by Hope Ramsay
She didn’t want to come face-to-face with a coyote, or a snipe, or worse yet, the snipe-eater she’d encountered last night. What had Dusty called that animal? A galawacus or something.
She took a step backward, reluctant to move forward as her heart jumped up into her throat. The combination of wind and her racing pulse made it difficult to pick up any other night sounds. But just above the pounding of her own heart, she heard the rustle of the creature’s footsteps in the underbrush beside the path.
She stiffened and tried not to scream. And then the creature made another sound, not a growl or a roar, but a whiny squeak.
Was she freaking out over a mouse? Or a rat? Did rats squeak?
Or was it the snipe after all? In which case Amy should have come armed with a bag and peanut butter. Maybe if she trapped it, Dusty would give her a bonus.
Just then, a four-legged animal of some kind padded onto the footpath a few yards in front of her. The animal stopped and dropped to the ground, blocking her way back to the Beemer.
What now? All her bravado about snipe hunting disappeared.
“Shoo,” she said in a totally wimped-out voice.
The animal didn’t move. Instead it made another almost pitiful sound, a whiny wail that was so lonely it knifed its way into her heart. Was the creature hurt?
She took one step forward before raising her feeble penlight. Through the flashlight’s weak beam, she confirmed that the animal wasn’t a bear or a raccoon. It had dirty gray fur, and it appeared to be shivering. Was it cold? Or frightened? She found it affirming to think that the creature might be scared of her.
She took a few more steps forward until her flashlight fully revealed the animal, and as she approached, it raised its head and stared back at her out of a pair of dark eyes that spoke of abandonment and hopelessness.
This wasn’t a wild animal intent on eating Amy alive. Her scary snipe killer turned out to be a dog. And a small one at that.
* * *
“Sally Hawkes made me sound like a douche bag in that article,” Dusty railed as he paced the length of David Lyndon’s tiny eat-in kitchen, located in the caretaker’s cottage behind Eagle Hill Manor. Dusty paced across the room in two strides, then turned around for a return trip. Sven the labradoodle watched him like a spectator at a Ping-Pong match, while David tucked into his breakfast of French toast and bacon, sent from the inn’s kitchen a short walk away.
“What the hell am I going to do?” Dusty asked on his next circuit of the room. “I’ve been working all my life to get the folks in Jefferson County to realize I’m not my father’s son.” His voice wavered with more emotion than he wanted.
David said nothing.
No surprise there. David never talked too much, but he listened about as well as anyone on the planet. A surprising trait in someone from the Lyndon family.
“I get that the Winchester Daily has to write about the park proposal,” Dusty continued. “But that article wasn’t fair or objective. The whole bit where she talked about my family, that was low.” He turned and paced the length of the room again, feeling like an angry caged tiger.
Sven got bored of watching and moved to sit down by David with a please-feed-me-a-piece-of-your-bacon look, which immediately scored him a piece. David, Willow, and Natalie were too easy on that dog.
“You want some bacon too?” David asked.
Dusty shook his head. “No. I’m fine. I’m not hungry. I’m mad is all.”
“Okay, but we knew going into this fight more than a year ago that everyone was going to be against you for holding out on this park plan,” David said.
Dusty stopped his pacing long enough to glare at his friend and attorney. “It’s my land and I have plans for it. Besides, my ancestors built that forge.”
“I know. But the county has competing plans and a lot more power.”
“We need to meet with the reporter and—”
“No. That would be a mistake. Sit down, Dusty.” David gestured toward a second stool at the breakfast bar. “I’ve got more bacon here than I can eat.”
Dusty slumped into the chair and snagged a piece. Sven immediately moved toward his side and tried the poor-starving-dog routine again, but Dusty knew all of Sven’s tricks.
“Listen to me,” David said, pointing his bacon slice at Dusty. “Right now the county doesn’t have the money for this park. They’ve held three public hearings, but they haven’t approved anything. That being the case, your best defense is a good offense. You need to come up with a competing plan for that land that will add something to the tax base. You do that and you’ll start peeling off votes.”
Dusty took a bite of his bacon, the salty maple flavor bursting on his tongue. He crunched the meat for a long moment before he let out a deep, frustrated sigh. “I could come up with plans out the wazoo, but I can’t get financing for anything with this thing hanging over me.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Jeff is investing in all sorts of projects,” David said mildly, and then took a long sip of coffee. Jeff Talbert was David’s cousin—the only other person in the Lyndon family who had crossed Pam and lived to tell the tale. Jeff was also the sole heir to the Talbert billions.
“You think Jeff would invest in a fishing camp for high-end anglers?”
David planted his elbows on the counter and leaned toward Dusty. “He might. But here’s the thing: In order to peel away votes from the park proposal, you’ll have to brand your plans accordingly. You’ll have to convince the county that your development will create more jobs and more tax revenue. So instead of calling it a camp, maybe you should use the word ‘resort.’ I’m just saying that if your plan is to put up a cabin and invite a few well-heeled fishermen in for private fishing, that’s not enough. But if you want to build a resort, that’s different.”
“And if I built a resort on Liberty Run, I’ll have a bunch of environmentalists and angler associations all over my ass. That’s not what I have in mind. I want a guide service and a first-class lodge for people to stay when they come out here to fish on the Potomac watershed.”
“Okay, but where’s your plan? The one written down on paper. The one you need if you’re going to try to get financing instead of assuming that you won’t get it.”
Dusty scrubbed his face. “I don’t know squat about business plans.”
“But I happen to be married to someone with an MBA from Wharton. Willow is happy to help.”
Dusty hated the idea of Willow helping him. He also hated the idea that his two best friends talked about him when he wasn’t around. “This whole business plan idea was hers, wasn’t it?” he asked.
David nodded.
“So I guess that means I’m now the subject of pillow talk, huh?”
“When we have time to talk,” David said with a straight face.
Dusty refrained from rolling his eyes. David and Willow had known each other for years before they finally tied the knot last Christmas. Both of them were brilliant, well-educated professionals. But when they were together, sometimes they acted like a couple of goofy teenagers.
“The fact is we can’t beat something with nothing,” David said in a more serious tone. “If the county was offered a choice between projects, you’d have a better chance of success or even compromise. But if you ask people to give up something they—”
“David, are you in there with Dusty McNeil?” The perpetually unlocked kitchen door banged open, and Pam Lyndon came through it dressed in blue and battle-ready.
David hopped up from his stool and intercepted his mother at the same time Sven approached seeking attention. Sven tried to jump up on her, but David edged the dog aside and bestowed the deferential kiss Pam expected. He also said, “Good morning, Mother. What a surprise.”
She batted her son away with almost the same motion that David had used on the dog. “I’m not here in the capacity of your mother. I’m here because I’m furious.”
Seemed like the same thing to Dusty, but he refrained from saying t
hat out loud.
David, ever the diplomat, gave his mother an amiable smile and said, “I have an antidote for anger right here.” He pivoted and picked up the plate of bacon and shoved it in his mother’s face. “Bet you can’t eat a slice and stay furious.”
Sven watched the bacon plate with longing in his dark puppy eyes.
Meanwhile, Pam glared at her son and pushed the plate away. “If Willow was any kind of wife, she wouldn’t let you eat that stuff.”
David picked up another slice and made a great show of savoring it while the old biddy got red in the face. When he’d finished the bacon he said, “Mother, if you don’t want to have breakfast, I’ll have to ask you to leave because I’m having a conversation with my client and—”
“Did you know Willow hired Amy to work for that man?” She pointed at Dusty as if he were something a flea-ridden cat had just dragged in from the wild.
“Uh…” David stuttered.
“He took advantage of Amy.”
David frowned and turned toward Dusty. “Did you take advantage of my cousin?”
Uh-oh, Gracie Teague or one of her Sunday customers must have run their mouths. This could be bad. “I did not. Although I confess that I sent her out snipe hunting on Saturday. And she—”
“You sent her snipe hunting?” David’s voice rose along with his eyebrows.
“Oh my God, what does that mean?” Pam asked in a frantic voice, as if snipe hunting were code for something straight out of a porn movie.
David’s eye roll conveyed his incredulity. “It’s a prank, Mother. You send someone out into the woods to catch a snipe, and they end up waiting all night for something that doesn’t exist.”
Pam frowned. “Why would Amy go hunting? In the dark? For anything? She’s afraid of the woods, and most animals I can think of.”
“That’s kind of the point, Mother,” David explained, then turned toward Dusty. “Does Willow know you sent Amy snipe hunting?”
“Well, I—”
The sound of a dog barking out on the west lawn saved Dusty from having to make a full confession. Sven snapped to attention and started his own chorus of woofs. And trilling above the canine serenade came a human voice screaming, “Wait, come back. I haven’t dried you yet.”
In the next instant, a tiny, wet, painfully thin dog appeared in the open kitchen door. Unlike Sven, this mutt had not perfected her food-begging skills. In short, she took matters into her own paws and made a beeline for the plate of bacon in David’s hand at the same moment that Sven made a beeline for her. In the process, Sven knocked over Pam and the new dog tripped up David.
Pam careened in Dusty’s direction, and even though he disliked the woman, he caught her mid-sprawl, just as the plate of bacon shattered on the kitchen floor with a crash. David managed to catch himself but not before the two dogs pounced on the breakfast food like they hadn’t been fed in days.
“Unhand me, you …” Pam said, scrambling out of Dusty’s grasp.
Just then, Amy appeared at the kitchen door, wearing her oversized golf shirt and baggy pants and carrying a filthy pool-house beach towel. “Muffin,” she said, stamping her clunky hiking boot, “stop that right now. You need to come back and let me dry your hair and make you beautiful before you eat breakfast.”
Chapter Seven
Muffin trembled when Amy wrapped her in the towel and took her outside. Despite the morning shower, the dog’s fur still hung in dirty, tangled dreadlocks and would have to be cut off as soon as Amy could scrounge up the money for a groomer.
But the dog’s unsavory looks and behavior didn’t matter at all. She rested her head on Amy’s shoulder and gave her a bunch of sloppy kisses. Was it possible to go from hating and fearing dogs to loving them in a few hours? It had taken a lot of courage for Amy to approach the dog last night in the dark—courage that had already been rewarded. She squeezed the dog a little closer to her chest. No doubt about it, Muffin was the best thing that had happened to her in a long, long time.
“Amy Jessica Lyndon, you’re a mess. Put that filthy animal down before it gives you fleas.”
Leave it to Aunt Pam to destroy the moment. Amy kept her back to her aunt and whispered soothing words to the dog, who continued to tremble in her arms. She wrapped the towel even tighter around Muffin, and that seemed to help a little.
“Did you hear me, Amy?” Pam bellowed from behind, setting off a new wave of Muffin shivers.
“I heard you,” Amy said, turning around and meeting her aunt’s furious stare. Pam may not have been born a Lyndon, but she had appointed herself the matriarch of the Lyndon family when Grandmother died fifteen years ago. She now saw her job as ensuring that the younger Lyndon generation took their rightful places in politics, business, and society. Aunt Pam expected every Lyndon woman to stand tall, walk with grace, dress like a fashion plate, speak like a well-bred lady, and marry someone important, powerful, and rich.
Amy had failed on every front even though she’d spent a lifetime trying to please the woman. So why try anymore? For Muffin’s sake, Amy needed to stand her ground and not simply give in because Pam insisted upon it. “I am not putting Muffin down. She’s scared. And hungry. She’s been living all by herself out in the woods.” Amy turned toward Dusty, who, like David, had followed Pam out onto the cottage’s tiny patio. “Mr. McNeil, I don’t think it was a snipe digging those holes near the chapel. I’m pretty sure it was Muffin. She’s very sorry about that.”
Cousin David met this speech with laughter. So typical. All her cousins, with the possible exception of Daniel, thought she was a joke.
“What?” she asked him, her tone defiant. Judging by the smirk on his face, he still didn’t take her seriously. “Fine, laugh at me,” she said. “But I’m serious.” Amy’s voice cracked, and her throat cramped up. She hugged Muffin even tighter as she stomped away in the direction of the barn. Thank God neither David nor Pam followed her.
But Dusty McNeil did. “Wait,” he shouted at her back. She stopped because Mr. McNeil hadn’t laughed at her, which struck her as a minor victory given how he’d judged her the last two days.
“What are you going to do about the dog?” he asked as he caught up to her.
Amy raised her chin. “No one thinks I can do anything. But I’m going to keep this dog.”
She expected him to argue, but instead he gave the dog a good scratch under her chin with his broad, work-roughened hands. Her mind flashed on the elegance and skill she’d seen in those hands yesterday when he’d been tying flies. His hands were strong with close-trimmed nails. Calloused, but gentle. Muffin’s shivers stilled the moment he touched her.
“What kind of dog do you reckon this is?” he asked.
Amy shook her head. “I don’t know. To be honest, I know nothing about dogs. But I’m going to learn. I’m going to let her sleep in the car for a little while and then—”
“You can’t keep a dog in the car. It’s not fair to the dog.”
She closed her eyes, and a tear leaked out. Would she have to choose between her job and the dog?
“I’ve got an idea,” Dusty said, pulling her from the angst that threatened to overwhelm her.
She opened her eyes. “I’m listening.”
Dusty glanced at the guest house, checking to make sure neither David nor Aunt Pam were listening before he spoke again. “Let me tell Willow that you’ve been sleeping in your car. I’m sure she’d be willing to—”
“No. I don’t want her to know. She’ll tell David. And he’ll tell everyone. I need to teach Daddy a lesson.”
Dusty’s face grew solemn. “Amy, I understand why you feel that way. I even admire you for wanting to make a stand. But I don’t like the idea of you sleeping in your car. I was worried about you last night. I even drove by the chapel a couple of times to check on you.”
“You did?” A warm flutter trembled in her chest like butterfly kisses. Never in a million years would she have expected a man like Dusty McNeil to care.
&
nbsp; “Let me see if I can find you and Muffin a place to live, okay?” he said.
“What, like a flophouse for the homeless? They won’t let me keep Muffin.”
He shook his head. “No. I think I can do better than a homeless shelter for you or a dog shelter for Muffin. In the meantime, I have a flat of pansies down by the pool house flower bed. Come on, I’ll introduce you to pansies and show you how they should be planted. And Muffin can stay in the kennel with Sven while you work. We’ll give her a big bowl of Sven’s kibble.”
They started toward the kennel, but Aunt Pam intercepted them. “Amy, I’m not happy with you right now. I can’t believe you took a job working as a gardener. But more important, I cannot condone the fact that you made the entire family the subject of unsavory gossip yesterday morning at Gracie’s Diner.” Pam finished her little tirade and gave Dusty the Laser Look of Lyndon Disapproval.
To Amy’s joy and amusement, the look bounced off Dusty as if he were the proverbial Man of Steel. Made bold by that fact, Amy squared her shoulders and addressed Pam as an equal. “I didn’t subject the family to gossip yesterday. I had breakfast at Gracie’s with my boss, Mr. McNeil. If people want to make something nasty out of that, then that’s their problem. But in my opinion, the people in this town have dirty minds.”
“Amy,” Pam said on a long-suffering sigh, “I need you to stop with this behavior. We have a family crisis on our hands. And I need your help.”
Aunt Pam needed her help? That was a new one. “For what?”
“Danny’s come home with the entire cast and crew of Vegas Girls in tow. The show wanted us to host the wedding at Charlotte’s Grove. I said absolutely not. Which is why I’m here. I hate to say it, but if there has to be a big wedding, we’ll have to have it here.”
“Danny’s marrying Mia? For real? That’s good, isn’t it?”
Pam glanced heavenward as if to say that Amy was too dense to understand the problem. “Do you want to be put on national television as part of a reality TV show?” Pam asked.
