Guys & Dogs

by Elaine Fox

  Elaine Fox

  Guys & Dogs

  For my great pal, Sarah Ferrell.

  Nobody knows dogs better or loves them more.

  And in memory of my dear friend Greg Cunliffe,

  who I’m sure would smile from the heavens

  if Ashley Judd were to star in a movie version of this book.

  Contents

  One

  The kiss was bad.

  Two

  Times like this, Sutter Foley wished he did have an…

  Three

  Sutter Foley was sitting in his car at the light…

  Four

  Sutter hated dogs.

  Five

  “Will that be all?” the clerk at the pharmacy chirped.

  Six

  The puppy immediately took off.

  Seven

  Megan opened the door to Penelope’s Mercedes sedan and slid…

  Eight

  Sutter’s hands gripped her shoulders as his lips crushed hers.

  Nine

  The following weekend Sutter found himself pacing the house. Martina…

  Ten

  “If you knew who he was, why did you ask?”

  Eleven

  “Hi!” she said buoyantly. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  Twelve

  “Miss Montgomery is here.” Arnetta’s voice over the intercom was…

  Thirteen

  “Excuse me,” Megan said, too abruptly, and turned to push…

  Fourteen

  Penelope and Megan rounded the corner of the animal hospital…

  Fifteen

  Sutter entered the animal hospital with Twister straining on the…

  Sixteen

  “I can’t do it, Aunt Edna,” he said to the…

  Seventeen

  Saturday afternoon Megan set off. She closed the animal hospital…

  Eighteen

  “I told you she’d come up with something.” Montgomery marched…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Elaine Fox

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  The kiss was bad.

  His tongue was everywhere—across her lips, on her chin, her cheeks…but he looked something like Brad Pitt so she went with it.

  It didn’t improve.

  Plus, he smelled bad. She turned her head away and noticed a crick in her neck. Then she realized she was not on a Caribbean island but in her own bed, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Finally, she opened her eyes.

  Jerking awake, she gasped into the hot breath of a hairy, grinning face.

  Megan was on her feet in the center of her bed before she realized that she’d moved.

  Beside the bed, with its dirty front paws on her pillow, stood a young golden retriever, wagging a long feathered tail and grinning with the friendly self-confidence only a golden retriever could exude while being gaped at in shock.

  Trouble was, Megan didn’t own a golden retriever.

  Nor had she ever seen this dog before. Which might have been unusual considering she was the vet who ran the local animal hospital, but she was new to the job. And the town.

  As her heart rate slowly edged back toward normal, Megan knelt down on the bed and reached out a hand to the dog, who licked it twice, then recommenced smiling and wagging at her.

  Megan wasn’t fooled. This dog had broken into her house. It was not bent on pleasing people for anything other than its own purposes. She raised a skeptical brow at it.

  “Well, hello, uh…” She leaned on one elbow and craned her neck to look under the dog’s hind end. “Hello, girl. Where’d you come from?”

  Edging to the side of the bed, she scratched the dog behind an ear and did a cursory examination, mostly out of habit. The dog—a mere adolescent, six or seven months by the look and build of her—stretched luxuriantly under her touch. Since it put up with that so magnanimously, Megan went for the collar.

  True to form—and in the spirit of most dogs’ favorite game, “catch me if you can”—the pup twisted sharply the moment it realized what she was up to and writhed expertly out of her grasp, taking off down the stairs.

  Megan sighed. Teenagers.

  Getting out of bed and pulling on some sweatpants under her tee shirt, she listened for any sounds of destruction. From what she heard downstairs, she surmised the puppy had found her own dog, Peyton—a big, tricolored bear of a Bernese mountain dog—in her crate next to the stairs. The sounds of toenails on hardwood mixed with frantic tail thumps on the side of the crate and throaty whines of longing were clear giveaways.

  How the pup had missed Peyton on the way up was a mystery, but after a bit of scratching and whining the interloper resorted to a short, high bark. Then another. By the time Megan reached the stairs the golden was down on its elbows, butt in the air—play bowing—as if Peyton weren’t actually closed up in the crate but for some reason just playing hard to get.

  “Come here, puppydog,” she called, walking past the golden on the way to the kitchen, thereby short-circuiting the dog’s play instinct to run away. A Milk Bone would convince it that having its collar and tags examined was not tantamount to torture. “Come on! Come let me find out who you belong to.”

  She entered the kitchen and found her father, hair mashed and spiky from sleep, threadbare bathrobe hanging from hunched shoulders, seated at the table, nursing a cup of coffee.

  “Oh. Hey, Dad,” she said, looking for signs of vitality in his sagging face. He hadn’t been home when she’d gone to bed last night, and she was fairly certain he was the reason she’d woken up at three this morning. He never seemed to learn that those late, hard-drinking nights resulted in these less-than-idyllic mornings. Either that or there was so much brain damage from years of this that he forgot by the time night fell again that it was a bad idea.

  He looked at her with watery eyes. “Hey, doll.”

  Despite the fact that Megan had grown up thinking it was just his nickname for her, she’d come to learn that her father called all women “doll.” The mistake was understandable—she’d only spoken to him about once a year after the age of nine, when her parents had split up—but she still felt a pinprick of disappointment whenever he called her that now.

  A few months ago, in a fit of missing her mother, who’d died of cancer several years before, Megan had decided to leave the animal hospital in Connecticut where she’d worked since graduating from vet school and move to Virginia to get to know her father better. In the week since she’d moved into his home here to take over his veterinary practice, she’d not only learned that women were “dolls” but that men were “sports.” Unless they were “assholes.” And the later in the evening it was, which meant the more he drank, the more dolls and assholes there seemed to be.

  Now he mustered a wry smile and said, “What’s with all the barking? I thought that dog of yours was supposed to be quiet.”

  “She is.” Megan looked at the back door, noted that the dog hatch was not locked as it should be, and concluded that this was how the extra dog had made it onto her bed. “Didn’t you notice someone strange coming through the dog door just now?”

  He straightened. “Huh?”

  Grabbing the box of dog bones and shaking it, she whistled sharply. The apparently delicious sound of meat treats in cardboard had the desired effect on both dogs. The puppy came running, while Peyton whined pitifully in her crate.

  “Who the hell is that?” her father queried.

  She held a bone out and the puppy nabbed it like a Zen master capturing a fly. She inhaled it just as fast and looked expectantly back up at Megan.

  “An unexpected visitor,” Megan said. “She just woke me up. And on a Sunday, th
e one day I can sleep in. Bad dog.”

  Her father chuckled.

  Megan held a bone up out of reach and said, “Sit!”

  The dog continued wagging its tail and gazed at her in gleeful ignorance.

  Her father harrumphed. “Probably not housebroken either.”

  Megan folded her arms across her chest and sustained eye contact with the puppy, whose optimism that another bone was in the offing was undiminished by her stern look. “I don’t know. It recognized the dog door. And it’s wearing a collar. Somebody obviously owns this dog.”

  She dropped her arms, lowered the treat to knee level and said, “Come!”

  The puppy bounded toward her and snapped up the bone.

  “Good dog!” Megan grabbed the collar and before the dog could resist offered another treat. Distracted, the puppy stood chewing while Megan examined the tag.

  “‘Baywatch,’” she read, then laughed and looked at her father. “This dog’s name is Baywatch, can you believe that?”

  He stirred his coffee. “That’s a weird name. Think it came from somewhere near the river?”

  “No, it’s an old TV show.” The dog was starting to resist, twisting in her grasp but she had the collar tightly this time. She reached behind her for the box and produced another bone. “Big-breasted girls running on the beach, that kind of thing. I think they’re supposed to be lifeguards or something.”

  Her father’s brows rose with interest. “I haven’t seen that one.”

  “Come on, Baywatch, settle down. Baywatch, no!” The dog showed no response to the name, or the command. Megan sighed. “Oh brother.”

  She finally got the puppy in a leg-lock and looked at the tag again. “BAYWATCH, 17 Washington Ave., Fredericksburg,” she read. “No owner’s name. No phone number. That’s strange. You’d think someone on Washington Avenue, of all places, could afford a phone.”

  She let the puppy go and walked across the kitchen to lock the dog door. She didn’t want Baywatch to run out and risk getting hit by a car. Since she couldn’t call, she’d just have to take the pup to the address once she got dressed.

  “Seventeen Washington Avenue?” Her father rose out of his chair and shuffled across the kitchen toward the coffee maker. “Did you say 17 Washington Avenue?”

  “That’s right,” Megan said, going to the hall to release her dog. Peyton bounded out of the crate and bee-lined for Baywatch. She and the pup sniffed each other a few moments with guarded exuberance before playfully lunging and nipping at each other.

  Megan went back to the kitchen, both dogs following and knocking into each other’s shoulders in the dog version of “me first.”

  Her father regarded the puppy with renewed interest. “I think that’s Sutter Foley’s address.”

  “Sutter Foley?” Megan repeated, surprised.

  Sutter Foley was Fredericksburg’s resident celebrity. He was the founder of SFSolutions, Inc.—a company second only to Microsoft in the computer software industry—and architect of the worldwide software revolution called FoleyWare. He was, at the very least, a multimillionaire, and quite possibly a billionaire. And he lived in Fredericksburg, behind a wrought-iron fence posted with security signs, in order to keep in touch with his regular-guy roots, or to stay away from the public eye of a big city, or to make it harder for the media to stalk him—strangers being more noticeable in a small town—or some other such similar tale that varied according to whom you talked to.

  “Are you sure?” she asked her father. If it was true, the last thing she wanted to do was go traipsing up to his door uninvited. He was, after all, famous. Not to mention famous for guarding his privacy. But then there being no phone number didn’t leave her much choice in the matter. Something told her he wouldn’t be listed in the phone book. Thinking about it, this was probably why there was no phone number on the tag, either.

  That was taking a risk, she thought irritably. How many people would make the effort to go to someone’s house to return a dog? It seemed irresponsible to her. If you were going to own a dog, you owed it to the dog to be reachable if said dog got loose. That was just common sense. And surely Sutter Foley, of all people, had enough money to get a phone line that didn’t have to be unlisted. Heck, he could afford to have a phone line dedicated to the dog tag alone.

  She shook her head, wondering how much of her annoyance was due to the inherent shallowness of naming a dog Baywatch.

  “Hell yes, I’m sure,” her father said, scratching the side of his shaggy head. “I’ve lived in this town twenty-seven years and if there’s one thing I know it’s where Sutter Foley lives. Time was, this place was known for its history—George Washington, James Monroe, hell, the Civil War! That’s a big thing, isn’t it? But no. Now we’re known for Sutter Foley. Seems an awful come-down to me.”

  Megan suppressed a smile. “Sounds like sour grapes. He stealing your women?”

  Her father scoffed. “We don’t exactly travel in the same circles.”

  Megan tilted her head. “I don’t know.”

  He had a dog named Baywatch, that sounded like the same circles to her.

  Megan put one of Peyton’s leashes on the puppy and opened the back door. Her father had gone upstairs to bed. Apparently the morning coffee had been a kind of midnight snack for him. Since his retirement he’d kept the hours of a college student—up ’til 3 a.m., sleep ’til 3 p.m. and start the whole cycle over again.

  The early June day was beautiful. Warm and sunny, with a caressing breeze that promised summer was here to stay. The trees sighed and birds darted as the world slowly opened its eyes. Baywatch pulled her along with all the gusto of an Iditarod contender.

  It was 9 A.M. on a Sunday. Early to be knocking on someone’s door, but Megan knew if it were her she’d be frantic about the whereabouts of her dog. Besides, much as she loved dogs, if the puppy wasn’t housebroken she didn’t need to add cleaning up dog poop at home to cleaning the entire animal hospital during her working days. Mr. Millionaire could take care of his own problems.

  Washington Avenue was just a dozen blocks away and while that was close, it was a crucial dozen blocks, as far as property values went. Her father’s house was large and charming, a southern Victorian with a wide porch and welcoming façade, but it was nothing compared to the places on Washington Avenue. For one thing, George Washington’s sister’s estate was there, and the houses around it—while not of the same time period—reflected the same affluence.

  She had to admit, she was a bit nervous. She’d never met a true celebrity before, and certainly never because she’d shown up at one’s door. She was counting on Baywatch to keep her from looking like some kind of computer geek in search of an idol.

  She enjoyed walking down the broad, stately street, reveling in the sunshine and admiring the houses. Dividing the east-and westbound lanes was a large public green lined with trees and hosting a statue of Hugh Mercer, local eighteenth-century physician and Revolutionary War hero, in the center. It was the perfect spot for games of Frisbee or impromptu picnics or just lying on the grass with a good book. She halfheartedly looked around for someone who might be Sutter Foley amidst the few out walking this morning, but based on what she knew about his aloofness she was pretty sure he didn’t show his face in public without an express purpose.

  She’d seen a picture of him once, so she had a vague idea of what he looked like. Handsome, in a groomed corporate way, with that killer look in the eyes that many CEOs tried to adopt when photographed but few could pull off. Most of them ended up looking like soft-palmed, doughy-faced, privileged white guys.

  Not so Sutter Foley. He’d been on the cover of Forbes or Fortune, one of those magazines she only saw in doctors’ offices, and she’d paused over it because he looked so intense. She had the feeling he always walked around with that expression, rather than having donned it to look intimidating in the photo.

  She hoped he didn’t answer the door with it.

  Of course, he wasn’t going to answer the
door. No doubt he had lackeys for that. No, he was probably in some bunker in the basement, far from prying eyes, alone with his computers and peripherals and surge protectors and God knew what else.

  In no time she reached number seventeen. The house was imposing, tall and wide, brick, solid-looking in that way that historic homes had.

  She paused outside the wrought-iron gate and looked for a buzzer or an intercom or something with which to ask for admittance. But there was nothing.

  Great, she thought, strong-arming Baywatch to a sloppy sit next to her ankle and examining the brick pillars into which the wrought iron was cemented. What was she supposed to do now? Scale the fence? She reached out and experimented with the latch and was shocked to find it unlocked. This was hardly consistent with Foley’s reputed obsession with privacy. The gate swung open on well-oiled hinges.

  Baywatch took this as permission to shoot up from the ground like a firework and yank Megan’s arm from its socket. Dog and walker landed on the front walk—dog swimming upstream like a spawning salmon as walker stumbled behind until she was able to control the animal by assuming the position of a water-skier.

  No doubt about it, the pup recognized this as home. When they got to the front stoop, however, Baywatch veered right, into the bushes, and began peeing.

  Megan waited, quickly looking self-consciously around, then, realizing the puppy had stopped peeing and started sniffing the bushes, all without changing position, she gave the leash a quick jerk and walked up the steps. This was silly. The man may be a celebrity, but she was only returning his dog.

  She rang the bell and waited what felt like an eternity. The door was huge, one of those oversized ones that some of the grander older homes had. She wondered if it was supposed to be a subliminal kind of thing, that she was supposed to think whoever lived here was not only richer, but actually larger in some superhuman way than herself.