by Ash Harlow
He reached across with the back of his knuckles and brushed them away. “Don’t cry alone, Marlo. Please, don’t ever do that.”
She lowered her head. “I have no choice.”
He sighed and rubbed a weary hand across his mouth. “You do, but you push away the people who want to help you.”
Nailed it. Again. She grabbed at his hand, needing the security of its grip for an instant before she released it.
He watched her for another long moment before speaking. “I have news, but I’m uncertain whether you’ll consider it good or bad.”
She looked up. His face was impassive. Back to cop mode. Any concern for her was concealed or, worse, no longer existed, and she was stunned by how much that hurt. How her actions had turned him away, and now she didn’t know how to ask him to come back. “Tell me.” Tell me everything. Tell me your news, and tell me how to get you back.
“The good news is that Justice wasn’t euthanized by Animal Control. He was picked up by CRAR, as originally planned.”
Joy surged through her. Justice was alive. She had to see him. Then the rest of his words sank in. “Wait, CRAR planned to pick him up? Why didn’t I know about this?”
“Because I believed the best way to keep you safe from the dogmen was if you thought Justice was impounded at Animal Control. If you knew CRAR had him, you’d be demanding him back.”
Every part of her wanted to shout at him. She balled her fists and dug her nails into her palms. Oh, Christ, here we go again. Always trying to keep her safe but unwilling to consult with her. Did he think she was incapable of making good decisions? She swallowed hard. “Go on.”
“The CRAR driver has gone rogue. He hasn’t been heard from since he picked up Justice. The transport van was found in a parking lot in Placerville, about a hundred miles away. No one has seen the driver or Justice.”
“Oh, hell. So what does this mean, exactly?”
“That’s hard to say, but it’s futile to speculate. Right off, I can think of a number of different scenarios, and they could all be wrong.” He stood, brushed the dirt from his pants. “Although Justice is presumed to be alive but missing, I can’t promise you that’s the case. He could be dead.”
Marlo nodded.
“One more piece of news. Intel tells us the dogmen are aware Justice is no longer at Dog Haven Sanctuary, so you should be safe. I can have some security organized for you if you’re feeling vulnerable.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.” Her standard answer sprang out when she didn’t have the courage to allow herself to be helped. From where she sat, she kept her head bowed, her focus on his feet, wishing now that he would turn and walk away. She knew his sturdy gaze assessed every breath she took. It made her so self-conscious that she breathed shallow and stayed still. Why wouldn’t he leave her? If she didn’t wreck this today, she would tomorrow. Or next week. She didn’t want this. She’d taught herself not to expect anything, any affection from people. The dogs…her dogs were enough.
Without him, she could focus on saving Justice. She should never have allowed her heart to feel the intensity of attraction, the reciprocation of another heart.
She took a moment to compose herself, and when she trusted her eyes to stay dry, she opened them in time to see his toe lift. He swiveled on his heel, and her heart lurched as he turned away. She wanted him to wait. She wasn’t finished, because she had no idea where to begin. “Adam, what now?” The question escaped like a bubble under pressure.
He stopped but didn’t turn. “With Justice?”
She wanted to say not Justice, but what would happen with them. The words wouldn’t form, and her head dropped. “Yes, Justice.”
“We’re working on it. I know it’s futile asking you to trust me, so I won’t do that. Unless any vital information comes through today, I’ll update you again in the morning.”
Marlo lay back on the rock, closed her eyes, and listened as his footsteps receded to silence. Her heart was battering her chest like a flurry of startled prey. Why couldn’t she fight for him if she could fight for the dogs?
A number of times, she had watched her mother fight for a man after she’d driven them out the door with the inconsistencies and lies that were the byproduct of her addiction. Marlo learned to stay quiet in her room, squeezing her eyes shut and covering her ears to block out the chaos as the final act played out in another ruined relationship. Now she realized that in the later years, her mother’s relationships came with a primed detonation button. One bad move, and they went off.
Exactly like Mom, I never learned how to hang on to a relationship.
Adam took no pleasure from the landscape on the way back to the car. Several weeks on, the sun didn’t have the intensity of the last time he’d been out to the lake. Even the scent of sage was difficult to detect. He no longer brimmed with the optimism for his work and the pleasure he got from the anticipation of learning more about Marlo.
He’d allowed himself a brief spark of hope when Marlo had questioned the future before she revealed her concern was for the dog. As admirable as that may be, her life was well out of balance. If only she could recognize that she could do even better work and be so much happier if she let in a few people, allowed them to get a little closer to her. Ironic that she placed such importance on socializing the dogs so they’d be able to live a stable life in the real world when she failed to allow herself that luxury.
Or perhaps she was simply too scared. The dogs couldn’t do it alone. Marlo needed someone to help her.
Not you. Idiot.
From start to near-finish, this episode in the U.S. had been like watching a train wreck. He’d be digging deep to produce a report that would elicit support and funding for a dedicated dog fighting combat unit out of this little mess.
Add to that his foray to try to save Marlo and, what had he achieved? More train wreck casualties. Man, that hurt. When he came out to the lake today, he fully expected to be walking back with Marlo. Instead, all he got was a chance to witness a bit more of her misery.
Nice one, Guildford.
Total knight-in-shining-armor-fail. Again.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I bring comfort,” Sally called from the front door. Sally to the rescue. As usual. That woman should wear a red cross.
Lulah worked on subtleties and would back off when asked, but Sally? She was the rat terrier. If you told her you wanted time alone, she stormed right in and made you hold hands and dance with the big thing you would’ve preferred to leave haunting you from a gloomy corner. No avoiding the scary stuff when Sally marched through your door.
Marlo pushed herself upright on the daybed. She’d been settled back with her laptop, watching some video made by a trainer in Australia who’d been working with a dingo. The unfettered body language and signaling from the semi-wild dog had kept her distracted. She closed her laptop and placed it on the table. “I’m out on the patio.”
Sally appeared in front of her. “Oh, look at you, girlfriend. I’m here just in time. You lose any more weight, and you’ll need stuffing for those push-up bras we bought you.” She started unloading bags onto the table. “Never fear, for I bring pizza with extra olives, fat salty anchovies, some shredded basil to keep it balanced, and mozzarella flowing like a lahar. I have a specific homeopathic remedy that fixes what we like to call, ‘heart stubbornness’ … that’s ‘unable to love’ to the layperson. Here, I also bring cheap red wine.” She turned the bottle and stared at the label. “Sorry, can’t pronounce the name but I think it translates to Generic Red Plonk.” With a flourish she raised a small cooler bag. “One tub of Ben and Jerry’s best for when we get all maudlin and start man-hating. Cherry Garcia—I believe it is your chosen frozen poison.”
She laid it out on the small table, while Marlo put the ice cream in the freezer and grabbed plates and glasses.
“Sally, this is fantastic. You’re a hero.”
With the wine poured, they each took a glass and raised them for
a toast.
“To a quick resolution for tonight’s two problems.” Sally grinned.
Marlo grimaced. “Two problems?”
“Yes, only two.” They touched glasses, tasted the wine, and groaned in unison. “A headache in every glass—perfect,” Sally announced.
Marlo shuddered as she placed her glass back on the table. “Christ, Sally, promise me you didn’t part with money for this.”
“No. It came from an ungrateful client. It probably needs to breathe.”
“Breathe?” She laughed. “It needs resuscitating.”
Sally shoved her nose into the glass, took a deep sniff and grimaced. “You’re right. It’s dead. It’s a shame, but it’s not the end of the world. Now eat, girl. Get some flesh on those bones. Once you’ve had three slices of pizza I’ll let you tell me about Justice. We’ll get him sorted first. Then we’ll sort out Adam.”
Marlo knew that apart from the wine mishap, for Sally, this was shaping up to be a perfect evening.
She managed two slices of pizza and picked at the olives on the topping of the third before pushing her plate away. “I’m done. If I’m going to fit in ice cream, I can’t do any more pizza.”
“Okay, tell me about Justice.”
Marlo filled her in on the details. When she finished she reached for her wine, inhaled the sour fumes and coughed. “Sorry, Sal, I can’t drink any more of that. I’m making tea. Do you want a cup?”
“Tea and sympathy. Bring it on.”
Marlo set the tea tray on the small table then started preparing to pour. She loved the delay her ritual of tea-making gave her, that way it worked like a pause button for life. “Lemon or milk?”
“Adam,” Sally replied.
“Adam?”
“Yes, stop using delaying tactics. You can tell me about Adam while you’re pouring the tea.”
She replaced the teapot and paused. When had she become this open book? Adam seemed to read her mind. Well, he used to. Now Sally was doing it.
Sally reached for her tea and sniffed. “Lemon, nice. How’s Adam?”
“I don’t know.” Marlo shrugged. “He’s gone.”
Sally pitched forward to the edge of her seat. “So, one moment you two are knocking boots like a couple of old lovebirds, and now he’s gone.”
Marlo poked at the slice of lemon in her tea. “Yes, well that sums it up.”
“Why? Why has he gone?”
Fair question. She had teased her lemon slice so much that the pulp was starting to break free of the membrane. “We, ah, we disagreed.” She gave Sally a watered-down smile.
Sally lifted her brows, signaling she was open for more information.
Marlo hauled in some air. What the heck. “Can girls be jerks?”
Sally nodded. “Sure.”
“Well, I’m a jerk. I asked him…told him to go, to leave me alone. I blamed him for everything that had gone wrong with Justice. He was so easy to blame. I wanted him to feel the hurt I was feeling, because I cared about him. How stupid is that?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”
“It looks as though I’m going to spend my life killing relationships. I don’t know how to do them.”
“I bet Adam would love to teach you.”
“He’s going back to New Zealand.”
“Ah, yes, that little issue.”
“You know, the night before I asked him to go, he made love to me, and it was so beautiful. He was so …well, completely better than anything I could have imagined. I woke in the morning and looked over at him. The sun was streaming in the window, across the pillows, right over his head, and honestly, he looked like some sort of god. It left me in awe that someone so amazing had taken such care with me. Then I had this bam moment. I realized how much this was going to cost me, and that previous night I’d made the down payment. My heart was no longer utterly mine, and this little piece of relationship I’d experienced was only temporary.”
“Geez, Marlo, Soap-Opera-Diva much? It doesn’t have to be temporary. It’s not as if he’s going to live on Mars.”
“New Zealand. Might as well be Mars. When I made that phone call to Animal Control, I was already in turmoil so that when I found out about Justice, that made it easy to make Adam go. That decision was intuitive, but the drive was real. The drive came from a desire to protect the rest of my heart. When he goes, he can’t take all of it with him. I had to hold on to some of it for me…and for the dogs.”
“So you’re going to be content cuddling a dog for the rest of your life?”
Marlo winced. “Ouch, that’s a low blow.”
“No, it’s not. That, my friend, is the future you’re setting up for yourself. You need something else in your life beyond the dogs. It’s great, the work you do with them, but they don’t complete you. Let someone else in.”
The dogs were enough. Well, they had been until Adam came along and gave her a peep show into other bits of life. The bits that normal people took for granted. He’d helped her wrench open her boxes-of-bad, and the contents hadn’t scared him off.
That had surprised her. In fact, that had blown her mind.
Nine years of being too afraid, too ashamed to let someone else look at that shit. Nine years of second-guessing what effect it would have if she shared it with someone she cared about so that she never actually allowed herself to care about anyone. And boy, she’d second-guessed that one completely wrong, because the only effect it had on Adam was that it made him want to protect her.
Yet each time he tried to lay his coat over a puddle for her, she kicked it aside and got her shoes soaked through instead.
Now the puddle was a bottomless lake, and she didn’t know how to swim.
Adam did.
Calling Cherry Garcia to the table, now, please.
Butch dived into the bottom drawer of his desk to bring out his hidden stash of chocolate cookies. “Sit down and make your miserable life happy, Kiwi.”
Margaret had just left the office after delivering them coffee with customary contempt. Adam raised the mug to his lips and flinched as he tried to take a sip, swearing as he replaced the mug on the desk. “You’ve got to start being nice to that woman, Butch, because the coffee gets more lethal with every making. That,” he pointed to the mug, “is thermonuclear.”
“I was nice to her once and she left me, said it creeped her out. Anyway, drink up. It’ll warm your cold little heart.”
“Gee, thanks. That’s done me no end of good.”
“We have progress, young man.” Butch pushed a photo across the desk. “Meet the rogue CRAR driver, Simon Weller.”
Adam picked up the photo. The image was poor-quality, from a security camera, but he had little doubt in his mind. “Ah, I believe I’ve met Mr. Weller, except on that day he was Jarrod Carter, intern at Dog Haven Sanctuary.”
“Or as his mom knows him, Michael Forge, Private Investigator. He’s a man of many names, but only the one shitty personality and even less talent.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Right now, he’s at his home recuperating from dog bites. It would appear Justice is one pooch you don’t want to screw with. He has a penchant for taking out the bad guys.”
The glorious rush of a problem solved streaked through Adam. “And Justice?”
Butch shook his head. “Still missing.”
Well, almost solved.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The shrill ring of the phone at 7:05 a.m. gave Marlo just the fright she didn’t need. She let out a low curse as she knocked her coffee mug from the kitchen bench to the floor, because there was that weird thing about the flying ability of spilled liquid and the places it managed to reach. And, of course, now, a broken mug. Fala had come in to investigate and walked through the entire mess, while the phone was still calling for her attention.
She picked up the handset as she turned to the dog. “Fala, out of there! You’ll cut your feet.” She put the phone to her ear, surprising herself with a har
sh greeting while gently nudging the old dog from the kitchen.
“Is everything okay, Marlo?”
The clock stopped. She watched five rivulets of coffee race each other down the front of a cream-colored cupboard door.
Adam.
The sound of his voice sparked her heart into independent action. She stalled while trying to get it back under control because, holy hell, heart, that weird prickling in her veins was calling out for calm. Not one streak of coffee completed a full descent to the floor, so they hung down the cupboard front like stained stalagmites.
Adam.
“Are you still there?”
“Adam, hi, I’m there. I mean, here.” Her voice had become all breathy, as if she’d been stopped partway up a hill climb to take the call.
“You’re there. Good. And you’re…okay?”
“Sure. The phone surprised me, and I broke a mug.”
He laughed. Damn, why did she tell him that?
“So do you have any mugs left or do you need to find a Walmart?”
Marlo grinned. “Are you suggesting I have a habit of breaking dishes?”
“I presumed that came from the Greek in you.”
Silence. She wondered if, like her, he was thinking of the other broken mug, and if all his thoughts were tumbling in on him the way they were for her. Was he thinking about how they’d changed and how rapidly their relationship had inflated, then burst…and how he’d always managed to tease her about that mug?
Almost as quickly, she wondered if there existed such a thing as a puncture repair kit for a relationship. And, if there was, could she buy one, please, and maybe a spare? Because she had lots of sharp edges for relationships to get snagged on.
“Do you need a minute to clean up?”
“No, I’m good.” Heart slowly coming back into sync. She was good.
“I’ve got some news about Justice. There’s been a sighting of him about twenty miles this side of Placerville. If you can get time away today, I thought maybe we could take a drive up there and have a look around. We can do some ground-searching for him.”
