Her Valentine Sheriff

by Deb Kastner

  “I suppose because you’re married?”

  “No. Because I traveled a long, hard road to get here. It took me too much time to trust what I have with Will. I made everything that happened into far more of an issue than things needed to be.”

  “Not every woman is lucky enough to have their future husband—ex-army, I might add—just walk in off the street and introduce himself, the way yours did.”

  “Don’t I know it. And I thank God every day for Will. The hard part was for me to admit I had feelings for him.” Her voice suggested she wasn’t talking only of herself.

  “And you think I’m doing the same thing with Eli?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Samantha paused, and then chuckled. “Yes. Yes, I did. But I won’t push you. Not now, in any case. Anyway, that’s not why I called. I have a favor to ask you.”

  “Name it.”

  “I promised Alexis that I’d be there to help her take in her next batch of kids at Redemption Ranch, but Will had already made plans for us to be out of town that day. Do you think you might be able to step in for me and help Alexis out?”

  “Sure thing.” Mary relaxed into the chair and cradled the phone close to her ear, relieved that the spotlight was no longer on her and her pathetic excuse for a social life. Besides, she loved helping out their friend with the teenage reform program she ran through her ranch. “When do you need me?”

  “Three weeks from Saturday. She’s got seven new kids coming in. If you ask me, I think she’s going to need all the help she can get. I can’t imagine working with that many juvenile delinquents at the same time. I’d pull my hair out.”

  “Alexis doesn’t see them that way.”

  “Bless her heart. She really does wear blinders—with amazing results. God has used her in magnificent ways with those teens. And they’re the first to admit it—after she’s finished with them, anyway.” Samantha chuckled, and Mary laughed with her.

  “I’d be happy to lend a hand. Tell her I’ll be there.” Mary paused as Bullet came dashing around the corner of the house, soap suds still clinging to his head and neck, and water dripping from his fur.

  “Now, what in the world?” she mumbled, patting her knee and making kissing noises to beckon the dog to her side.

  “What happened?” Samantha asked.

  “It’s nothing. Listen, I have something I need to take care of right now. I’ll see you in church on Sunday?”

  “If not before. Love ya, Mary.”

  “You, too, hon.” Mary rang off and stuffed her phone into the back pocket of her blue jeans.

  “Hey, buddy,” she said to Bullet, rubbing her palm down the dog’s side, wiping off some of the residual suds. “You’ve got secrets to tell, don’t you, you impish dog. What did you do to Eli?”

  * * *

  “Sorry for the interruption,” Mary apologized as she entered the laundry room with Bullet at her heel. “I didn’t mean to leave you on your own here.”

  “Everything okay?”

  Mary tittered and waved her hand in a dismissive motion. “Samantha was having one of her dramatic moments, and she needed to talk. You know how she can be sometimes. By the way, Bullet came out to find me after you finished with his bath. I don’t want to sound critical, but you missed a few spots.”

  Eli sputtered.

  She glanced up, and her mouth gaped as her gaze covered the chaotic scene.

  “What happened in here?” He could see that she was desperately trying to restrain a chuckle, but amusement underlined every word, not to mention the way her eyes were glittering. “Did the sprayer explode on you?”

  Eli combed his fingers through his wet hair, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him whole. No way he’d get out of this one with his pride unscathed.

  “I forgot to check the temperature before I sprayed the dog,” he said with a chagrined shrug. “The water was freezing. Bullet objected.”

  Laughter escaped Mary’s lips, and Eli scowled, though he couldn’t really be angry. He had to admit—privately—that it was funny, but she was enjoying the moment far too much for his liking. His skin was prickling and not only from the cold.

  “You’ll get better at it,” she promised, moving to the table and pulling a towel from one of the folded piles. She didn’t seem to notice that the rest of the load consequently fell over into a disorderly heap. Eli resisted the urge to straighten it himself.

  She wrapped the towel around Bullet and rubbed his fur dry. The dog was clearly enjoying her ministrations.

  It just figured. Eli couldn’t even do a bath right. Not like Mary. He was jealous at how effortless it all was for her.

  “You’re welcome to grab a towel for yourself,” she said, nodding toward the table. “Then if you want, I can walk you through Bullet’s dinner routine.”

  Eli lifted his chin, ignoring the frosty drops of water that trickled from the corner of his jaw. “I think I’ve had enough torture for one day, don’t you?”

  She leaned back to meet his gaze, crouching on her heels. “I suppose you have. I imagine you want to get home and out of those soppy clothes. As the old song goes, there’s always tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow.

  Mary made tomorrow sound like a good thing. For her, it was. He only hoped some of her enthusiasm would rub off on him.

  Chapter Four

  “Spread those boxes on either side of the dirt road there. We’ll eventually be hiding Bullet’s tennis ball in the one marked with a red X,” Mary instructed Eli. “I’ve hollowed out some holes farther on, so we can do some underground work with him, too.”

  And you, she added silently. She held Bullet’s lead and distracted him while Eli placed the boxes.

  It was a beautiful Friday in early February, now three full weeks into their training period. Mary still occasionally noticed Eli’s continued reticence in working with the dog, but she hadn’t directly confronted him on it. She thought that might do more harm than good with a proud man like Eli. In any case, he and Bullet were finally making what she considered to be reasonable progress. She would have to be satisfied with that. They seemed to be working more and more as a unit with every day that passed. Now it was time to test the duo out in the open country, and teach them how to search and scan with real drugs.

  “What’s different about the one with the X?” he asked, jogging from one side of the road to the other and placing the containers where she’d indicated.

  “It has been lined with trace amounts of a drug cocktail,” she answered. “A mixture of marijuana, crack, cocaine and heroin.”

  His eyebrows rose in surprise, but he didn’t question her—aloud, anyway. His shimmering deep blue gaze displayed both amusement and astonishment, and gave away exactly what he was really thinking.

  She smothered a nervous chuckle. Eli had managed to put her on the spot without saying a word. No one else on the planet had the ability to rattle her so thoroughly. And working side by side with him for the past three weeks hadn’t made it one bit easier for her.

  “Obtained totally legally, compliments of the D.A.,” she qualified with a nervous laugh. “They know about my training program and have licensed me to use small amounts of genuine drugs to train my dogs. Bullet has to learn to identify the scent of illegal substances.”

  Eli held up both hands, palms outward. “I would never have thought to suggest otherwise,” he assured her with a cheeky grin.

  She wrinkled her nose at him, just barely refraining from sticking out her tongue like a juvenile. Only her inherent dignity, bruised though it was, allowed her to maintain decorum.

  As his comfort with the training had grown, Eli’s tense anxiety of the first week had eased somewhat. This was good for making Bullet more comfortable with him. It was bad for Mary, though, since a more relaxed, more confident Eli
was an Eli who flirted nonstop for the fun of it—and who seemed entirely too amused at the way it made her stammer. His swagger grew bigger every day.

  Worse, he used flirting as a way to stall on working with Bullet. The connection between the man and dog still hadn’t developed as fully as she’d hoped and figuring out what else she could try had her at her wit’s end. Thus, today’s lesson. Eli loved being a cop—if the proof of Bullet’s potential usefulness out in the field didn’t win him over, nothing would.

  “Tell the truth. You did wonder where I’d gotten my hands on illegal drugs.” She snorted in mock offense. “Like I bought them off the street or something. Really, Eli.”

  His lips twitched and his smile widened, if that were possible. “I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper,” he reminded her. “You could win the award for Most Integrity, if Serendipity had such a thing.”

  Mary creased her brow. That should have been a compliment, so why didn’t it feel like one? Her skin itched. She was vitally aware how self-conscious she was around Eli, and she couldn’t always tell when he was teasing her. Was it possible that he was mocking her for being such a Goody Two-shoes?

  No. Not Eli. He wasn’t that kind of man. He couldn’t be intentionally cruel. It wasn’t in his nature.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you take things far too seriously?” He tilted his head, his gaze narrowing on her, speculative and gleaming, immediately followed by another bold—and annoying—grin.

  Mary pushed her glasses up her nose with her index finger and shifted her gaze away from him so he wouldn’t see the change in her expression. He hadn’t a clue that he’d hit her where it hurt, smack-dab in the red zone of her insecurities. Of course she took his opinion of her too seriously. She’d been doing that for years.

  Even when she was a child, she had hid her own perceived frailties behind the comfort of her more boisterous and outgoing friends. Both Samantha and Alexis were bubbly, vivacious, glass-half-full women whom everyone in town loved and respected. Mary couldn’t help it if she’d been standing behind the door when God passed out confidence. The only thing she was fully confident in was her work—and that was what this afternoon was all about.

  It wasn’t as if this were a special occasion—it wasn’t a date or anything. Not even remotely close. She was, for all intents and purposes, Eli’s boss at the moment, and it was her job to make a K-9 unit out of him and Bullet. That was a serious business which needed her complete and comprehensive focus.

  Not that Eli was in any position to accuse her of taking it too seriously. Eli was the poster child for an overachiever with perfectionist tendencies. He had to be the best at everything he did. Best football player. Best motorcycle rider. Best cop.

  And now, best K-9 handler. Maybe that’s why he sometimes appeared so brusque when he was around the dog. It was a good working theory.

  “We’re going to be learning how to scan and search today.” Nothing like completely ignoring his statement and redirecting, but she didn’t have a better solution.

  “Scan as in having Bullet search for drugs?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Cool. That sounds fun. Now we’re getting to the good stuff.”

  Mary chuckled and shook her head. His reaction was far better than she’d anticipated. She was glad he’d taken her lead on the conversation. This was the first time Eli had displayed genuine interest in the procedures she had been teaching him. “Haven’t you learned by now? It’s all good stuff.”

  “Yeah, but this is where the bad guys meet their match. We’re gonna take ’em down, aren’t we, Bullet?”

  The dog barked and wagged his tail so hard his whole back end was a blur.

  “See there?” Eli crowed. “Bullet agrees with me.”

  “Of course he does. You guys are partners, right? I told you a little enthusiasm would go a long way.”

  Understanding flooded Eli’s gaze. Mary felt the turning point as genuinely as if they’d staked a flag and claimed the area. She hadn’t been making nearly enough progress with Eli’s mind-set, and then suddenly, there it was.

  He got it.

  “So the first thing I want to do is throw his tennis ball for him a few times. Remember to praise him when he brings it back to you.”

  And then it was gone.

  His smile disappeared, and he sounded genuinely disappointed. “I thought you said we were finally going to start learning to search for the real thing.”

  “We’ll get to it, I promise.”

  He shrugged, resigned but not happy to be having playtime as their warm-up rather than jumping right into the work as he’d hoped for. His attitude frustrated Mary. There was so much he still didn’t get. Would he ever learn to trust her?

  “Fetch? Uh, I mean, apport?”

  “Nice Dutch,” she commented, drawing out the words. “Apparently someone doesn’t list patience as one of the primary virtues on his résumé.”

  “No. Nope. Can’t say that I do. I stick with my true fortes. Remarkably charming. Devastatingly handsome.”

  “And yet so humble.”

  He wagged his eyebrows.

  She shook her head and chuckled. “Stop giving me grief and toss the ball for Bullet. It’s an important step in the process, warming him up before the real deal. We’re getting him focused on his ball. Trust me.”

  Eli grumbled under his breath, but at least he threw the ball. Mary rolled her eyes. Exasperating man. Really. It was lucky for him he was cute, or she might just trash this whole idea.

  “Are we warmed up yet?” he asked less than a minute later.

  Less than a minute. Good grief. The man simply would not learn.

  “I suppose we can move on,” she agreed, even though she usually spent a good quarter of an hour playing fetch before moving her dogs on to another assignment.

  “Awesome.” He jogged up in front of her with Bullet at his heel, both of them bright-eyed and ready to go. She couldn’t tell who was more eager to play the next game—or as Eli would prefer she say, to do the work.

  “All right, then. I’ll distract Bullet while you sneak his ball into the box marked with the red X. We don’t want to let him know which box in which to look for his ball. He needs to use his nose.”

  “Is that safe for Bullet?”

  “Perfectly,” she assured him, glad that Eli cared enough to think of Bullet’s safety. “The point of this exercise is that he learns to associate his tennis ball with certain scents. After a while, he’ll search for those scents even without his ball in play.”

  “Gotcha. Makes sense. Can’t wait to see it in action.”

  While Mary drew Bullet’s attention away from what Eli was doing, he trotted down the road and dropped the tennis ball into the marked box. When he returned, she handed him Bullet’s lead and nodded toward the first box on the road.

  “You’re going to lead him beside the box you want him to scan. In essence, you’re showing him where you want him to work, and then you’ll step aside and let him do his job. In addition to using the verbal command reveiren, which is Dutch for search, I find it helpful to use a hand signal to indicate the general area you want him to cover. I use a simple sweeping hand motion.”

  She demonstrated, and Eli copied the gesture.

  “The trick is not to use your own body language to give the hit away. Obviously, in this practice session, you know where you hid the ball, but Bullet doesn’t. You want him to figure it out with his nose, not by you giving him silent indications. During a legitimate search, you won’t have any idea where the drugs are hidden, or even if they are present at all. You’ll need to be able to trust Bullet’s instincts and of course his encompassing sense of smell.”

  “What will happen when he finds the ball?”

  Mary smiled to herself. Eli had said when h
e finds the ball, not if. He was starting to trust Bullet without even realizing he was doing so. Progress.

  “He’ll indicate a hit with a firm sit. That said, you’ll want to be ready with a correction, if necessary. If for some reason he doesn’t sit, or if he shifts his hind end around or doesn’t stay until you’ve released him, you’ll want to be right on top of it. He’s a great dog, but he’s still in his puppy stage. Sometimes he gets a little overexcited.”

  Eli approached the first box and gestured with his arm. “Bullet, reveiren.”

  “Excellent! Strong, solid command. He’s watching you. Stay out in front of him. Keep leading. Praise, praise, praise.”

  “Good boy, good boy,” Eli responded, high-pitched and full of excitement. He was just getting warmed up. He was clearly in his element doing actual police work. There was a bounce in his step and a gleam in his eye that had been missing from his earlier sessions. He led Bullet to the next box and repeated the scan motion. By the time they’d reached the subsequent box, the energy coming off the pair was almost palpable.

  For the first time since they’d started, Eli and Bullet were working as a legitimate team, both focused on the same goal instead of one always getting in the way of the other.

  Mary’s heart soared with encouragement. She’d begun to doubt her own abilities, to despair of ever being able to train a man-dog unit. Maybe they would work out after all and her goals were more than a hopeless pipe dream. She hoped so, for all of their sakes.

  Her breath caught in her throat as Eli and Bullet neared the drug box. She watched carefully to discern whether Eli might be giving Bullet subtle clues in his body language, but he acted exactly the same as he’d done with the others.

  Bullet took one sniff and immediately went into overdrive. His whole body was quivering, but he gave a solid sit.

  “Look at that!” Eli exclaimed. “Good boy, good boy, good boy!”

  “Quickly now. Grab the ball out of the box and bounce it for him as a reward. Keep going with your praise. You’re both doing great.”