Ruff Around the Edges

by Roxanne St Claire

  “You have my word,” Aidan whispered.

  The machine attached to one of the ten different cords pressed to his body started beeping, loud and fast, as Charlie closed his eyes.

  A medic called an alert. A nurse shoved Aidan away. The doctor hustled over and started firing off orders.

  And someone grabbed Aidan by the arm and yanked him out of the way. “You need to go outside, sir,” a nurse said. “Now.”

  He moved blindly through the doors, back to the cold fluorescent lights of the hallway, into the waiting room. There, vaguely aware of the sharp-eyed gaze of the sergeant still at his post, Aidan leaned against the wall and felt his whole body start to crumble, sliding toward the floor. As he sank lower, something snapped in his head. In his heart, maybe.

  The smells and sounds of the base hospital swirled around him, like he was on psychedelic drugs and a bad trip. Grief rose up and strangled him, the way it had after his mother died. Regret. Remorse. Misery. Loss. Loneliness.

  Every dark thing that he could feel closed in around his head, smothering him.

  Just before he hit the ground, he launched up, so hard and fast his boots slid on the linoleum.

  Without a word, he took off, running through the hospital hall and out into the dusty, filthy air of Afghanistan. He looked left and right, got his bearings, and headed straight to the yellowed adobe walls of base housing, breaking into a run so fast the air sang in his head.

  When he got to the entrance, he powered through the common area, ignoring the sound of someone calling his name. He shot up the stairwell and threw open the door to Club 25, as they called the four-man suite. Immediately, a big brown head rose from Charlie’s bed, followed by a deep, baritone bark of greeting. Aidan threw himself at the boxer, arms around his neck, and put his face in fur that sometimes seemed like God made it to absorb silent, secret tears.

  But Aidan didn’t hide these tears. They flowed hard, until Ruff put a massive paw on Aidan’s shoulder in the closest thing to a hug a dog could give. They both fell on Aidan’s bunk eventually, spent. Aidan didn’t even take off his boots but let sleep be his escape.

  It was barely sunup when two officers came in and quietly opened Charlie’s locker, took a bag of his belongings, and stripped his bed without a word.

  After a few minutes, Aidan got up, put a leash on Ruff, and took him out. Then he called his father, woke him up, and asked a special favor.

  If anyone could pull strings and get a dog from Afghanistan to the US, it was the man they called the Dogfather. Yes, it would take money, which he’d happily pay. And it would take time. A long time. The only question was who would get out of this hellhole first, Aidan or Ruff?

  Didn’t matter. They both would, and they’d have each other’s back just like Aidan and Charlie. Now it would be Aidan and Ruff, a couple of Night Stalkers who never quit.

  Chapter Two

  Six Months Later

  “He’s on his way.”

  Aidan froze in the act of hosing out a dog kennel stall, letting his father’s words sink in. As he flipped off the water, his heart slammed in his chest like the thumping blades of a Sikorsky taking off.

  “How long?” Aidan asked.

  “Cilla said they’d be here in ten minutes.” Dad stepped closer, a note of pride in his voice that his good friend and skilled travel agent had the credentials needed to travel to Europe and bring home a very special delivery. “She said he’s awake from the travel sedation and…rambunctious.”

  He laughed. “That’s Ruff.” On a heavy sigh, he put his hand on his father’s arm. “I don’t know how to thank you, Dad. This took a long time, longer than I thought it would, but you did it.”

  “We had a lot of help here and overseas,” his father said with classic Daniel Kilcannon-style humility.

  Aidan had been home from Afghanistan for about a month, but his own Army discharge when he hit ten years had been a breeze compared to the hell they’d gone through to get Ruff cleared to leave the country. Aidan had started the process—well, Dad had started it—the morning after Charlie died in November. And now, more than six months later, Ruff was ten minutes away.

  “How do you feel?” Dad asked.

  Aidan shook his head and tucked his fingers into the pockets of his jeans. “Overwhelmed, I guess. Like I’m coming full circle.” And that there might be hope for him here at Waterford Farm, once Ruff arrived. But he didn’t need to say that to his father. Didn’t need to start another conversation about how much he’d struggled since he got back. Dad knew, so he also knew how important this was to Aidan.

  “Because Charlie wanted you to have Ruff.” There was something in his father’s strange statement of the obvious that caught Aidan off guard. Was that a subtle warning? Doubt? Something didn’t sound quite right.

  Maybe his father wanted to have that conversation anyway. He’d never miss a chance to advise one of his kids, no doubt readying a low-key lecture on how Aidan should face his issues, unpack his baggage, and settle into life at Waterford Farm the way all the other kids had.

  But his siblings hadn’t been at war. They’d been bonding over dogs, building the largest canine rescue and training facility in the state, and moving on from the grief of their mother’s unexpected death three and a half years ago.

  All the while, Aidan had been fighting and training and flying and losing his best friend. But did Dad really want to talk about it now?

  From the question in his father’s piercing blue gaze, so much like his own, the answer might be yes. But Aidan didn’t want to screw up his reunion with Ruff by getting into deep shit with Dad right now.

  “I’m going to go wash up and greet him in the driveway.” He tried to step past his father, but Dad didn’t move out of the way, his six-foot-and-change frame blocking the opening of the empty kennel. He didn’t say anything, either, but Daniel Kilcannon didn’t always speak when he had something to say to one of his six kids. A good long look usually did the trick. Fact was, Aidan had faced hard-ass COs who couldn’t deliver that look like Dad.

  “What?” Aidan asked, not bothering to pretend he didn’t feel the glare.

  “You’re absolutely certain?”

  Aidan made a face, confused. “Of what?”

  “That you should keep this dog.”

  His father could have hauled back and sucker-punched him, and it wouldn’t have shocked him as much. “What? Is that a joke?” They’d moved heaven and earth to get Ruff here, and Dad had been integral every step of the way. “You know how much he means to me. You know Charlie gave him to me on his deathbed.”

  Dad stood stone-still and finally dragged his thick, silver hair back as if trying to pull something out of his head. The right words, maybe. But for what?

  “There’s no chance you misunderstood him, is there?”

  Where the hell was he going with this? “No. I didn’t misunderstand anything.”

  “He was on heavy medication, I assume, after surgery. In pain. Maybe delirious, even.”

  Aidan frowned, angling his head as if he wasn’t hearing right. Delirious? “He was in pain and medicated, yeah. He was dying, not to put too fine a point on it. But he was lucid. And insistent. Why would you even ask me that right now?”

  Dad crossed his arms and let out a noisy breath. “Have you, by any chance, been over to visit Charlie’s aunt and uncle?”

  Another curve ball he hadn’t expected, but Aidan answered honestly. “Once. I went to pay my respects about a week after I got home.” He lifted a brow. “I’m not sure Sarah Leone was that happy to see me alive when her nephew isn’t.”

  “Grief can change people.” Of course, who knew that better than his father, who’d lost the woman he loved more than anything or anyone on earth. “Charlie was like a son to her.”

  Aidan conceded that with a tip of his head. Sarah and her husband, Mike Leone, had been legal guardians to the two Spencer kids after their parents died in a car crash when Charlie was fifteen.

  “Wha
t about Charlie’s sister, Rebecca?” Dad asked. “Have you seen her?”

  “Sarah didn’t let me in the house. She said her husband was sick and Beck…” Aidan frowned, trying to pull up a visual of the girl he hadn’t seen much since he and Charlie had gone to college. Rebecca Spencer, who was almost always called Beck, had been a kid back then, maybe fourteen. When they’d come home, she hadn’t been around much, and then she went to the Midwest for art school, if he recalled correctly.

  “Charlie told me she moved to Chicago, lives in a high-rise, and has some business that has to do with babies. I don’t know any more than that about her.”

  “You have some of your facts straight,” Dad said. “She’s here now. Mike Leone had a mild stroke in the end of February, and Beck came back from Chicago, where she apparently has a baby-photography business. She’s helping her aunt keep Slice of Heaven running.”

  Aidan felt a kick of guilt, knowing he should have done more to offer sympathies to the whole family. Maybe gone into their pizza parlor in town once or twice. But Sarah Leone had been frosty when he’d knocked on the door of their home north of Bitter Bark, saying little more than hello and goodbye to Aidan. They might not blame him for Charlie’s death, but they sure as hell resented Aidan for being alive.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Aidan asked, his wheels spinning as he psyched out the conversation and its timing. “You want me to take Ruff to see them or something?”

  Two brows lifted. “Or something.”

  “Dad.” Aidan let out a soft laugh of bewilderment. “Can the cryptic code. What’s up?”

  “Beck Spencer came to see me a few weeks after Charlie died.”

  “Okay.” That didn’t completely surprise him. Beck had lived in Bitter Bark a long time, and everyone in town knew his father, a highly respected local veterinarian and pillar of the community. People sought him out for advice, or favors, or to tour Waterford Farm. “What did she want?”

  “Ruff.”

  “’Scuze me?”

  “She wanted my help in bringing Ruff home from Afghanistan. For her.”

  He drew back. “Did you tell her you’d already started the process? For me?”

  “I did tell her you’d asked me to initiate his return already, but I didn’t know what your plans were with the dog. I knew you wanted him back here, so I assumed you knew that Charlie…Charlie…” He took a pause and searched Aidan’s face while he looked for a way to say whatever he had to say. “Charlie left Ruff to his sister.”

  Aidan almost laughed at how crazy that was, but there was something serious in his father’s eyes that stopped him. “Dad. He gave me the dog. He begged me to bring him back here and told me he wanted me to have the dog.”

  “But she’s—”

  “She’s his sister, I get that.”

  “And next of kin.”

  He huffed out a breath. Yes, next of kin got everything unless a soldier requested otherwise, but not Ruff. “But he left Ruff to me, and anything else would be going against his request, and I can’t do that.”

  “She wants Ruff.”

  “She can’t have Ruff.” This was not debatable. “We’re bonded. We’re one. We survived those last months without Charlie because we had each other.” He heard his voice strain to make his point, but pushed on. “That dog is a part of my soul, Dad. And more than that, I gave Charlie my word I’d do what he wanted with Ruff. Hell, that’s half the reason I didn’t re-up, so I could honor that promise. That’s all that matters.”

  Dad looked…unconvinced.

  “No way,” Aidan continued. “I’m not giving him to a stranger, even if she is Charlie’s sister. I’ll help her find another dog and disavow her of the notion that she automatically gets him because she’s next of kin. Because she doesn’t. She can’t.”

  Dad’s expression barely registered the impassioned speech. “She has a letter from him, signed, dated, and unequivocal, instructing her to transport and keep the dog. It could easily be taken to court as a legal addendum to his official will.”

  “Court?” A white light popped in Aidan’s head as he shook it vehemently. “That’s wrong. That’s… Court?”

  “His letter is specific, with instructions that, should anything happen to Charlie, Beck was to contact me and do whatever was necessary to get Ruff and to keep him as her own.”

  This wasn’t possible. Aidan felt the tiny bit of joy he’d been clinging to for days dissolve in a pool of pain. “Ruff is mine, Dad. I don’t want to be an asshole about it to Charlie’s sister, but this matters to me. More than anything.”

  He hated that he had to add that, because it would open a can-of-worms conversation about why Aidan was so restless and unhappy now that he was back in the States and out of the Army, but Dad—of all people—should understand this. “Would you have given Rusty to someone else when Mom died? Wasn’t that dog the only way you got through the worst times?”

  “My family got me through it. My kids and this place.” He let his shoulders drop. “But I wouldn’t have been happy about letting go of Rusty.”

  “Thank you.” He made one more attempt to step past Dad. “Can we drop this now?”

  “You have to talk to her, Aidan. You have to work this out.”

  He choked softly, refusing to even dignify that with a response. He powered past his father, his boots pounding on the kennel tiles as he headed for the door. What kind of fresh hell was this? Talk to her about what? Shared custody? Dad was out of his flipping mind if he thought that was happening.

  Just as he reached the open door that led to the sunshine outside, a loud staccato bark stopped his thoughts and maybe his heart. “Ruff!”

  Aidan whipped around, blinking into the light as a large brown blur came tearing at him. Before he took his next breath, Ruff leaped into the air, slapped both paws on Aidan’s chest, and pushed so hard they both slammed into Dad, who was right behind him.

  “Whoa, whoa, boy!” Aidan half laughed as he managed to get his arms around the sturdy boxer and roll down to the ground. Immediately, the barking stopped and the tongue came out.

  And everything and everyone else disappeared. The kennels, the sunshine, the grief and guilt he’d been carrying for months, even Dad and his crappy news.

  There was nothing but Ruff, a wild, crazy, loving brute of a dog who was as much a part of Aidan as his soul. And the love was mutual, as anyone could see by the stubby tail knocking back and forth and that relentless tongue swiping over Aidan’s face.

  Paws beat against his chest until Ruff ran out of steam and collapsed in drooly satisfaction on Aidan’s chest. All Aidan could do was laugh at the pressure of the seventy-five-pound beast who’d transferred all his love from Charlie to Aidan the day his real master was carried out of Afghanistan in a box.

  Still chuckling, nuzzling, and rubbing the big head, Aidan pushed the dog up to look into his big, sad eyes. He never looked happy, even when he was. “That’s my boy.”

  Except…was he?

  Both of them still panting, Aidan managed to sit up and get Ruff to settle down. A little. But the dog barked and pawed and kissed a few more times, barely glancing up at Dad as one hundred percent of Ruff’s doggie focus was on Aidan.

  “You’re a good boy, Ruffie,” Aidan murmured into his fur, letting the full joy of having this dog in his arms again roll over both of them.

  “That’s a bit of a stretch,” Dad joked, reaching down to give Ruff a scratch, which only sent the dog into another barking tizzy, spinning twice and pounding on Aidan again. “Looks like Ruff could use some Kilcannon training magic.”

  Which Aidan did not have. “He’s untrainable,” Aidan said.

  “There’s no such thing.”

  Aidan buried his face in Ruff’s neck again. “You haven’t met this one.”

  “But he’s a military dog,” Dad said. “I can’t believe he didn’t get trained overseas.”

  “He’s an Afghani stray,” Aidan corrected. “Not a working dog.”

>   “Looks like a purebred boxer to me.”

  Aidan shrugged. “I don’t know what he is, but he’s not trainable, not like you guys do it.”

  He waited for his dad to correct the you guys into a we, as he had several times since Aidan came home. But Dad was silent, and when Aidan glanced toward the driveway, he saw Darcy, Garrett, and Liam all talking to Cilla Forsythe. His siblings were giving Aidan space for his reunion before they descended on Ruff and pronounced him yet another family dog and tried to turn him into some kind of rule-following specialist. Good luck with that, guys.

  All this dog could do was play hard and give comfort. And Aidan needed both more than he needed food and water.

  “As far as Beck Spencer,” Dad said, pulling Aidan’s attention back to him. “I’m not going to insist you do anything.”

  Aidan almost rolled his eyes. As if the man who breathed Do the right thing before he got out of bed every morning wasn’t going to put his hands on Aidan’s shoulders and push him toward Slice of Heaven.

  “But I saw the letter to Beck, and I know that, at least when he wrote it, Charlie’s request was that Ruff be adopted by his sister. There is no ambiguity about it, and the letter is proof in writing, something you don’t have.”

  Irritation slammed him. “Dad, he was clear that night. He was determined. He made me give my word.”

  When that didn’t sway his father, Aidan gripped Ruff’s big brown head, angling his slobbery face toward Dad. “Look at him. He’s a guy’s dog. A drooling, snoring, out-of-control jumper, licker, and eater of shoes and toilet paper.”

  Dad gave in to a smile, crouching down to get close to the dog and eye-to-eye with Aidan. “He’s definitely a handful, but if your mother had heard you call any canine ‘a guy’s dog,’ she’d have thrown you down for a good old-fashioned Annie Kilcannon talking-to. Then your sisters would pounce on you, too.”

  “You know what I mean. He’s been at war. He’s an honorary member of the 160th SOAR Airborne. He can’t live in a city high-rise surrounded by babies and cameras. He belongs with me.”