Page 250 of Storm over the Caribbean
I took another deep breath. Not that it seemed to help much.
“My question still stands.” I fixed my gaze on her. “Who is Fence?”
She opened her mouth, hopefully to give me a suitably dutiful and deferential response. But before she could, a blurry figure suddenly shot towards me and leapt into my arms. Now, if that blurry figure had been my wife, that would have been fine. But…
“Woof!”
It wasn’t.
“Woofwoofwoofwooooof!”
It most definitely wasn’t.
“What,” I enquired in a voice capable of scaring the hounds of hell away. The slobbering dog on top of me didn’t care one bit. “is that?”
“That’s Fence,” came my dear wife’s voice from somewhere beyond the sea of saliva. “He’s happy to meet you.”
“You don’t say?” I tried to raise my arms to push the dog away. Unfortunately, those rebellious things just flopped around weakly and wouldn’t cooperate, so I had to settle for another glare at the canine who was still doing its best to clean my face of everything but dog saliva. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“Well…” Beyond the four-legged fiend, I saw my wife flash me a grin. She was enjoying this, wasn’t she? “…then I’m happy to help.”
“Mrs Ambrose?”
“Yes, Mr Ambrose, Sir?”
“Get. This. Mutt. Off. My. Face.”
“Why, yes of course, Sir. Would you like me to put it on your groin instead?”
I tried to jump up to grab her by the scruff of the neck. As a result, I flopped around on the ground uselessly.
“Don’t youdare!”
“All right, groin it is.”
Maybe, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have eaten that poisoned fruit after all.
Suddenly, the dog leapt off me and dashed away. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the canine rushed back with some object in its mouth. A moment later, something rough and hard slammed into my nose. Something made of…wood?
“Mrs Ambrose?”
“Yes, Dicky Darling?”
“Why is that dog trying to shove a stick in my face?”
“Well…either he noticed the stick up your arse and thought you could do with a new one…”
“Mrs Ambrose!”
“…or he wants you to play fetch.”
I fixed her with a gaze that told her exactly how thrilled I was by that prospect.
“I,” my voice filled the tropical cave with all the frost I could muster, “do notplay.”
“I beg to differ. Or do I need to remind you of a certain part during our wedding night, when you—”
Hurriedly, I cleared my throat. No need to publicise such things in front of an audience, even if only a canine one.
