Shelter

by Rhyll Biest

  Chapter 23

  Not a cloud in the sky, as if Walgarra were so super happy Kat was leaving that the town was holding a sunshine party.

  The bitch.

  She smiled as she locked her front door and walked to her car, but the joke failed to ease the tightness in her chest at the thought of leaving Walgarra. At least she’d done her best. Had dropped the girls off with their aunt, had dutifully provided a heavily airbrushed witness statement to the police when Grinder’s body was discovered at the tattoo parlour. David Beaumont had also shot himself, so there was no one around to contradict her version of events but for the two little girls who had nothing to say to anyone but their aunt.

  She got in the car and pulled her seatbelt on. Her best had turned out to be pretty good, except for her thing with Luka. Love—that hungry, three-headed dog—had bitten gaping chunks from her heart and spat them out at her feet.

  Not that she was bitter about it—oh, no, not at all—it was just that she’d given up a lot of sleep trying to make sense of what had happened. And what to do about it.

  A part of her wanted to make things right with Luka, but the other part baulked. His talk about wanting her to change how she approached conflict was an attempt to control her, and she would not be controlled.

  She was free.

  Galenka nodded.

  Free and alone again.

  For a while, she’d thought she could change, but she couldn’t, and she was hardly the first person in the world to fail at that.

  She backed out the driveway. The knowledge that leaving Walgarra was the right thing to do to protect both her and Luka was bitter, a boulder-sized pill on her tongue, but she had to swallow it. She would find another job in another town.

  Look for silver lining, bitch, Galenka muttered.

  You’re all sympathy, cow.

  If there was any silver lining, it was that Walgarra had weaned her off her more theoretical fears. It was tough to worry about nuclear war, comets and alien invasions when so many lives were at stake, her own included. If Stacey failed to save someone’s dog, she could pay for it with a bullet. Step into the wrong home, drive onto the wrong farmer’s property, and it could be the last thing Nick ever did. Cross the wrong biker and Luka could get gut-shot.

  She paused at an intersection.

  Luka. Desire remained an infection she couldn’t shake, and there was no analgesic for it.

  When she’d left Sydney, there hadn’t been anyone important she’d said goodbye to. She’d given notice, visited Bill the beagle—who’d barely looked up from scoffing food fallen from his new owner’s kitchen table—and that had been that.

  Whereas now, leaving Walgarra, the welfare of several creatures plagued her. The meth-exposed cockatoo. He was probably fine, tucked into bed with a spliff and a bottle of vodka, but what if Ruth ran out of vitamins? And how was Ruth coping with her kitten? It was probably showing some signs of disturbed behaviour after being kidnapped by bikers to be used as live bait. And time was running out for Mad Max to find a new home. Then there was the abandoned Maltese terrier, still plagued by a nasty staph infection.

  For the first time in her life, caring tethered her. It was a gentle sort of tether, no choke chain and lots of slack, the rope made from questions about the shelter’s assorted residents, about whether Stacey and Nick would ever hook up, about whether Sharon would get a clue how stupid her beehive looked and how annoying her knitting crusade was.

  And with Kat gone, who would Luka move on with?

  Her hands tightened around the steering wheel. Not Sharon, let it be anyone but Sharon.

  A squeal of car tyres from ahead provided warning just before the car in front of her lurched to a halt. She stomped on her brakes, her body stiffening as she braced to be rear-ended.

  Shit!

  As the seconds passed and nothing happened, she craned her neck out the window to get a better view. ‘What’s going on?’ She frowned at the road ahead. Traffic was banked up to the bridge that spanned Walgarra River.

  An accident? Since she was trained in first aid it would be wrong not to stop and offer help. She flipped a U-turn, no easy feat with the oncoming traffic, and parked on the nearest footpath.

  Her loaded first aid kit nearly dragged her arm out of its socket, and she was out of breath by the time she reached the bottom of the embankment.

  A sluggish river ran right through the heart of Walgarra, its banks the favoured dumping ground for shopping trolleys, tyres and unwanted things. Usually only children or die-hard fishermen bothered with the river but now a sizeable crowd gathered around it. Past the crowd, a police wagon and ambulance stood waiting.

  That was never a good sign.

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me.’ Kat smiled nicely as she elbowed people out of the way and used a booty bump where necessary.

  Once she broke through the human corral she stared. A pink hatchback had ploughed through the guard rail to land in the river. It sank fast, nose first, into the brackish water. Inside the car, a middle-aged woman’s face was pressed against the interior glass of the hatchback’s rear window, her eyes wide with fear.

  Standing chest-high in the water trying to keep the car from submerging was Luka. He stood at the front end of the car, arms wrapped around the front door pillar, biceps straining as he fought the water trying to pull the car deeper.

  That’s insane. He might just be the strongest man she knew, but he couldn’t keep a car from sinking.

  But it was just like him to try.

  Her heart swelled to batter at the bars of its prison, desperate to escape.

  As she watched, another officer, not one she recognised, raised a broken brick to smash in the rear windshield glass. The trapped woman lifted a hand to protect her face, retreating as far away from the windshield as she could without submerging her head.

  It took three good bashes before the glass shattered and by then the water had risen to devour Luka’s neck.

  The woman scrambled through the shattered glass, her birthing assisted by the officer, and tumbled into the baptising river.

  She resurfaced, her grey hair plastered to her pale, bleeding face and Kat expected her to wade to shore with the officer keeping a grip on her arm. Instead the woman resisted being helped from the river. She reached a hand towards her car. ‘Boo, my dog. He’s in there.’

  Kat’s stomach sank faster than the hatchback. If Boo was alive, why hadn’t he followed his owner out of the car?

  ‘Sorry.’ The officer shook his head and dragged the protesting woman towards the river bank and a waiting ambulance.

  Luka lingered.

  Fear and hope swirled in Kat’s body, thick and muddy as the water sucking the car down.

  What was he going to do?

  He didn’t have a hope of finding that dog.

  Luka bent over the shattered rear windshield and reached one of his albatross wings inside. His uniform, plastered to his body, rippled as he groped inside the hatchback, intense concentration on his face.

  For several long skips of Kat’s heart his head disappeared beneath the water. Kat’s fingernails buried themselves in her palms.

  When he burst out of the water, sucking in a deep breath, it was with something small, sodden, grey and bedraggled in his hand. Kat squealed and almost jumped into the river alongside him in her impatience to check the dog’s condition.

  ‘Bring him over here,’ she called out.

  Luka’s dark head turned her way before he waded towards her, the unconscious Boo in his arms. The dog was a terrier of some kind, perhaps a Yorkshire. Possibly he’d been kicked or hit in the owner’s panic to escape and knocked unconscious, and his lungs filled with water.

  ‘Take my hand.’ She stretched out an arm, digging her heels deep into the clay to brace herself against his weight as he climbed the muddy bank with the dog tucked under one arm. Though he took her hand more for balance than purchase her recently injured shoulder twinged ominously.

  Luka fought th
e sucking mud to reach the grass, his uniform smeared with grey silt and clay. The stench of mud and decay rose from him.

  A worried frown knotted Luka’s brows as he set the dog down on the grass and looked down at it. ‘He’s not breathing, what do I do?’

  She rested a hand on the dog’s tiny ribs, felt for movement, but there was none in the small, bedraggled body. Gently she opened the terrier’s mouth, pulled the soft, warm tongue out of the way, and tried to determine if Boo was breathing.

  Nope.

  If only one of the vets were around. She whipped her phone from her pocket and scrolled through her bookmarks to find the web page. ‘I haven’t done this before but I’ve heard about it. Might as well give it a go.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Water dripped from Luka’s hair as he stared down at the limp dog in his arms.

  ‘Mouth-to-snout resuscitation.’

  ‘That’s a thing?’

  She nodded. ‘That’s a thing.’

  He stroked the unconscious dog’s face before looking up. ‘Okay, tell me what to do.’

  Her eyes met his. This was a man willing to try anything, to do anything, to help both people and animals.

  Just looking at him was like being stabbed through the feels with a bayonet.

  The future Mr Daily.

  Shut up, ovaries.

  ‘Right. Hold the dog’s mouth closed, cup your hand around its nose, and try breathing two short breaths directly into the dog’s snout.’

  He followed her directions, big fingers gentle around the terrier’s snout.

  No response from the terrier. She frowned. ‘I didn’t see any obstruction but there could be one. Did the breaths go in?’

  ‘I think so, I felt the lungs move.’

  Boo remained limp and lifeless. Like her relationship with Luka, he was dead. But she wasn’t ready to give up just yet. ‘Okay, the ideal number of breaths is one breath for every three seconds, I’ll help you by counting off. Remember to keep your hand snug around the muzzle and try to blow the air directly into the dog’s nose.’

  He nodded, a rivulet of water streaking across one lean cheek. The smell of mud rose off him.

  ‘One, one thousand, two, two thousand, three, three thousand, breathe.’

  His cheeks rounded as he gently blew into the terrier’s nose. The dog’s rib cage expanded.

  ‘One, one thousand, two, two thousand, three, three thousand, breathe.’

  It was probably a lost cause, but then, she was the queen of lost causes.

  She saw a leg twitch. ‘Stop!’

  Luka pulled his face back as the terrier squirmed, its movements sluggish and confused.

  Alive.

  She laughed with delight when Boo opened his eyes to stare directly into Luka’s.

  ‘Oh, my god, I don’t fucking believe it.’ She stamped her feet to check she wasn’t dreaming.

  ‘Me either,’ Luka muttered. He stared at the dog bemused.

  The man shouldn’t have looked handsome, not with his hair plastered flat against his skull, droplets of water running down his face and his shirt sucking his skin, but Kat had never seen a man as handsome. He was her handsome giant, one willing to resuscitate a limp ball of dog small enough to fit in his hand.

  Luka gently rubbed the dog’s ears. ‘Bad day, mate?’

  Boo, still woozy, licked his arm and gazed at Luka with the same adoring expression Sharon did. With his wet fur pointing in every direction, Boo also looked a little crazed—again, just like Sharon.

  A droplet of water fell from one of Luka’s dark brows to land on one raw cheekbone, another slid down his philtrum, that lovely, mysterious curved hollow just above the bow of the lips, so vulnerable on an otherwise severe masculine face that it would be a tragedy to cloak it with a beard.

  Luka looked up from the dog in his arms and smiled at her. Smiled at her like they’d shared something.

  The smile hit her like a club. What was she throwing away for her precious freedom and so-called safety?

  Luka’s smile faltered. His expression flattened out, and by the time he lowered his head to resume patting the terrier she’d almost convinced herself that she imagined the moment. She’d caught another glance of the man behind the stern façade. Just like that moment before their first kiss, and during the precious seconds that lasted forever as her lips had hovered inches from his.

  In the distance, a flash of spiked blue weaving through the crowd caught her eye. Ruth’s blue mohawk cutting a path through the spectators.

  What did Ruth think when she watched happy-clappy Hollywood movies where everything turned out happy in the end? She probably thought just what Kat did: bullshit. Because it was easier to be cynical, to give up hope, than be constantly disappointed.

  One could only tolerate so much disappointment.

  ***

  Water dripped from his brows and Luka wiped it away with a brusque gesture. He hadn’t seen Kat for several days since ‘the incident’, had only heard from her when she’d called to tell him what David Beaumont had told her.

  She’d then dodged his return calls.

  Boo shivered in his arms, drawing Luka’s attention to the breeze that had sprung up to generate a wind chill factor. Though that chill would be nothing in comparison to what he’d feel if he let Kat slip away. He locked eyes with her. ‘Help me bring this one to the shelter?’

  Hesitation clouded her beautiful eyes as she met his eyes. ‘Why do you need me to come with you?’

  ‘What if Boo goes into convulsions while I’m driving and I can’t take my hands off the wheel to help him?’

  A low blow mentioning convulsions with his own seizure fresh in her memory. But hadn’t she been the one to tell him to never hold back? ‘I think his owner would be pretty upset to find out that we revived him but then he died on the way to the shelter.’

  Her face fell.

  Yeah, now he was playing real dirty, but there wasn’t much he wouldn’t stoop to in order to keep her from leaving his side.

  She sighed. ‘Fine.’ She packed up her first aid kit.

  Luka smiled. She was coming with them. He glanced at the terrier in his arms, marvelled at the length of Boo’s eyelashes. They really were long. And thick and luxuriant. Like Kat’s.

  Boo licked his hand with a warm, wet swipe of his tongue.

  After he and Kat dropped the dog off, he would have to restrain himself from dragging the inspector back to his place like some law enforcement caveman. Or he could just roll with that urge.

  ‘I’ll drive.’ She dangled her car keys at him.

  He followed her and as they paused by her car he glanced down at the wet ball of dog in his arms.

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The guys at work are never going to let me hear the last of it once they find out I gave CPR to a mutt.’

  ***

  Bullet-ridden signs flitted by as Kat stared out the window. When she’d arrived she’d thought them sinister. Now they were simply part of the landscape, welcoming her proximity to what she thought of as Walgarra’s heart, the RSPCA shelter.

  On her first day she’d met the best and worst of the townspeople. And since then she’d met a lot more—volunteers at the shelter, people who gave their time to clean up poopy cages, retrain dogs and brush cats just because they cared about animals. Then there were the new owners, people who overlooked younger, cuter puppies and kittens to give an older, less shiny dog or cat another chance at happiness.

  Boo wriggled in Luka’s arms, covering him in yet another ecstatic round of kisses and a bit more mud.

  Luka glanced at Kat. ‘The owner’s gonna be excited when she sees him.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Luka raised an eyebrow. ‘Baba Yaga got your tongue?’

  She should never have told him about Baba Yaga, the grandmother witch in folklore that Russian mothers used to scare their children. ‘I’m thinking of leaving. This place, I mean.’

  He frowned. ‘But I just fo
rced a hatchback off the road and gave CPR to a dog to impress you.’

  An unladylike snort escaped her. If he had, that’d be pretty hard-core. ‘Who says I’m impressed?’

  ‘Oh, I think you were. I also think you’re having second thoughts about leaving and that’s why you’re sitting in this car with me rather than hitting the highway.’

  He’d waited until they were in the car to have this discussion, the cunning rat bastard. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Don’t try to hang noodles over my ears.’

  Using her own language against her. That was low. She glared at him. ‘You do understand that I’m trying to protect you as well as myself, right? That I don’t want to rip your life apart with the kind of shit I have a habit of attracting.’

  ‘Sounds like an excuse to me, I think you’re just afraid of a real relationship.’

  Jerk. ‘You should be afraid of it too, if it’s one with me.’ The moment when Galenka had shown herself to him flashed before her eyes.

  ‘All I’m asking is that you try.’

  She scowled as she pulled into the shelter parking lot. There he went again, telling her what to do.

  ‘And for your information, when it comes to relationships, I’d rather court disaster every day, stare it down and grab it by its hairy balls than have it hide around a corner, waiting to mug me and spill my guts all over whatever bullshit tidy life I’d constructed for myself.’

  Okay, that was a clear jab at her. She tore her seatbelt off. ‘Well you go fucking find someone to do that with, then.’ Anger made her positively bounce out of the car. She stalked, top speed, to the reception door.

  He came after her. ‘I have fucking found someone to do that with—you.’

  His tone rattled her and it really got on her tits that he managed to beat her to the door—it was those freakishly long legs of his—and hold it open for her.

  She stomped inside, nearly barrelled into Stacey in front of a reception room full of pet owners waiting to see a clinician.

  Stacey glanced from Luka to her. ‘Hey, Kat, I thought you—’

  ‘You have a patient, meet Boo. He nearly drowned.’ She took the terrier from Luka and thrust him against Stacey’s chest.