Which wasn’t far from the truth.
It’s not Max. It can’t be Max. Max is dead. Resemblance aside, reaction aside. This cannot be Max. You know that.
“I’m okay,” Kaylea assured both Logan and Janine, who was hovering over her with even more concern in her eyes than Logan had in his. She winced at the tremble in the words and strengthened her voice. “Seriously, I’m fine.” She reached out to ruffle the dog’s fluffy ears. “Where did you say you found him?”
“I didn’t. He found me.” Logan straightened, apparently taking her reassurance at face value. “I’m working the graveyard shift. He was waiting on the porch when I got home this morning. I figured he’d wander back home, so I left him outside when I went to bed, but he was still there when I woke up this afternoon.”
Logan had only been in town for six weeks. Maybe the dog belonged to whoever had lived in that house prior to Logan’s arrival.
“What’s your address?” Kaylea asked.
The golden let loose with a round of tail thumping and several gusty groans as she leaned forward to dig her fingers in behind his ears and massaged the slight hollow beneath the joint. Max had loved having that spot rubbed, too. In fact, he’d always reacted in exactly the same way. With tail thumping and deep, guttural groans.
Her heart jerked.
He couldn’t be Max. Couldn’t be.
She’d watched Max die. She’d buried him. It might have been seventeen years ago, but she remembered it like it had happened mere hours earlier.
“68 Willow Burrow,” Logan said. “The house came with the job.”
The address knocked Kaylea’s breath away and spawned a viper’s nest of memories.
Shrill childish screams echoed in her ears. “Stop it, Daddy. Stop it. Please, please, stop. You’re hurting her.”
“You know the place?” Logan asked, his gaze suddenly sharp and searching. Cop’s eyes.
“I knew someone who lived there.” She forced the admission past the knife in her throat. “But it was a long, long time ago.” Seventeen endless years ago.
Her gaze shifted to the dog. To the big, blocky, golden head identical to Max’s. To chocolate-brown eyes as expressive as Max’s.
Logan said he’d been waiting on the porch. On the porch at 68 Willow Burrow. Exactly where Max had waited for the school bus, all those years ago.
Was it possible? But how?
Something niggled at her, but she was too frazzled to hunt the memory down.
Instead, she pushed the dog aside and braced her palms against the floor, trying to shove herself up. Logan caught her arm and pulled, holding onto her until she regained her balance before letting go, all without releasing his grip on the dog.
“You should see the doc; you’re still pretty white,” he said quietly, that earlier distance creeping in to cloak his eyes and voice again.
“I’m fine,” Kaylea said, brushing her shirt and slacks with hands that were shakier than she’d like. “You can let him go now.”
Instead of releasing the dog, Logan glanced at Janine. “Do you have a leash?”
The question shook the last of the haze from Kaylea’s mind. “I’m perfectly capable of controlling an unruly dog.”
Or an excited one. She glanced at the golden sitting in front of her. The liquid brown gaze was watching her with joyful adoration—focused completely and utterly on her, as though she was the only thing of importance in the world.
Exactly the way Max had always watched her.
And for the first time, she realized that the dog’s eyes, eyes identical to Max’s, were the exact same shade of brown as the eyes of the man holding him.
Was that why she’d had such an instant, blinding sense of trust in Logan back then? Had his eyes subconsciously reminded her of Max?
Yeah, it made sense. There hadn’t been a trusting bone in her body by then, yet somehow she’d fallen into Logan’s snare with nary a whisper of warning.
Janine handed Logan a kennel lead, and he slipped the noose over the dog’s head. As he straightened, the golden bounced up, his gaze still focused on Kaylea’s face, his whole body vibrating.
His eyebrows snapping together, Logan tightened the lead.
“Max,” Kaylea said, testing the name to see the dog’s reaction. The feathery golden tail wagged wildly.
“Sit,” she said.
The fluffy hindquarters instantly plopped down.
“So you know who he belongs to?” Logan asked, glancing between her and Janine with a slight frown.
“I think so,” Kaylea managed. He belongs to me. He’s my Max Midnight.
She ignored the surprised look Janine sent her and stared at Logan, willing him to leave.
He must have picked up on her assistant’s confusion, or maybe the strangeness of her reaction, because he hesitated again, his frown deepening.
“Just leave him with me. I’ll contact his owners.”
Please don’t ask who his owners are.
He glanced between her and Janine again, and Kaylea held her breath, just waiting for her assistant to voice her confusion and blow everything. Janine knew their clients’ pets as well as Kaylea, so she knew there wasn’t a golden retriever who looked like this or went by the name of Max in their database.
After another slow glance between the three of them—the dog, Janine, and Kaylea—he finally nodded and turned, heading for the front entrance. Silence dominated until the bells chimed, signaling the door closing behind his broad back.
“I’ve never known you to lie, Kaylea Armund,” Janine said, planting her palms on her generous hips. “So I’m sure there’s a good reason for that clunker of one you just told.”
“It wasn’t a lie,” Kaylea protested. At least not a complete lie. “I do think I know who he belongs to.”
Janine released a soft huff of doubt and confusion. “And this person isn’t on our lists? Because I’ve never seen this dog in my life.”
No, she wouldn’t have. Max had died long before Janine had come to town. It can’t be Max. It can’t be. Yet every instinct Kaylea possessed screamed that it was.
“So his name’s Max?” Janine asked.
“Yeah. Max Midnight.”
The dog raised his paw to shake hands as Kaylea said his full name, exactly as she’d taught Max to do all those years ago. Her heart stuttered and thrashed, trying to break free from the shackles she’d chained it in. Break free and trust in this miracle.
“Midnight? That’s an odd name for a golden retriever.”
That’s what her father had said, just before he’d hit her.
“He was named for a comic book hero.” Kaylea pushed the explanation past her tight, aching throat. “Max Midnight, Avenger of Injustice.” And abusive, murdering fathers.
Janine still didn’t look like she believed Kaylea, but it was closing time, and she’d said she had big plans for the weekend involving the casino in the next county. She shrugged and went to collect her purse and sweater. “Never heard of it.”
No, you wouldn’t have. I burned all the copies I created after he died.
She busied herself pretending to straighten the office until Janine’s car pulled out of the parking lot. Then she locked the front door and pulled the window blinds.
Once she was alone in the clinic, with no witnesses, she studied the dog intently, inspecting him from nose to tail. He really was the spitting image of Max—from the pink scar on the bridge of his black nose to the slight kink in his tail. Absolutely identical to her childhood companion, to the best friend she’d ever had.
Slowly, she knelt in front of him. His deep brown eyes watched her with adoration and joyfulness. The expression was so familiar, so much like Max’s.
Her hands were shaking as she ran her fingers through the fur along his neck and then down through his chest, searching for scars—for the evidence of the bullets that had plowed into him and taken him from her.
Bullets that had been meant for her.
“Max?”
/>
His tail thumped hard against the floor.
How was this possible? Seventeen years separated them. Even if he was Max, he’d be nineteen years old now, an old man in dog years. Plus, wouldn’t he remember a child? A twelve-year-old girl? How would he even recognize the woman she’d become?
And then he leaned over and sniffed her arm, his nostrils flexing, and she knew. He’d recognized her by scent. Physically she might have changed in the intervening years, but her scent must have remained the same.
If this was Max.
Because Janine was right. She tried not to lie. Not even to herself.
And everything aside, this couldn’t be Max. It couldn’t be. Max was dead. He’d died and taken her heart with him.
For a while it had looked like Logan might be able to revive it, except she’d eventually discovered that her heart was best buried where she’d left it—with Max Midnight, the superhero who’d offered his life so that she might live.
Spirit Woods is available now on Amazon.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Dear Reader
About the Author
Excerpt from SPIRIT WOODS
Bound By Seduction (A Red-Hot SEALs Novella Book 2) Page 12
