Page 71 of Still Beating

My heart is pounding against my ribs, my vision blurring. Mandy is staring at me like I was momentarily possessed by Nicholas Sparks.

Fuck.

I close the gap between us and grab her face between my hands, pulling her forehead in for a kiss. “Mandy, Mandy, sweet as candy,” I whisper, echoing the rhyme I’d sing to her when we were teenagers. “I don’t regret you. And I pray you can forgive me someday and we can be friends, because my heart won’t be the same without you in it. But I understand if you can’t, and I respect that.” Her eyes are shut tight, weighed down by the burden I am handing her. “I know this isn’t the happily ever after you imagined. I’m so sorry for that. But Ipromiseyou’ll get it, and when you do, you’ll look back and this will all make a hell of a lot more sense.”

I place one last kiss against her hairline, watching as her tears silently dampen her cheeks.

Then I pull away and walk out her front door.

Chapter Twenty-One

Cora:I did a thing.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table that Saturday afternoon, eating one of those frozen macaroni and cheese dinners, when Cora’s text comes through.

Me:How outrageous are we talking?

Cora:Hmm. Upper medium?

Me:On a scale of “I cut my own bangs” to “I bought a llama farm”

Cora:Let’s just say I bought the llama from the farm. Two of them.

Me:Wtf?

I’m about to just call her when a picture text comes through and I almost choke on a noodle. It’s a selfie of Cora holding a scraggly Yorkie mix in one arm, while her other arm is draped around a German Shepherd, hugging the animal to her chest.

Me:… …

Cora:I sort of adopted a serial killer’s two dogs. Meet Jude and Penny Lane.

Twenty minutes later, I’m standing in her living room.

“Are you nuts?” I glance at the two dogs curled up together in one giant dog bed as the miniature bed sits empty. “You adopted Earl’s dogs? The ones who were going to eat us?”

She stands up straight after refilling their water bowls, pulling her hair up into a ponytail and raising an eyebrow at me. “I doubt they were going to eat us. Earl was just trying to scare us.”

I blink. “The guy was pretty honest and forthcoming, if I recall.”

“They needed homes, Dean. Nobody else wanted them. I already planned on adopting a dog, and this just seemed like the right thing to do. Look at them.”

We both turn our heads to admire the undeniably adorable display. Penny Lane, the little one, is curled up into a tiny ball against Jude’s chest. They are both fast asleep and content.

“Fine, they’re fuckin’ cute. I’m not a stone cold monster. I’m just confused.” I scratch my head, cocking it to the side as I try to process it all. “Aren’t they… messed up?”

I realize that was the wrong terminology when Cora’s head snaps back over to me. “Not anymore messed up than us. Are you saying we don’t deserve to be loved and cared about because of what happened?”

Shit. She got me there. I fill my cheeks with air and shrug my shoulders, letting out a slow breath. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just thought they might be aggressive or have some issues, you know?”

Cora swings her head back and forth, glancing at the resting animals. “They had a full assessment and the vet doesn’t think they were abused. Just severely neglected. They’re very attached to each other, so they came as a bonded pair.”

A bonded pair. They aren’t the only ones.

She smiles, wistfully. “I guess you were right about me getting two dogs.”

My own smile stretches across my face. Her heart is even bigger than I thought. “I guess so.”

“They’re the sweetest. I’ve only had them for a couple of hours, but I think they knew everything was going to be okay the second they stepped inside the house,” Cora says. “It’s like they knew they were home.”

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