afraid he’d done something to hurt her, but she only sighed and settled into a deeper sleep. Puppies he might not understand, but the heavy, dreamless sleep of the exhausted was a thing he knew well. Some of the men and women on his wildfire team had been known to literally fall asleep on their feet after a particularly grueling day.
It was what made this whole Pomeranian-service-dog thing so upsetting. It was impossible to explain to anyone who hadn’t been on the edge of a forest fire just how close it was to being at the gates of hell. Those flames moved fast—faster than most humans could run, let alone a small animal—and were as unpredictable as the wind.
People died out there. Good people, strong people, people who knew what they were getting into and made the decision to fight anyway.
How could he ask this little nugget—yes, nugget—to tackle that with him?
“I’m adding that to the list too,” he muttered as he suppressed a yawn. The warm lull of the puppy’s body had him sinking lower into the mattress. With a quick, furtive look around the room—which was ridiculous for a lot of reasons, but most especially the fact that no one else had been inside it for years—he planted a soft kiss on top of Bubbles’s head.
“Tomorrow, we’ll get everything sorted out,” he said. “Tomorrow, we’ll make her see reason.” Tomorrow, he’d say a lot of the things that lodged inside his throat and inside his chest.
It was a thing he could promise with absolute certainty because, tomorrow, he was going to get to see Sophie again.
Chapter 5
At first, Sophie wasn’t sure she’d gotten the right house.
The structure itself was about on par with what she’d expected. A grumpy bachelor who spent most of his time battling the elements should live in a huge, ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere. The sense of isolation with each passing mile, the dirt drive leading in, even the weird metal sculpture rusted over and broken at the hinge all seemed to fit Harrison’s personality to a tee.
Rough and grizzled. Unwelcoming.
And, with a little work, probably one of the best things she’d ever seen.
But as the tires of her sleek, little Fiat crunched over the gravel, it wasn’t a brawny, steely-eyed firefighter who appeared at the door. Instead, there stood an older man, tall but gaunt, slowly lifting a cup of coffee to his lips.
“Hello,” Sophie called as she rolled down her window. “I’m looking for where Harrison Parks lives. Do you know if I’m on the right road?”
It took the man a second to absorb her arrival, but he eventually nodded. “You sure are, darling. You found us. Well, most of us, anyway.”
Most of us?