by Nancy Warren
That was the last straw. She’d saved that squirrel’s life, and it was bopping her on the head with nuts.
She let go of the leash. “Knock yourself out,” she told Kitsu. “I am out of here.”
Turning, she massaged her sore shoulder and prepared to limp back the way she’d come. Somewhere in the bag she’d abandoned on the picnic blanket—if it was still there—was the magic key ring with the panic button. Let Mark come and collect his wretched beast.
She hadn’t gone three painful steps when she saw Emily, hair flying behind her, hot on their trail.
Even in her fury, she managed a small smile. That girl was a trouper.
Emily was breathing hard when she caught up. Unable to speak, she collapsed in Annie’s arms and watched Kitsu’s insane behavior. He’d managed to wrap the leash so tight around the tree trunk that he almost strangled himself every time he leaped up, barking, while nuts rained down on him.
“What are we going to do?” the child asked in a worried tone.
“Do they make dog meat out of dogs? Or is that just horses?”
“Annie! You wouldn’t?”
“With my bare hands.”
“Kitsu!”
The dog spared her a glance, tongue hanging out, tail wagging, before resuming its pursuit of the treed squirrel.
“Come on,” Annie said. “We’ll go back and phone Mark.”
“We can’t leave Kitsu. Something might happen to him.”
“We couldn’t be that lucky.”
“Please, Annie. Please. He’ll get tired in a few minutes.”
Privately, Annie thought it would take a rifle full of buckshot to get that dog away from the tree, but she kept her opinion to herself. “I guess I could use a few minutes to rest,” she agreed and dropped to the ground, picking at the glob of gum welded to the bottom of her foot.
“Want a jujube?” Emily asked, gesturing with the package she was holding.
“Why
not?”
The cellophane rustled, and Emily handed her a bright red candy.
“Look.”
The dog’s attention had been diverted. Instead of straining to get up the tree, he was straining toward the package in Emily’s hands. “Do you think he wants a candy?”
“It’s worth a shot.”
The girl paused, open bag in hand, and a glimmer of worry crossed her pink cheeks. “Is it good for dogs to eat candy?”
“At this point I’d happily feed him arsenic.”
“Kitsu, want a jujube?”
Amazingly, the dog did. He whined and pulled at the leash he’d managed to wrap snugly around the tree trunk until he was half choking himself trying to get to the shiny treat.
Emily approached him, holding out the sweet, which the dog snatched daintily from her fingers and greedily devoured, whining softly for another.
Annie was on her feet by this time, finding the end of the leash and walking in circles until it was free of the trunk.
Emily began dropping jujubes in a trail leading away from the squirrel, and the dog followed, gobbling each one.
They retraced their steps with the perfectly docile Kitsu, giving the playground a wide berth and silently praying they wouldn’t meet any more squirrels.
When they returned to their blanket, miraculously everything was still there, but neither of them wanted to risk another squirrel incident, so they packed up everything and lugged it to the truck.
“Pass me a cranberry juice, Em,” Annie said once they were all buckled in.
“Uncle Mark doesn’t let me have food or drinks in his new truck,” Emily warned her, as they drove off, her brake foot uncomfortably naked against the pedal.
“Really? I’ll have a piece of chicken, as well. And have one yourself. I’ll deal with Uncle Mark.”
She
didn’t
exactly
try to get the steering wheel shiny with grease. But if Mark was stupid enough to stick them with the hound of the Baskervilles as a picnic companion, what could he expect?
THE BIG HOUSE seemed empty and quiet. Mark almost used the word lonely, but that was ridiculous. He’d just got used to Emily being there all the time. And since Annie had moved in, it was like living in the middle of a circus. No wonder it was quiet without them.
He should relax now that he had a police dog guarding the pair of them, but somehow it was impossible.
Annie had been in such a snit with him she hadn’t left him any dinner, he noted when he opened the fridge hopefully. He could have cooked himself something, but it was just as easy to phone and get a pizza delivered.
He’d just sunk his teeth into a big gooey slice with all the toppings when he heard the door. He glanced at his watch and allowed himself a smug smile. They were earlier than they’d said they’d be. Kitsu was already making a difference.
As he was mentally congratulating himself on getting the animal, Emily and Annie walked in.
Walked was actually an inaccurate term. Annie limped—painfully, it seemed to him. Her hat and glam sunglasses were gone. As was one sandal. The other was muddy, and one half-plucked daisy hung by a thread. Those tight short pants she’d left the house in were grass-stained, and one knee was torn right out, showing a patch of grazed skin. Even the tight top he’d disapproved of mere hours ago wasn’t perky anymore. It had a lot of threads pulled, and globs of dirt and some kind of vegetation stuck to it.
Emily looked better—but not much. Maybe they’d been playing baseball?
But one glance at Annie’s face had him revising that idea.
She was wearing a scowl that warned him that whatever had happened, it wasn’t a friendly game of baseball, and somehow it was all his fault.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Not well,” Annie answered, slumping into a chair with a groan.
“It wasn’t Kitsu’s fault,” Emily wailed.
Mark closed the pizza box. He was getting a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“What happened?”
Annie was pulling things out of the sole of her foot. Slivers maybe, the way she was wincing. He directed the question to his niece.
“He was really good, Uncle Mark. Until he saw a squirrel. Then he kind of went nuts and chased it.”
“Kitsu chased a squirrel?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you call him to heel?”
“About a million times.”
“And?”
“He, um, he ignored us.”
“But he’s a trained police dog. He’ll always come to heel.”
Annie glanced up at that, and he noticed her face was streaked with mud. “Not if he sees a squirrel, he won’t,” she assured him.
Suddenly, he remembered the police trainer’s report. And that notation he couldn’t read. It had looked like “squiggle.” Maybe the word that trainer had written was
“squirrel.”
As though she’d read his thoughts, Annie said, “I think we now know why Kitsu flunked police dog school.”
“You’d better tell me exactly what happened,” he ordered with a sinking feeling in his gut.
By the time they’d finished their recital he knew he had no choice but to get rid of Kitsu. The guard dog was worse than useless. By dragging Annie all over the park, he’d effectively left Emily completely unprotected.
“But he came right to heel as soon as I gave him a jujube,” his niece assured him, as though that would make Mark forgive the wayward canine.
He took a long pull of the beer he’d opened a few minutes ago, when the world had seemed normal. “I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t really sure who he was apologizing to—his niece or his shoeless nanny. All he knew was he’d made an uncharacteristic, but colossal, error in judgment. He’d been so eager to make everything work out, he hadn’t researched the dog properly. He shuddered to think what disasters could have occurred because of his haste.
“Emily, honey, I need to speak to Annie alone for a minute
.”
“It wasn’t Kitsu’s fault, Uncle Mark. Really it wasn’t. I’ll go feed him his dinner now.”
“All right,” he said heavily.
He waited until she’d left the room. “I’ll return him in the morning.”
Annie glanced at him, her green eyes shining out of a grubby face. “I need a bath.” That was all she said.
A few minutes later, Emily bounded into the room, the German shepherd at her heels.
His tongue lolled out, and his eyes gleamed with innocence, as though he hadn’t terrorized a small furry animal, frightened a playground of little children and dragged Annie for miles, ignoring every command he’d been taught.
Tail wagging, he approached Mark with the tired whine of a dog who’s spent a satisfying day. He lay at his master’s feet, his head on his paws, and dropped to sleep.
Emily glanced from Annie to him, a worried look on her face. “You won’t…you won’t do anything, will you, Uncle Mark?”
“I’m sorry, Em, but Kitsu’s going to have to go back.”
To his horror, tears flooded Emily’s eyes and spilled over onto her cheeks. “No!
It’s not fair.” She’d been so brave all year, though he knew her little heart had broken when her parents died. He cursed himself for letting her get attached to the dog so quickly.
“Please, Em,” he heard himself pleading. “Try to understand.”
“You promised we could keep him. You promised.” And with a heartrending sob, she threw herself into Annie’s arms.
Over Emily’s head, Annie shot him a look of reproach. But what was he supposed to do?
Frustrated beyond bearing, he took in the sobbing child, the glaring nanny and the snoring dog.
It was all too much.
While every sensible instinct told him he was doing the right thing in returning the beast, his softer emotions overruled him.
A tense minute passed for everyone except the happily snoring beast.
“Oh, all right,” he snapped. “I’ll give him one more chance. Just one.”
Like magic, the sobbing stopped. Emily lifted her head from Annie’s shoulder and turned a wet but smiling face his way. “Thanks, Uncle Mark. He’ll be good from now on. I know he will.” She jumped up and came over to give him a hug before dropping to her knees and giving the dog an even more loving embrace. Kitsu roused himself enough to stop snoring and lick her face with his huge tongue.
Determined to assert his authority in some small way, Mark ordered her to bed after her busy day, and without any argument or delay, she went. Followed by the useless watchdog.
He turned to his nanny with a feeling she wasn’t going to be so easy to pacify.
“You have a piece of peanut shell in your hair.”
She grunted. “I probably have half of Stanley Park in my hair.” Sitting slumped in one of the overstuffed chairs in the family room, she appeared much younger. And very, very cranky.
“Why don’t you go and have that hot bath?”
With a tired sigh she nodded and rose.
“Do you want a glass of wine to take up with you?”
“I’ll have it afterward. I hope you buy your wine by the gallon jug.”
He half smiled as she limped out, so tired she didn’t seem to notice she was wearing just one sandal. The plastic daisy bobbed hopelessly. He had a feeling he had as much hope of hanging on to his nanny as that shoe had of hanging on to that daisy.
A moment of panic speared him. What would he do without Annie? He was already down one guard dog. He had to find a way to stop Annie from quitting. He wracked his brain.
Could he flatter her into staying?
Beg
her?
Change the outgoing code so she’d never get out of the house?
He’d start with flattery, he decided, and move on from there if he had to. He paused as he began assembling a tray of wine and glasses, remembering the sight of her grazed knee. Before he started on flattery, he’d better apply first aid.
It made an odd collection, once he had everything assembled in his rarely used sunken living room. A good bottle of wine, glasses, some slices of pizza on a plate, a first-aid kit. She was probably feeling the way he used to after a difficult arrest. Not only tired, but bruised. The way she’d been rubbing her shoulder, she could have strained the muscles. He went back and dug out the rubbing alcohol.
He put a jazz CD on, soft and soothing in the background. Then paused.
Would she think he was trying to seduce her?
He couldn’t take any chances that she might misinterpret his intention. Irritably he jabbed the button, choking the sultry singer in mid croon.
He grabbed all the stuff and stomped to the familiar shabbiness of the family room.
And tried to think up something to say that would make her stay.
When she came into the room half an hour later, he still hadn’t thought of anything. He glanced up, hoping inspiration would hit him, and noticed she was wearing the same multicoloured dress she’d worn the day he met her. Had she dressed up? For him? Damn. Maybe he should have stayed in the living room, after all.
She winced as she walked, lifting the hem of her dress impatiently until it was several inches above her knee, where the grazed skin was inflamed. “Ouch. I can’t stand to have anything touch it.”
“Don’t you have a bathrobe?”
“Yep. It’s somewhere in Spain. Madrid, maybe, or Barcelona. I never did figure out where I left it.” She shrugged. “I never replaced it. It’s just one less thing to lose.”
What kind of woman didn’t want a bathrobe? he asked himself. A woman who didn’t want to be encumbered, that’s who. A woman who would look at him and his lifestyle and see one big encumbrance.
She sat down, and he shifted an ottoman under her outstretched leg.
“First things first,” he said, gesturing to the bottle on the table. “Red all right? Or I’ve got white in the fridge.”
“Red’s
great.”
He poured each of them a glass of Merlot and let her take a sip before clicking open his first-aid kit and dropping to his knees on the floor at her feet.
An amused smile flickered across her face as he cleaned, creamed and bandaged her knee. He did his level best not to notice how warm and soft her skin felt beneath his hand or to see the little patch of goose bumps that rose when he applied the antiseptic lotion.
Once he’d covered the grazed skin with a bandage, he couldn’t smell the antiseptic anymore. Only Annie. And she smelled so good, warm and still damp from her bath. He caught the scent of tropical fruits and the nearer scent of woman.
He gently lifted the foot he’d seen her limping on and studied the sole. “What’s this red patch?” he asked, concerned.
“Bubble gum,” came the succinct reply. “I had to scrub with a nail brush to get it all off.”
“Ouch. You’ve got a few slivers here, too.” He shuffled through his first-aid kit.
“What are you planning on doing with that needle? And those tweezers?”
He grinned at her. “Drink some more wine. You won’t feel a thing.”
“That’s what my first boyfriend said,” she mumbled.
Deciding the safest response to that was none, he got to work, carefully digging splinters out of her foot. Apart from a little squirming and some mild whining, she let him get on with the job.
She had very nice feet. Not shapely like a dancer’s, more broad and sensible, like a woman who does a lot of walking. Or running. The pads were firm and a little callused, the toes square and somehow sexy.
And he tried to forget all about the long, luscious legs they were attached to.
“That was a good thing you did. Letting Emily keep the dog.”
He glanced up, a frown pulling his eyebrows together. “It was moronic.”
Her gaze locked with his, and a sweet smile lit up her face. “No, it wasn’t. Losing Kitsu would have broken her heart.”
�
�That dog is a completely useless protector.”
She tilted her head. “Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s safe to say we’ll be protected from marauding squirrels with evil intentions.”
He allowed himself a stiff grin and, putting her foot gently on the floor, flopped to the couch beside her. “It’s not squirrels I’m worried about.”
“You’re worried about everything from unfriendly aliens to the bogeyman.”
