The Twelve Dogs of Christmas
Page 15
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ben promised. Now that they were on the main floor they had a little more room to maneuver, and Connor appeared at Mac’s other side, taking half his weight.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Connor chimed in helpfully. “Though you might want to consider calling her Ally rather than Dog Lady. Just a thought.”
“I’m not going to call her anything. We’re friends.”
“Uh-huh,” Connor agreed skeptically.
“I like friends,” Mac declared with drunken sincerity.
“Does it bother anyone else that he doesn’t even get hungover when he’s like this?” Connor asked. “How is that fair? All the fun of being slap-happy-drunk and none of the morning-after consequences? Where is the cosmic justice?”
“Yeah,” Levi drawled. “That’s one of the real injustices of the universe that’s going to keep me up nights.”
“Hey. Fair is fair.”
“We really should do this more often,” Ben said dryly—but he actually meant the words.
Levi seemed to sense the truth behind his comment, meeting his eyes and giving a wry twist of his lips. “Yeah. I’ve missed you assholes.”
“Language!” Connor gasped with mock horror. “The little ears might still be awake.”
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten the time you tried to teach her to swear,” Ben growled.
Connor shrugged. “It was British swearing. Bloody bollocksed isn’t even really a thing in this country.” Ben glared at him and Connor grinned. “You’re just jealous you didn’t think of it first. Or you would be if you loosened up on the reins a little bit. She’s a good kid, Ben.”
“She is,” Levi confirmed. “And you know you can call us, right? Anytime you need anything?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
He just didn’t do that. He didn’t ask for help. And Levi’s look said he knew it.
“Idiot,” Levi said softly, clapping him on the shoulder and stepping out into the cold night air.
Ben closed the door behind the three of them to the sound of Mac winding up for a rendition of “Memory.” He headed toward the kitchen to rinse the empty bottles for recycling and realized he was smiling.
They did need to do that more often. When he made time for the people who knew him best, he felt more like himself again—and like he could manage all the other ten thousand things he had to do. It shouldn’t make any sense. He’d wasted three hours tonight, playing poker and talking about nothing with his friends. But he felt like he’d gotten time back. Gotten himself back.
He wanted to tell Ally about it.
His hands stilled on the bottles. Did he have feelings for her that weren’t friendship? He hadn’t even let himself consider the possibility, but he’d hated the idea of Connor asking her out. The thought of Connor asking out Elinor didn’t bother him in the slightest. Elinor was his friend. Ally was his friend. But Ally was also…
He didn’t know. He didn’t know what else she was. He just knew she couldn’t be whatever that was. Because she was leaving. She had a life in New York to get back to. This was temporary. The shelter. This season. And he couldn’t do temporary. Not with Astrid in the picture. He had to be smarter than that. He had to put Astrid first. Always.
Chapter Twenty-One
Who’s ready for a Christmas parade? Is JoJo ready? Is the sweetest most precious little girl ever ready to be a parade star?”
Ally watched Deenie cooing over JoJo as she put tiny red ribbons on her ears. She arched an eyebrow. “You really should just adopt her.”
Deenie looked up, laughing at herself. “I know. But I really can’t have pets in my place, and you never know when wanderlust is going to hit.”
Ally turned her attention back to Partridge, sobered by the reminder that Deenie wouldn’t always be there. This last week and a half had been wonderful. They’d failed to get the national pet adoption segment they were hoping for, but with Astrid and Ben and Deenie and her grandparents all strategizing ways to get the word out, she didn’t think they even needed it.
In a couple of hours she and Deenie would be loading the dogs onto the Furry Friends pickup, which had been decked out in Christmas cheer for the parade, but now they were putting ribbons on the dogs and deciding who would get to wear the Santa hat and who would wear the reindeer antlers.
The reindeer antlers had been Ben’s latest addition. He hadn’t been by to do his laundry, but he had swung by with Astrid a couple of times this week, lingering in the office to chat with Ally while Astrid played with the dogs. Partridge still followed him around like a duckling wherever he went, and Ally was starting to think he might not be quite as immune to the lopsided bulldog as he wanted everyone to think.
“Will Ben be at the parade?”
Ally jerked guiltily. “What?” Had Deenie seen something on her face? Had she somehow known that Ally was thinking of him? “I don’t know. I mean, isn’t the whole town going to be there?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“Why would he tell me?”
Deenie grinned. “I don’t know. I just thought you guys have been hanging out together a lot. Doing ‘shelter stuff’ together.” Ally had no idea what the air quotes around “shelter stuff” meant, and she definitely wasn’t going to ask. “Last weekend at the fair, I thought maybe I sensed a vibe.”
“A vibe?” She laughed, hoping it didn’t sound as artificial to Deenie as it did to her own ears. “What kind of vibe?”
“You know. Like a ‘you, me, mistletoe, let’s do this’ kind of vibe.”
“Deenie! Nothing’s going on. We’re just friends. He’s nice.”
“Right…”
“What?” Ally demanded.
“Nothing,” Deenie insisted, but at Ally’s look she capitulated. “It’s just he doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being nice. He’s nice to you.”
Ally couldn’t wrap her head around it. How could anyone fail to see how kind Ben was? How utterly selfless? “What kind of reputation does he have?”
“You know. Grumpy. Impatient. Brusque.” Deenie paused her grooming efforts. “I love that word. Brusque.” Her hands started moving again. “I mean, we all understand why. He got hit with a whole boatload of grief and never got out from under it, but he’s still the town grumpus.”
“Grumpus?”
“Grinch. Grouch. Whatever. I know—I spend too much time around five-year-olds, and it’s affecting my vocabulary, but you know what I mean. And I’m just saying that Ben isn’t known for nice, but when he’s around you, he’s different. Happy. I guess I just wondered if something was going on.”
“No. Absolutely not. Our friendship is purely platonic.” And if she said that often enough, she would force herself to believe it.
“That’s a bummer.”
“Deenie! He’s taken.”
Deenie blinked, looking up from JoJo’s bows. “He is?”
Ally shot Deenie a look. “Elinor? His fiancée? Ringing any bells?”
“Elinor Rodriguez? Like Elinor Elinor?”
“Yeah.”
Deenie’s jaw dropped. “You thought she was engaged to Ben West?”
“Yes?” Deenie’s shock was corroding Ally’s confidence, and she frowned, suddenly not so certain she’d read the situation correctly. But her grandmother had said Ben was engaged. And Astrid called Elinor her aunt. And they’d seemed so comfortable with one another…
Deenie snorted a laugh. “That’s one I’ve never heard before.”
The jingle bells above the door jangled, and Elinor appeared like she’d been conjured by the conversation—or, more realistically, like she’d already told them she’d be arriving on Friday afternoon when she was done with school so she could meet the dogs and decide which one might be right for her.
Ally jolted to her feet. “Elinor!”
The librarian smiled, as always slightly wary of Ally’s overenthusiasm. “Hey.” She glanced at the dogs currently being beautified. “Is this a bad time?”
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“No! Of course not! Would you like to look around and see if anyone catches your eye?”
“You know, this explains so much,” Deenie said conversationally. Ally shot her a let’s-keep-this-conversation-to-ourselves glare, but her psychic powers must have been on the fritz, because Deenie kept talking. “I was wondering why you kind of spaz out around Elinor—I even wondered if maybe she was the one you were into, but if you thought she was with Ben, it all makes sense.”
“Ben?” Elinor repeated, pausing in the act of looking in one of the dog pens. “Ben West?”
Her surprise was the final nail in the coffin of Ally’s belief. “You aren’t engaged to him?”
“To Ben? No. God, no. Not that he isn’t lovely—”
“Oh, she knows,” Deenie put in helpfully. “Ally has a thing for him.”
“You do?”
Elinor’s gaze lasered in on her with intense focus, and Ally wished for a hole to open up and swallow her. “I really don’t.”
But Elinor didn’t seem to hear her, a slow, knowing smile spreading across her face. “You know that does explain a lot. You get this sort of manic look in your eyes whenever you talk to me. Honestly, I thought you were just desperate for female friends. It was sort of adorable. Unnerving, but adorable.”
“Oh God,” Ally groaned, hiding her face behind her hands. “I’m sorry. I was trying so hard to be normal.”
“Well, there’s your problem,” Deenie chirped. “Normal is the worst.”
“You really thought I was engaged to Ben?” Elinor repeated.
Ally felt her face heating and knew it must be seven shades of scarlet by now. “My grandmother said he was engaged, and then Astrid called you Aunt Elinor, and you two are so natural with each other…”
Realization dawned on Elinor’s face, and she released a soft laugh. “Astrid calls me Aunt Elinor because her mother, Katie, was my best friend in the whole world. Ben and I grew up together. And then I made the mistake of dating one of his best friends in high school, so we were pretty much forced to see each other even more. And yes, Ben was engaged. Past tense. Isabelle left him as soon as the custody papers came through, and Ben hasn’t looked at another woman since. But he has been spending a lot of time at this shelter.”
“He’s helping with the dogs.”
Elinor nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“It isn’t like that,” Ally insisted.
But a voice in the back of her brain whispered, Is it?
She’d thought Ben was taken. She’d been so sure. So she hadn’t even let herself consider that he might be interested in her, but now she couldn’t help but think of everything they’d done together in the last couple of weeks and wonder if she’d been wrong about more than his relationship status.
Had he been flirting with her? That night when he’d walked her home after brownie baking and the snow had started to fall so peacefully around them, making her feel like she was inside a real-life snow globe—had that been a date? Had he been thinking about kissing her?
Were they dating and she hadn’t even known it?
“Uh-oh. Looks like someone just took the blinders off.” Deenie grinned gleefully. “How’s that platonic relationship looking now?”
Ally shook her head, denial running strong. “He hasn’t done anything—held my hand, kissed me, he hasn’t made a single move.” Even if she might like him more than a little bit, that didn’t mean her feelings were reciprocated.
“He wouldn’t with Astrid around,” Elinor put in. “I’m not sure he’s been on a single date since he became her guardian.”
“Two years?” Deenie asked incredulously. “That poor boy and his blue balls.”
Ally snorted, startled out of her confusion by the dry comment from the bubbly princess who always seemed to have glitter somewhere on her body. In the run next to them, Harry perked up and rushed to the gate, sitting her best sit with her long fluffy tail sweeping the ground behind her in an eager wag as she gazed fixedly at Deenie.
“Not that kind of ball,” Deenie told the Aussie, repeating her favorite word and sending her into even more determined good-girl behavior. “No ball, Harry. Sorry, baby.”
“He knows the word ball?” Elinor eyed the gorgeous Aussie, who still sat with her ears pricked forward, just in case a game of fetch was about to materialize.
“She, actually. Harry for Harriet. And yeah, she knows a lot of words, and she’ll play fetch until your arm falls off if you let her.”
Elinor frowned at the complicated padlock system on her run. “What’s all this?”
Ally grimaced. “Harry, also for Houdini. She knows how to open doors. Our own little explorer.”
Elinor chuckled. “Should we call you Dora, sweetheart?”
“See? I’m not the only one who spends too much time around children,” Deenie said while Harry cocked her head at Elinor.
“If you adopted her, you could rename her whatever you want. The trick, we learned, is to lure her back rather than chase her. When you try to catch her, she thinks it’s a game of keep-away, and just when you think you have her cornered she’ll leap over something you were sure she couldn’t leap over, and it all starts over again. But if you grab a piece of cheese and ask her to come, she’ll behave like a perfect angel.”
“She’s pretty,” Elinor commented, eyeing the merle Aussie, who was still doing her best good-girl routine, as if she knew she had a receptive audience in the librarian. And maybe she did know. The dog was scary smart.
“Would you like to play with her? We have her in the biggest run, but even with that much space, we bring her to the paddock to get her zoomies out a few times a day, or she starts trying to climb the walls of her run.” Literally. Ally had never seen a dog try to scale a fence before, but Harry could do a lot of things normal dogs didn’t even try. “You’d be doing us a favor.”
Elinor grinned to let her know she’d been laying it on a little thick, but she still nodded. “Sure, I’d love to help.”
Ally got Elinor set up in the back paddock with Harry and her favorite squeaky ball, then returned to the grooming station, leaving Elinor laughing at Harry’s antics.
“I think we might have a match,” she whispered as she picked up Peanut for a cuddle. “Ben said he thought Harry might be good for Elinor.”
“Did he?” Deenie asked, layering the words with extra meaning. “So you and Ben have been spending time together…”
Ally groaned. “We’re friends,” she insisted. “He doesn’t see me as anything else.”
“That doesn’t mean he couldn’t with the right push,” Deenie suggested. “Sometimes males are stupid and have to have their faces shoved in what’s good for them before they realize what everyone else knew all along. Look at Maximus.”
Ally snorted. “Did you just compare Ben to Maximus?”
“He’s a lovely dog with a huge heart, and he desperately wants to please everyone. He just can’t seem to figure out what you want from him unless you shove it in his big, dumb face. That sounds a lot like Ben.” She cocked her head. “Actually it sounds like most of the men I’ve dated, too.” She frowned, then another sunny smile burst across her face. “On second thought, you probably shouldn’t take dating advice from me. I’m the worst.”
She said it as cheerfully as she said everything else, without an ounce of negative feeling, but Ally was starting to understand that was Deenie’s way of keeping anyone from trying to dig too deep. She had some experience with that. “It must be hard to find something long-term when you’re always traveling.”
“It is,” Deenie agreed brightly. “Luckily, I’m not looking for long-term.” She held up two different ribbons. “What do you think for Trapper, red or green?”
Ally considered pushing, not letting her change the subject, but Deenie seemed determined to keep her secrets, and there would be time. At least she hoped there would. She was enjoying this life in Pine Hollow that she’d started to build. With Deenie and Astrid and Ben…
He was a great guy. He loved Astrid like nothing else. He tried to do his best for the town, even when they all seemed to think he was a Grinch. He missed his sister so much he wouldn’t update his own kitchen. And more than anything else, he had a good heart. That was hard to resist.
And if he wasn’t engaged…
“Ally?”
“Green.” She made a snap decision on the bow, blushing at the direction of her thoughts—again. “Definitely green.”
She would see him at the parade. She would know soon enough.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ben knew gossip flew around Pine Hollow faster than Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. He knew how little it took for a story to gain traction in a town their size. He just wasn’t used to all the speculation being about him.
In the last week, word had gotten out that not only had he and Astrid been helping at the shelter and attended the tree lighting with Ally, but that she’d also brought him coffee at work and helped make the brownies that had been such a hit at the Christmas Fair. This was, apparently, tantamount to an engagement announcement. The town was in a frenzy.
Ben was used to his neighbors stopping him on the street to complain about whatever business was in front of the town council—stopping him to ask about his love life was something else entirely. The smiles, the winks, the friendly claps on the shoulder—all of it was freaking him out.
After the third “I hear you’ve been spending time with Hal and Rita’s granddaughter” and the fourth “Have you seen Ally yet today?” Ben was ready to snap at the next person who smiled speculatively at him as he and Astrid navigated their way toward the school, where the floats were assembling for their procession through town.