by Ford, Holly
Lennie went over her local geography. ‘Is that around here?’
He gave a small, spare shake of his head. ‘It’s a province in Afghanistan.’
The word hung like a lead weight between them.
‘There was a dog that used to hang around one of the bases,’ Mitch said. ‘Some of the guys there used to feed him.’
Lennie watched him blink, breathe in, breathe out.
‘A friend of mine,’ he said slowly, ‘used to feed him.’
‘What was his name?’ she asked gently.
There was a long pause. ‘The dog?’ Mitch said. ‘Chase.’
She’d meant the name of his friend. It had seemed, for a moment, like he’d wanted to say it. Recognising a signal to back down when she saw one, Lennie let it lie.
‘Pesh is a Maremma sheepdog, out of Abruzzo in central Italy,’ she told Mitch conversationally. ‘But there are versions of them all over Central Asia. The Akbash, the Ovcharka. Anatolian shepherd. Afghan sheepdog. Livestock guarding breeds.’ Lennie wasn’t at all convinced he was listening to her, but it felt like the right thing to do to keep making a friendly noise, so she did. ‘They live half-wild a lot of the time, out there with the herds. When they see people, they like to check them out. If you don’t look like a sheep thief and they’re not busy, maybe they’ll hang for a while. Especially if there’s lunch.’
Mitch’s eyes were quartering the garden, raking from one object to the next as if he was making a mental map of how to get back to his current position. Suddenly, his body language changed, startled into a different kind of alert. Sensing it, Pesh pricked her ears. ‘There’s a deer in your paddock,’ he said, his voice low.
‘Yeah.’ Lennie smiled. ‘That’s Alice. We’ve had her for years. Jim brought her home when she was just a day old. Her mother had died, and the farmer wasn’t up for trying to raise her.’
‘She just stays there behind a sheep fence like that?’ Mitch shook his head. ‘She doesn’t jump out?’
Lennie shrugged. ‘She’s twenty-seven years old. She doesn’t do much these days.’
‘You have a twenty-seven-year-old deer,’ he said, his gaze shifting from Alice back to Lennie’s face.
‘She’s one of the family.’
‘Yeah.’ There was a warmth growing in his eyes, the corner of his mouth crinkling. ‘I can see the resemblance.’
Lennie laughed. Mitch was still looking at her. Just that hint of a smile made him seem younger. Lighter. Feeling her cheeks flush again, she made herself look away, willing her body not to betray how close to a guilty fantasy this was.
‘I didn’t hear you drive in,’ she remembered.
‘I didn’t want to bring the trailer up. I’m parked back on the road.’ Mitch looked like he was just remembering something too. ‘I hope you don’t mind—I promised Stan I’d look in on Peg while I was in town. I went by the clinic and they said she was here.’
‘Of course.’ Of course. Why else would he have come? Lennie moved towards the house, trying to shut down her over-awareness of Mitch behind her, the charge in the air between her body and his. ‘Come on in. She’s inside.’
‘Jim said it’d be okay if I dropped by.’ Mitch’s voice drifted over her shoulder, raising the hair on the nape of her neck as he followed her through the open French doors into the conservatory.
‘It’s fine.’ Gathering the dregs of her professionalism, Lennie smiled back at him. A little heads-up from her grandfather—a chance to change out of her sweatpants, check her face—might have been nice, but hey. What for? she reminded herself. He hadn’t come to see her. And even if he had, where was she going with this? What possible good could come of it? ‘Here’s your girl,’ she said.
Peg’s tail thumped the tiles. She was lying in a patch of sun beside the sofa, stretched out across a double layer of Vetbed, her head on the tri-pillow Lennie had provided to keep her neck up and her breakfast down.
‘She looks pretty comfortable there.’ Mitch dropped to his heels beside Peg, putting his hand to her bony head.
‘She’s turned the corner.’ Lennie perched on the sofa. ‘She’ll be good to go home any day now.’
‘I’m not sure she’s going to want to leave,’ Mitch said. ‘She’s never been allowed inside before.’
Lennie was silent. As he continued to look down at Peg, she took the opportunity to check out the cut above his eyebrow. It was healing nicely. She was close enough to see the fine sheen of dust on his neck below his shirt collar, the rise and fall of his chest. His bare forearm was resting on the sofa beside her thigh, the skin crisscrossed with grazes old and new, a fresh knock drying on the back of his hand. It was the sort of body that looked like he threw it in front of all kinds of things without much thought for its safety.
Smudge jumped up onto the sofa, making his way across her lap to flop over, purring loudly, and rub his head against the long muscles of Mitch’s arm. Glancing up, Mitch ran the back of his index finger along the cat’s jaw.
The memory of his touch on her own neck flooding back, Lennie forced herself to look away. He was—He was unavailable, that’s what he was. Tangled up in something he didn’t even want to describe. And…and what’s more, he was kind of a cheater. Almost, anyway. Whatever kind of relationship they were in, however complicated it was, nice guys didn’t go back to strange women’s motel rooms. They didn’t kiss them. Even if—Lennie winced—they were concussed and bleeding and maybe the strange woman kissed them first.
‘Listen,’ Mitch said. He was still looking at Peg, but Lennie felt pretty sure he’d stopped thinking about the dog. ‘About what happened that night at the pub…’
For a second or two, she watched him struggle. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You don’t owe me anything either.’
His head rose, that glow of humour in his eyes again. ‘I might have put that badly.’
Lennie smiled. ‘You might have done.’ Getting up, she walked to the kitchen bench, feeling his gaze like a point between her shoulderblades. ‘But never mind.’ She picked up her phone, checking an imaginary message so as not to have to look at him again. ‘Let’s just forget about it.’
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Pesh pad up and stick her nose down the back of Mitch’s shirt collar, sniffing that golden, muscular neck.
‘Pesh,’ she felt compelled to say, ‘leave him alone.’
‘She’s okay.’ Mitch eased himself to his feet. ‘Pesh?’ He looked from the dog to Lennie, checking he’d got the name right.
‘Pescasseroli,’ Lennie explained. ‘Bit of a mouthful, huh? It’s the town in Italy where I found her.’
‘That’s south of L’Aquila, right?’
‘Right.’ She looked at him in surprise. A lot of Italians probably couldn’t point to the place on a map. ‘You’ve been there?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve flown over it, that’s all.’
Lennie waited for more information.
‘So what took you there?’ Mitch said.
‘I was a volunteer on a project to study the Apennine wolf,’ she told him. ‘We tracked them for three months.’
‘So you went to Italy looking for wolves,’ he said, ‘and came home with a sheepdog?’
‘Pesh and I took a pretty roundabout route back—but yeah. I did in the end.’ She almost jumped as her phone, still in her hand, blipped with incoming email.
‘Well,’ Mitch said. ‘You’re busy. I guess I’d better not hold you up. I should head home myself.’
Lennie paused. ‘Where is that, exactly?’
‘Broken Creek?’ Now he was the one who looked surprised.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I mean, I know where Broken Creek is. But…is that where you’re working now?’
‘Some of the time,’ Mitch said. ‘I work all over the place. But I’m based at Broken Creek, yeah.’
Lennie shook her head, lost for a second in nostalgia. She could still see Lois brandishing suntan lotion on the riverbank, Jim up to his knees in the ice-cold water, a fishin
g fly dancing around his ears. ‘I haven’t been up that road for years.’
‘Well,’ he said, his voice equally thoughtful, ‘you and Pesh are welcome there anytime.’
Watching him walk back down the drive, disappearing into the trees as quietly as he’d arrived, Lennie found her mind going back to Abruzzo and her single up-close-and-personal encounter with the Apennine wolf. She’d been off work, just out for a walk, when one had slipped out of the forest in front of her, close enough to glimpse the battle scars on his muzzle as he paused on the track, looking at her for half a second before he vanished again. Then, as now, she’d had the distinct feeling there was more to him turning up—showing himself—than she knew.
Was Mitch really just concerned about Peg? Just doing Stan a favour? A phone call, surely, would have done the trick.
The clank of Mitch’s trailer as it moved off made Lennie jump. What had he actually come here for?
About what happened that night at the pub…
She’d assumed he was trying to apologise, but maybe she’d misunderstood what Mitch Stuart was sorry about. Maybe he regretted what hadn’t happened, not what had. Maybe he wished he’d stayed. Lennie looked at Pesh, who was still staring down the drive. Seven weeks was long enough for a cut to heal. Had other wounds closed too?
‘Maybe,’ Lennie said, out loud, ‘things are simpler now.’
Was that what Mitch had come to say?
Six
On Friday, Lennie stood watching Peg through the door of the crate in the clinic’s recovery room as she listened to Stan’s landline ring. Having left a second message, she hung up the phone.
‘Maybe you don’t go back to being a farm dog today after all,’ she told Peg. Lennie checked her watch again. The Broken Creek turn-off was a good hour and a half’s drive from Kimpton. How far into the station Stan might live she could only guess. She could remember having driven up that rough shingle road for what seemed like hours, but she couldn’t recall ever seeing a house. If he was going to organise himself a lift and make it into town before the clinic closed, he’d need to get started pretty soon.
Lennie stared at the other number on her computer screen. Okay, then. She raised her chin, trying to ignore the ridiculous rush of adrenaline she felt as she tapped in the digits of Mitch’s mobile. It took what felt like an age to connect. As it started to ring at last, she braced herself for that low, even voice in her ear.
‘Hello? Mitch’s phone.’ The woman sounded a little out of breath, like she’d just been running, or laughing, or both.
Lennie fought a sudden urge to hang up. ‘Hi,’ she forced herself to say. This was a totally legitimate professional call. No reason on earth she shouldn’t be making it. ‘It’s Lennie O’Donnell here. I’m calling from Central Vets.’
‘You’re looking for Stan,’ the woman guessed.
‘I’ve left a couple of messages for him this morning,’ Lennie began.
‘He’ll be out in the garden.’ Mixed up in a deep rumble of background noise, Lennie could hear a man’s voice saying something. ‘Is Peg okay?’
‘She’s fine. All good. I just wanted to let Stan know he can pick her up today if he wants.’
‘That’s great news,’ the woman said. ‘We’re just on the road.’
‘We close at five,’ Lennie said, in her best professional voice, ‘but it’s not a problem to keep her here for another night if you can’t make it.’
‘No, we’ll be there.’ The woman paused. ‘One of us will, anyway.’
‘Great.’ Lennie nodded.
‘Hey, thanks—Stan’s going to be so happy to have her home.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Lennie set the phone back in its cradle. So that was Mitch’s complication, was it? She sounded…nice. Intelligent, confident. Normal. Lennie shook her head. What had she expected to hear, a bunny boiling in the background?
It occurred to her that maybe the real reason Mitch had turned up at her house yesterday was to see how much hot water he’d landed himself in. How likely it was that she might say something to his girlfriend about what had happened that night in the pub. Shit. It seemed so obvious now. How had it not occurred to her when he was there?
Well, he could rest easy. She had no intention of telling on him. And she wasn’t about to sit in judgement on a situation she knew nothing about. Lennie closed Peg’s file, trying to shut down a nagging sense of disappointment along with it. Disappointment in what, exactly? In Mitch?
So he’d come to see her to try and cover his tracks. So what? It reflected better on him than the other option, surely. Better to want to hide an old affair than start a new one. She caught herself. An affair? Jesus, she needed to get a grip. Since when did one kiss from a man with a head injury constitute an affair? She needed to get over it. She was. She had been.
And why had that changed? Because Pesh liked him? Because of that flash of old pain she’d seen in his eyes as he looked at the dog? Because he’d been in Afghanistan?
Well, dogs made mistakes too. And she was only assuming he’d actually fought in the war. He could have been selling spoons to the Taliban for all she knew. She didn’t know the first thing about him.
Pesh, stretched out in the largest crate, gave Lennie a disapproving glare.
‘Okay,’ Lennie said. ‘I guess we do know some things.’
She knew Mitch Stuart was brave. She knew he was kind. She knew the taste of his mouth, the brush of his fingers against her neck, the fleeting, delicate touch of his tongue behind her upper lip—Lennie stopped herself right there. As she had to, as he himself had done. The rest was all imagination.
‘Just because you’ve got Great Dane eyes doesn’t make you loyal,’ she told Pesh.
‘Excuse me?’ The receptionist stuck her head round the corner.
‘Nothing,’ Lennie said quickly. ‘Just thinking aloud.’
‘Right.’ Barbara gave her a funny look. ‘Look, I have to pop across to the bank. Your one o’clock isn’t here yet.’
‘I’ll keep an ear out,’ Lennie promised.
About a minute after the front door had shut behind Barbara, the sensor buzzed again. Expecting Otto the short-haired dachshund, Lennie wandered through.
‘Lennie.’ Halfway between the door and the reception desk, Benji Cooper stood grinning at her. ‘Hey. You’re here.’
‘Benji.’ Looking into his handsome, open face, Lennie felt a wave of relief, as if she’d just hoisted herself out of the diving pool and was back in safer water. Some low-stakes, nobody-gets-hurt flirting was exactly what her ego needed right now. ‘Hi.’
‘How’s the first week going?’
‘Good,’ she told him—smoothly, she hoped.
‘I’m just here to pick up Paul for lunch.’ Benji’s gaze lingered over her lab coat. ‘You should join us.’
‘I’d love to,’ Lennie admitted. ‘But I’ve got a patient to see.’
‘Shame,’ Benji said. ‘Maybe next time.’
Hmm, so Benji and Paul had lunch often, did they? And talked about what? The deal to buy the clinic? How they were going to get Jim to sign?
‘Or maybe,’ Benji suggested, treating her to another flash of his perfect teeth, ‘you and I should grab a drink sometime. We’ve got a few years to catch up on.’
‘It’s been a while,’ Lennie agreed. ‘So where are you living these days, anyway?’
‘East Kimpton. I’ve got a place on the Alnwick back road, just before you get into Snake Gully.’ The posh end of town, in other words. Benji shrugged modestly. ‘It’s handy for work. We’ve got our head office in Alnwick.’
‘Yes.’ Lennie nodded. ‘Jim said.’
‘Look, Lennie.’ Benji lowered his voice, leaning over the counter towards her. ‘We’re all so glad you’re here. Maybe now we can finally—’ He stopped. ‘Well, maybe now we can get somewhere.’
She frowned.
Benji stood back as the clinic’s front door opened and a woman dragged an overweight dachshu
nd towards the reception desk. ‘Here we are,’ the woman coaxed, ‘come on, Otto, come on. Oh good boy. Good boy!’
From the floor on the other side of the counter came a low growl.
‘Hello Mrs Thomas.’ Lennie smiled brightly.
‘See you later,’ Benji promised, as Paul emerged from the lunchroom to slap him across those well-muscled shoulders.
With an effort, Lennie returned her attention to its proper place. ‘Okay, let’s see if we can get Otto onto the scales, shall we?’
•
‘Did you know Paul was having lunch with Benji Cooper today?’ Back home that night, Lennie ran her grandfather to ground in the lounge.
‘Not today, no.’ Already cleaned up from his afternoon round of the district and settled in his usual chair, Jim seemed unsurprised.
‘Do Paul and Benji do that a lot?’
‘I can’t say I’ve been keeping track.’ Her grandfather sipped his whisky. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Don’t you think you ought to be there too?’
‘What for?’
‘Because—’ Lennie checked his face, searching for possible irony ‘—they’re probably talking about the clinic.’
Jim shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t imagine Benji and Paul have too much else in common.’
‘And that doesn’t bother you?’
‘I already know Paul wants to take VETSouth’s offer. He’s convinced. What else can they say to him? Paul likes the deal. He likes Benji.’ Her grandfather paused. ‘Everybody likes Benji. I have to try hard not to like him myself.’
‘But you manage it,’ Lennie suggested wryly. Walking over to the sideboard, she poured a Scotch of her own.
Jim raised his glass to her. ‘It’s the company Benji works for I’m not sure I like.’
Taking the opposite armchair, Lennie tucked up her feet, allowing Pesh to settle on the carpet below. ‘As far as I can see, their offer’s looking pretty fair.’
‘So Benji and Paul keep telling me.’
And Lois, and their lawyer too.
‘I need to be sure, Dak.’ Jim leaned forward, suddenly serious. ‘I’d hate to let the practice go and then—’ He broke off.
‘And then what?’ Lennie asked gently. ‘Come on, Grandpa, what is it you’re really worried about?’ She hesitated, knowing she was about to edge out on a prickly limb. ‘Are you nervous about retiring?’