by Parker, Ali
I shook my head at myself. I needed to get my shit together. I was asking a dog for help with dating? Yeah, it was hardly my proudest moment.
I took him back to the kennels at the back of the exam rooms that we hung onto for just this reason. Even though he was clearly a sweet little thing, it wasn’t like many people went for older dogs these days, so I didn’t feel too confident that he was going to have much luck finding a home. It made my heart sad, but that was just the way it worked, like it or not. I had to accept that there wasn’t always something I could do for these sweet old dogs, no matter how much I would have liked to.
If I’d had the chance, of course, I would have loved to take him home myself, but that was a rule I had set up for myself a long time ago. I couldn’t just start taking home any old animals that I wanted to. Once that started, there was no way I could get it to stop again, and I didn’t want to end up with a zoo back at my apartment.
He fell asleep as soon as we had him bedded into his kennel, and I headed out to join Hannah again.
“Oh my gosh, did you see that guy?” she asked, clapping her hand to her chest as though she was trying to prevent a cardiac event.
“What, the one who just came in with the dog?”
“The very same,” she replied. “He was hot as hell, wasn’t he? And did you see how sweet he was with that little girl?”
“Yeah, he was cute,” I replied with a shrug. Truth was that he was a smoking hottie, and I was already having a hard time getting the image of his face out of my brain. Which was dumb, really dumb, and I shouldn’t have been giving him a second thought. But Hannah was right. This guy had been cute as hell, and he had come to the rescue of this little old dog who so clearly needed help. I had to admit, it was more than a little charming.
“Cute?” Hannah exclaimed. “That hardly does him justice, does it?”
I thought back to his dimples, his dark wavy hair, that expensive suit that he didn’t mind getting covered in dog fur. He had these dark eyes that seemed to smile when he looked at me, and yeah, sure, I would have been lying if I said that I didn’t get just a little fluttery over the thought of him.
But a guy like that was likely already locked down with a wife. He certainly had a kid, though he had referred to her as his niece. Whatever. He was committed, and I had no intention of trying to get in on that. Not when everything in my life was complicated enough.
“I’m surprised you let him walk out of there,” Hannah teased. “I’d have been finding reasons to keep him sticking around.”
“Okay, I think I have some intake forms to get ready,” I told her firmly. I knew she was just kidding around, but she was hitting a little too close to home for my liking, and I didn’t want her to see the flush on my face.
I made it through the rest of the day as usual, managing not to think about him at all. Or at least, not to think about him much. I couldn’t remember if he’d had a ring on his finger or not. I should have made a point to check, if just for my own peace of mind. If he was married, then he was off the market. But if not...
I took the dog that he had brought to us down to the shelter that would take him. I wanted to keep him another night, but Hannah pointed out that we had spaces booked already from other animals who needed somewhere to stay for the night.
I handed him over to the shelter, and Jackie, the woman who ran the place, took him from me carefully.
“How’d you come across this little fella?” she asked me, smiling down at him as she set him on the table for a checkup.
“Some guy brought him by this morning,” I explained. “Said he almost backed over him with his car. Seems like this dude really wants the attention, huh?”
“Well, he’ll get lots of that here tonight,” Jackie replied. She was a good couple of decades older than me, and it warmed my heart to know that she had been working with animals for this long and still hadn’t grown tired of it. It gave me hope for my own future, for what I had in store for me when I had been doing this a few more years.
“Thanks so much,” I told her, and I gave her a quick hug. “I’ll come in over the weekend to check on him, okay?”
“Okay,” she agreed, and she turned her attention to the dog. “Now, let’s get you all settled in, shall we?”
I watched the dog for one more moment before I turned and headed out the door. I was a little sad, leaving him behind like that—well, I was always a little sad when I had to leave a dog behind, but even for me, I was sadder than usual. Maybe because I knew that that dog was the only connection I had to one of the only men in years who had actually turned my head, and now that I had handed him over, there was no reason for him to get in touch with me again.
I decided to treat myself to some Greek takeout on the way home. There was a beautiful restaurant not far from me that made an amazing vegetarian gyro, and I was obsessed with them. I inhaled the deliciously savory scent as I tucked it into my bag and carried it down the last couple of blocks to my house. The fact that I had walked most of the way home meant that I had totally earned this, right?
Right.
I tried not to get too hung up on my body. I was tall, and I had the body to match my height. I wasn’t tiny and lean and little like Rita had been before she’d gotten pregnant, and I knew that I was never going to be. I didn’t get a lot of time to go to the gym, and my job was physically demanding enough that I had a decent amount of muscle anyway.
I knew that I wasn’t everyone’s type, but then, I was hardly trying to be. I hadn’t been out on the dating scene in a while, so I wasn’t much concerned with what other people might have been thinking about me.
Still, Reed sometimes got on me about not ever just going out to have a good time, and I supposed he had a point. I could have let loose a little and still been able to do my job as well as I ever could. But my job came first—always had and always would—and I didn’t want to lead anyone into thinking anything different.
My commitment to my career had scared off plenty of men in the past, and I was happy to let it keep doing so. I felt like it acted as an asshole detector. The people who were only interested in me for the way I looked were filtered out after they got bored of waiting for me to stop talking about animals already.
I made it back to my apartment and walked inside gratefully, dumping all my stuff down on the counter and grabbing my food as I set up a cheesy reality show on TV to watch. I needed to kick back and catch my breath a little. That was for damn sure.
I felt like I was exhausted constantly from the amount of work I was doing, and I knew I didn’t give myself enough time off. But for some reason, this evening, I felt particularly tired, as though something that had happened over the course of the day had flicked some switch inside me that had made things worse.
Just as I finished up my food, my phone rang. It was Reed. I answered it at once.
“Hey, bro,” I greeted. “What’s up?”
“Very little,” he replied. “I just wanted to tell you something.”
The way he was talking, I could tell he had something a little devious on his mind. I cocked an eyebrow. I had seen him pull enough pranks when we were kids to know when there was trouble on the horizon.
“Do you care to come out and tell me what that something is?” I asked.
He sighed heavily, as though he knew that I wasn’t going to have the best reaction to this. “All right, but you’ve got to promise that you’re not going to get mad at me, okay?” he commanded.
I took a deep breath. “Reed, what the fuck have you done?” I asked bluntly. I just wanted to hear it already. I was looking forward to having the rest of the evening to myself, and I didn’t want to have to concern myself with other people any more than I already had.
“I signed you up for a dating service,” he replied.
I practically dropped my phone in surprise. “What the fuck!”
“Okay, okay, calm down,” he said. “It’s not that big a deal. I just wanted you to have the chance to
get out there for a change, and I knew you weren’t going to do that without a little nudge in the right direction.”
“And you were the one to give me this nudge,” I muttered back.
“Who else could?” he replied.
I sighed and sank down into the chair. “And why, pray tell, would you be coming clean about this now?” I asked, though I was quite sure I knew the answer.
“Because you have a date this Friday night,” he told me. “And I’ve already agreed to it. So you have to go.”
“Reed!” I exclaimed. “What if you set me up with a serial killer or something? You have no right—”
“Then I’ll make sure to crack some really good jokes at your eulogy,” he replied. “Come on. Just give it a try, sis. For me?”
I massaged my temples. I had no idea what to say to him. There I was, foolish enough to think that I was going to get a nice night all to myself. And no. My brother had come swinging in and made it so that I was going to have to spend it chewing him out instead.
Typical Reed.
Chapter 5
Harry
I knew that I should have been replying to all my emails at that moment, but in truth, I was more caught up in making sure that I had everything covered for Winnie for the next few months.
I had no idea how my sister had managed to take care of her by herself for so long. Sure, I had seen the struggle when she had first had her, but I’d had no idea just how much it was going to take out of me on a day-to-day basis.
Jesus Christ, the stress of it all. The running around trying to make sure that everything fell into place, that all the bits and pieces came together at just the right moment and just the right time to be sure that everything worked out. She did band and played soccer after school, and that meant I had to make sure there was always someone there who could pick her up and take her home—whether it was Yara, me, or one of the sitters I practically had on twenty-four hour call right now.
My sister had worked her ass off to get Winnie this far in life, and it was the least I could do to pick up where she left off. I didn’t know how she had managed to keep her head above water all alone for those first seven years—before the accident.
Winnie’s father had tapped out a long time ago, and we hadn’t heard from him since, which was why I was next on the list to step up to the paternal role for her when the time came. I wondered if he ever thought about his daughter.
We knew that he was aware of the pregnancy, but that hadn’t been enough to stop him from hitting the road as soon as he got the chance to get out of there. I knew that, as a big brother, I should have tracked him down and beat him up, but my sister needed me by her side to help her look after her daughter more than she needed me to launch a cross-country campaign to get this asshole to step up and do his job.
My sister was everything to that little girl. I still didn’t know how I could possibly compare. I could see the grief in Winnie every once in a while, but she always did her best to cover it up. We had gotten her in therapy sessions as soon as we could, but that was the best we could do. I couldn’t force her to open up, couldn’t force her to engage with anyone about this.
It would all happen on her own time, I was told, and I would just have to be there for her when it happened. Which I would be. I was going to be with her any way that I could.
The door to my office sprang open, and I quickly clicked away from the calendar I had been looking at and back to the reports I was meant to be going over. I fucking ran the company. I knew that there was nobody who could tell me off for not working, but still, old habits died hard.
Yara was standing in the doorway, and she clapped her hands together.
“So,” she announced, kicking the door shut so hard it practically clattered in the doorframe. “You remember when I said I was going to sign you up for that lonely-hearts thing?”
I cocked my head at her. “No.”
“Well, the good news is that you’ve got a date from it,” she replied cheerfully.
I laughed and shook my head. “You’re joking, right?” I asked her
She shrugged. “Does it seem like I’m joking?”
I gazed at her for a long moment, scanning her eyes for any hint that she was just joking around, and I sighed heavily when I realized that she was telling the truth.
“Yara, I don’t have time to date right now,” I told her. “You know that. With Winnie and the business—”
“You’ve got a lot of excuses to keep pretending you don’t want to get back out there,” she said, finishing my sentence for me. “But I’m not going to let you keep hiding anymore, all right? You’re a damn catch. I want you to get out there and meet the woman of your dreams already. Then at least we can have something to gossip about.”
“I’m not going out with someone just because you want something to gossip about,” I told her. I couldn’t help but smile at how certain she was that this was the right way to go about it. She was always pushing me out of my comfort zone. It was one of the things that made her such a good PR woman, I guessed.
“Okay, hear me out,” she replied, hopping into the seat opposite my desk. “You were on that hot bachelors list recently, yeah?”
“I really have no idea—”
“Well, it’s my job to have an idea, so trust me when I say that you were,” she said. “And I think it would be good publicity for the company if you were to lean into that a little, get out there, and start dating, you know?”
“So you’re saying I need to do this for the sake of the company?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Look, I’m just saying, I think that you need to step out of your comfort zone a little bit. You can’t just keep holding back, right? I know that you’ve been occupied with Winnie, but she wouldn’t want you putting your life on hold for her, not forever.”
“It’s still so soon—”
“And it’s just one date,” Yara pointed out, holding up a single finger to emphasize the point. “One date! What’s the worst that could happen?”
“She could fall in love with me and never leave me alone again.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she replied, flashing me a smile. “Come on. I know the old bachelor version of you is in there somewhere! What do you say?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to just come out and agree so quickly because that would be tantamount to agreeing that what she had done was a good idea. But she had a point. I had been off the market for such a long time, and it wasn’t doing me any good to be cooped up in the house alone all the time. I would have to get back out there eventually, one way or another. Maybe this was a blessing. I was never going to do it myself, so perhaps Yara putting in the effort was how I could get back into it.
I had dated before what had happened, of course. Quite a bit actually. But I had never found anyone who had actually made me want to settle down. Most of the women I met had this edge to them, like there was something on their mind other than just spending time with me. I soon came to figure out that it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the family name that I was attached to.
They took one look at that, and dollar signs started pulsing in their eyes. They couldn’t see anything past that. I had given up on dating at all when Winnie had come under my care. There was too much on the line, too much to risk when it came to her. I didn’t want to involve anyone in my life who I wasn’t sure would get along with her.
“Come on.” Yara nudged me with her foot. “I’ll get you a drink when it’s all over. I just want you to get out there again.”
“Fine,” I agreed with a sigh.
She punched the air and got to her feet, instantly going through everything that she had on hand about this woman.
“So, she’s the same age as you,” she explained. “Seems cool. And enthusiastic. She works as a vet—not the army kind, the animal kind—and she’s going to meet you on Friday night.”
“Friday night?” I muttered, and I went to pull up the cale
ndar again.
“And I’ve already put it aside so that I can take care of Winnie for you,” she assured me, reading my mind. “Come on. You know I’m got you covered. You go out and have a good time, all right? I’m giving up prime party night for this, so you at least owe me that.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “But don’t you dare go and set me up on anything else without checking with me first, all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re going to get out of your little man-cave for a change.”
“Very funny,” I replied dryly.
She cocked her head at me and shrugged. “All right, all right. I get it. I’ll leave you to it. But the vet. On Friday. Okay? We have a deal?”
“We have a deal,” I replied, and she stepped out of the office and closed the door behind her. And it was only when she left that what she had just said really clicked into place with me.
A vet?
I couldn’t help but think of the vet I had met a few days before. The one we had taken that little dog in to see. I still had her card tucked away in my pocket somewhere. I should have gotten rid of it, but I liked feeling it in there every time I dipped in to reach something out.
She had been sweet and also hot as hell. Not to mention the fact she worked a job that had to be seriously tiring. I doubted that she would have had a lot of time to put herself out there and bother to find blind dates any more than I did.
Winnie was finally talking to me again after I had taken the dog into the vet. She had come home from school that day with a look of certainty set on her little face, and I had known what she was going to say before she opened her mouth.
“We’re not getting a dog,” I warned her.
She sighed and laughed. “How did you know that was what I was going to say?”
“Because it’s written all over your face,” I told her, turning around and planting my index finger in the center of her forehead.