Carolina Man (A Dare Island Novel)

by Virginia Kantra

  “Stephanie’s out with the baby.” Danny grimaced. “All this is a little much for her.”

  “Yeah, I bet.” Luke cleared his throat, embarrassed. “I meant the dog.”

  “Oh, right. See for yourself. She’s right here. Bibi!” he called.

  The tan hound scrambled from under the kitchen table, her thin tail whipping back and forth, her dark-ringed eyes on Luke.

  Luke dropped to a crouch, gladness flooding him. “Hey, Bibi. Hey, girl. How’s it going?”

  In answer, the dog flopped on to her back, exposing her belly for a rub.

  Luke obliged, noting as he did so that her stomach was almost back to normal. “Taylor, meet Bibi.”

  “Hi, Bibi.” Taylor got down on the floor beside him, offering her hand to the dog. Bibi sniffed and took a polite swipe at her palm with a soft, pink tongue. “She’s nice. Is she yours?” Taylor asked Danny.

  “Yeah.” Danny thrust out his jaw. “You save a life, it belongs to you.”

  Taylor’s eyes widened. “You saved her life?”

  Some of the defensiveness went out of Danny’s pose. “Not me. Your dad did. Rescued her when we were out on patrol. Bibi saved my life, chasing off some bad guys.”

  “Good dog.” Taylor rubbed the flat, scarred head. “Good Bibi.”

  Above her head, Luke met Danny’s eyes. “Is Stephanie okay with this? With the dog?”

  “Yeah, sure. She bought Bibi a steak the first night, like a thank-you present. She likes dogs. It’s just . . . You know.” Danny shrugged.

  Luke didn’t know, exactly. Hell, he wasn’t married. But the emotional well-being of his men was his responsibility. And he’d watched his parents long enough to guess where the trouble could be.

  “Sure,” he said casually. “Coming home. New baby. New pet. It’s an adjustment.”

  “It’s a lot of work. I try to help out,” Danny said. “But she just gets mad if I do things my way.”

  Oh, yeah, he knew this one. Tom and Tess had always done their best to present a united front to their children. But after every deployment, Tom would spend a couple of weeks barking orders, and Chicago-born Italian Tess would make it clear that whatever tactics had worked with his Marines wouldn’t fly in her house.

  “Stephanie’s been handling everything on her own for eleven months,” Luke said. “You’ve got to respect that.”

  “I do. She’s terrific.”

  “Have you told her how proud you are of her?”

  “I . . .” Danny stopped. Grinned sheepishly. “Shit.”

  “You can tell her when she gets home.” Luke rose with a final pat, satisfied he’d made his point. “And you tell her we took one of your problems off your hands today.”

  “Thanks, Staff Sergeant. They’re out back,” Danny said.

  “Where are we going?” Taylor asked Luke.

  “This way.”

  She trailed him to the door. “Is it my surprise?”

  He gestured to her to go ahead.

  “What is . . .”

  Yip yip. An eddy of movement in the yard, a swirl of black, tan, white.

  “Puppies!” Her voice rose with delight.

  Luke grinned, victory and relief loosening his shoulders. So he’d done okay. It felt good, like getting his Expert badge in marksmanship.

  A wave raced across the browning grass and flung itself at the steps. Taylor waded in and was engulfed in a whirlpool of small, solid, furry bodies—Bibi’s three pups, tumbling over each other in competition for her attention. Taylor giggled—a pure, happy sound he’d never heard from her before—and sank down, her arms outstretched as she tried to touch, pat, hug them all. The little girl, the joyful dogs and sunlit yard combined into a picture so bright it stung his eyes. His chest tightened.

  He cleared his throat. “So what do you think?”

  She turned her head to face him, catching a lick on the chin from the sandy-colored pup. She snorted with laughter, putting her arms around the wriggly body in her lap. “They’re so cute. They’re so little.”

  “They’ll get bigger. And they’re old enough.”

  “Old enough for what?”

  “To find homes. New homes. Which one do you like?”

  “I love them all. I . . .” Her head jerked around again. “What? Why?”

  He swallowed, trying to keep things from getting sloppy. Kate’s words replayed in his head. Are you ready to take on the responsibility for another living being right now?

  The puppy needed a home, he told himself.

  Taylor needed a home.

  “Well, Danny can’t keep them all here,” he said matter-of-factly. “Cody Burrows—he’s another buddy—he’s taking two to his family’s farm in Texas. That leaves one for you.”

  “For . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her eyes met his, wide, shining. “Me? It would be my dog? Mine?”

  Her desperate hope, her stunned disbelief, humbled and scared him. He nodded, tucking his hands in his back pockets. “Seems only fair. Since you’ll be the one doing all the work. Feeding it and stuff.”

  “I would. I will. I’ll take really good care of it. I’ll walk it and feed it and . . .”

  “Relax,” he said. “You’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.”

  “Are we getting a boy dog or a girl dog?”

  Did it matter? Maybe to a ten-year-old, he thought. “Whatever you want. Bojangles there, with the patches, is a girl. Popeyes and Ronald—that’s Ronald—are boys.”

  Taylor looked at the cream-colored fluff ball squirming in her lap, enthusiastically covering every inch of exposed skin with puppy spit. “Ronald is a terrible name for a dog,” she said with disapproval.

  “He’s kind of a clown,” Luke explained.

  Her nose scrunched. She didn’t get it.

  “You can change his name,” he added. “If you want.”

  Doubt warred with naked longing in her face. “Won’t Fezzik mind?” she asked earnestly. “If we get another dog?”

  “Nah. He needs somebody to boss around.”

  She looked unconvinced.

  “He needs somebody to play with,” Luke amended. “To take care of.”

  And so, he thought, do you.

  Her squinched little face relaxed. She nodded, her arms tightening possessively around the puppy. The gesture gripped at his heart, clenched his gut.

  So do I, he thought, before he caught himself and brushed the feeling away.

  Eight

  KATE STOOD PARALYZED in the Morehead City pet super store. This was what came of making impulsive decisions. Of getting emotionally involved. Of falling victim to the appeal in a little girl’s eyes, the temptation of her daddy’s kiss. You wound up stalking the cat food aisle, trying to decide between chicken-n-gravy or seafood medley.

  Children of alcoholics are frequently afraid of making the wrong choices, came the lecturing voice of her therapist, Judith Frum. You need to learn to trust your instincts.

  Easy for Judith to say. Her instincts had obviously never landed her in Cat Food Hell.

  Kate fought down panic, surveying the bright rows as if careful study would yield the desired answer. She was almost certain that yesterday she’d seen a dirty white shadow slinking under Dawn’s bushes. It had to be Snowball. Anyway, something had been eating the canned tuna she’d left on Dawn’s back porch.

  Raccoons, supplied the lawyerly side of her brain. Possums. Rats . . .

  Kate shuddered. She’d already plunked down fifty dollars for a humane cat rescue kit. All she had to do was bait her trap.

  “The hell with it,” she muttered.

  She grabbed an armload of cans at random from the nearest shelf and marched toward the registers.

  “Ronald! Ronald!” a child called.

  “Damn it, dog.” A man’s voice, more amused than annoyed.

  Kate froze. Was that . . . ?

  “There he is!”

  She caught a blur at the corner of her eye, moving fast and low to the ground, and checked hers
elf just in time to avoid the puppy scampering up the main aisle. His leash whipped across the floor. Kate tripped, slipped and flung out her arms, executing a clumsy shuffle-change step as a little girl—Taylor—dashed by in pursuit. Cans of cat food scattered and rolled.

  A hard, warm arm wrapped her waist. A lean, muscled body took her weight.

  “Nice moves,” Luke said in her ear. “You okay?”

  Her breathing hitched, lifting her breasts against his chest. His face was close and smiling.

  Heat swept from her throat to her hairline. “Fine,” she said stiffly. “I—”

  Taylor reappeared, the puppy tugging on a leash behind her. “Sorry,” she said. To which one of them, Kate wasn’t sure.

  The child’s anxious gaze tugged at Kate. She’d always liked Dawn’s daughter, who was bright and confident and funny, if Dawn’s stories were true. But the sad truth was Kate wasn’t very good with children outside her office. What did she have to offer them besides her jar of candy, her box of tissues?

  “Hi, Taylor,” Kate said.

  “Hi.”

  Kate looked down at the puppy, tan and wobbly, with huge paws and a kink in its tail. Its short face was marked with black patches in place of eyebrows, giving it a permanently quizzical expression. Kind of like Taylor’s. “Who’s this?”

  Taylor beamed. “That’s my dog.” Her gaze switched to Luke, her big eyes suddenly anxious. Kate tensed in instinctive sympathy. “I was watching him, honest. He just pulled all of a sudden, and I—”

  “It’s okay,” Luke interrupted.

  Kate cleared her throat. “I’m sure she was trying—”

  “I said it’s okay.”

  “I didn’t mean to let go,” Taylor said.

  “I know. Try holding on like this.” Releasing Kate, Luke dropped to his heels and slid the loop of the leash over Taylor’s wrist. “You were right about that name,” he added.

  The girl regarded him warily from under the brim of her hat. “Yeah?”

  Kate held her breath.

  “Yeah. We should change it.” His smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Dog sure as hell isn’t answering to ‘Ronald.’”

  Taylor’s laugh sputtered out. Luke grinned back.

  A void opened in Kate’s chest. So much love there, she thought. In his eyes, in his smile. She wondered if either of them recognized it yet.

  His hand hovered, as if he might pat Taylor’s shoulder, and then he tugged her cap instead. “Why don’t you go find the mutt here something to chew on besides my boots while I talk with Kate, okay?”

  “Okay. Come on, puppy.” She pulled the leash. The dog caught it in his mouth and danced alongside her up the nearby aisle, his black-tipped tail moving in frantic circles, his whole body quivering with pleasure.

  Kate watched them dive into a bin of rubber bones and Santas. She glanced at Luke, wondering how to tell him what his carefully casual reassurance had meant to her. To Taylor, she corrected. She could only imagine her own father’s reaction if she’d been careless enough to cause a disturbance in a public space.

  “Nice move,” she said, using his words.

  Luke rose, tall and substantial in his olive green shirt and fatigues. “It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out that kids like dogs.”

  That wasn’t what she meant, but she let it pass for now. “So you bought her a puppy,” she said dryly. A man of action.

  “Not ‘buy.’ He’s a rescue.”

  “You got your daughter a shelter dog?” That was kind, she thought.

  “Sort of. My squad adopted the mother dog a couple months back. Or she adopted us.”

  “I thought there were rules against pets in a war zone.” Roger Dolan had been big on rules. The problem was he never informed his family when those rules changed, and behavior that was acceptable one day could earn a slap or a sneer the next.

  Luke shrugged. “Most bases have cats and dogs. They keep the mice down and morale up. Usually they stick around when the unit’s rotated out and get adopted by the next guys. But we were turning the base over to the Afghans. The mama dog used to patrol with us. I couldn’t leave her there.”

  She looked at his daughter, squatting on the floor with the puppy, and back at Luke. A warm, liquid rush flooded her chest. Maybe, in some small corner of her heart, she’d still doubted him. Not his intentions—she knew he was trying his best—but his commitment. What did she know about him, after all, except that he’d knocked up his high school girlfriend and moved on? He hadn’t known about Taylor. He hadn’t cared enough to know.

  But she’d been wrong. This was a man who couldn’t leave a dog behind. Who must have gone to considerable trouble to rescue this one.

  I couldn’t leave her.

  “So you brought her with you.”

  “Not with. The shelter in Kabul shipped them out. There’s a thirty-day waiting period after they got their shots.”

  They? The mama dog, he’d said. Kate glanced again at the puppy. “That must have been expensive, flying . . . How many dogs?”

  “Four. Bibi and three puppies.”

  “Four dogs from Afghanistan.”

  He jammed his hands in his pockets. “We all chipped in. Hell, Ortega was ready to organize a bake sale to get them home. And the shelter helped with donations.”

  “Well.” A smile tugged her lips. “I guess it was cheaper than buying Taylor a pony for Christmas.”

  He met her gaze. “You said she needed love,” he reminded her. “Nothing loves you like a dog.”

  She had said that. But she hadn’t expected him to listen, let alone take her advice. She glanced away, unaccountably breathless. The puppy was crawling in and over Taylor’s lap, lunging at the toy in her hand, licking everything within reach.

  That couldn’t be hygienic. “It certainly seems affectionate,” she said uncertainly.

  “You don’t like dogs?”

  Was that some kind of test question? Had she failed already? “I’m not used to them.”

  “No pets growing up?”

  “No.” Too blunt. She tried again. “My father didn’t like animals in the house. They shed, they smell, they cry, they don’t listen . . .”

  Luke was watching her, that too perceptive, too sympathetic gleam in his eyes. “Like kids.”

  She winced. “Yes.” Her father didn’t like her, either.

  Luke nodded toward the scattered cans. “So now you have a cat.”

  Kate bit her lip. She wasn’t ready to confess that she’d been back to Dawn’s house four times already searching for Snowball. What if the trap didn’t work? What if Snowball was lost? Or dead. “Um, no.” Not yet.

  Luke crouched again and began to pick up cans. “So what is all this? You eating cat food while you pay off your student loans?”

  A laugh bubbled up. She knelt to help him, awkward in her skirt and heels. “I’m thinking I might get a cat. I want to be prepared.”

  He shook his head. “Lawyers.”

  She arched her eyebrows, instantly on the defensive. “You have a problem with the law?”

  “I don’t have any outstanding warrants, if that’s what you mean. I just think it would be better, easier, if people settled their disputes without going to court.”

  “Or to war.”

  He smiled, acknowledging her point. “That, too.”

  He wasn’t offended. She stood with an armload of cans, her heart pattering with relief and lust. “So is it lawyers in general you have an issue with or has something happened to upset you?”

  “No, we’re good.” He hesitated, then added, “I talked to your friend in social services. Alisha Douglas? She’s coming out to the island tomorrow.”

  She dragged her mind off her stupid heart and focused on his case. “Well, that’s good,” she said heartily.

  “Our lawyer said an investigation could take weeks. But the social worker acted like it was no big deal.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” Kate said, confident now that they were on safer
, legal ground. Here, at least, she knew what she was talking about. She could offer him something, encouragement or reassurance. “No one in your family has a criminal record. There’s no history of the police getting called or unexplained trips to the emergency room. No substance abuse. Nothing to substantiate the allegations in the report.”

  He stuck his thumbs in his front pockets. “How do you know?”

  She opened her mouth. Shut it. “I may have . . . discussed your case with Alisha. Sometimes a simple home visit is all that’s needed to resolve a complaint.”

  “Appreciate it,” he said quietly.

  Kate felt herself flushing under that bright blue gaze. “I was merely sharing my professional judgment as someone familiar with the parties involved. I would never interfere where the safety of a child was at stake. I believe in the system.”

  “Systems can screw up.”

  “Yes, they can.” She looked at Taylor playing with the puppy and thought of all the children who fell between the cracks. The runaways, the lost, children on the streets or in unsafe homes, battered, scared, abused. “That’s why there are safeguards,” she said. “Social Services is required by law to respond to every report. That doesn’t mean they have to waste precious time and resources on every crackpot who complains about a neighbor who lets her child run into the street. Or a grandparent calls,” she added deliberately, “with an axe to grind.”

  He studied her thoughtfully. “Why are you taking my side?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. Somehow, without meaning to, she’d aligned herself with Luke and his daughter. Acting from her gut, choosing with her heart.

  And that terrified her.

  In Kate’s experience, emotional decisions were bad decisions.

  Look at her mother, who’d married her father out of love and stayed with him out of fear. Look at ninety percent of her clients, who were willing to sacrifice money, dignity, even the safety of their kids because they could not separate their emotions from their judgment.

  “I’m on Taylor’s side,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “And the law’s. Taylor wants to stay with you. And the law says that unless you act in some way that abrogates your rights as a parent, you and Taylor are a family.”