Page 25 of Tempting as Sin
Bailey took another look at the denuded Chuck. “A makeover?” he asked dubiously.
Lily had to laugh. “How do you know about makeovers?”
“TV,” he said, looking affronted. “They’re always doing makeovers on my grandma’s shows.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not making fun of you. It’s just…He’s not really a makeover kind of dog, is he? Or maybe I’m thinking about us. We probably need a makeover ourselves at this point.” She was rewarded by Bailey’s grin. “And as for Chuck? He needs food. He’s a healthy boy, that’s obvious. Look how skinny he was under all that hair, and how well he’s managing anyway. Regular meals and a flea and tick pill, and he’ll be a new dog. Fortunately, I know where to get both. And I just had an idea. There’s this thing I read about. Dog sharing.”
It wasn’t a deviation off the logical, rational, functional-and-beautiful track. It was just a…an alternate route. Yeah, that was it.
“Huh?” the boy asked.
“It’s like—peanut butter and chocolate!” Lily said brightly. “You have some chocolate, but you like it with peanut butter, and you don’t have any. And your best friend has peanut butter but no chocolate. So you share, and it’s so much tastier for both of you. Sharing.”
Why was she doing this? The Humane Society number was right there on their website, and Chuck was even cleaned up. Homely as can be, but cleaned up. And if she couldn’t stand to think of him in a cage, standing on cold concrete and looking hopefully out through the wire of his pen, his tail wagging madly at everybody who walked by, his spark dimming a little with every day somebody didn’t take him home…
No.Just the thought of it made her choke up. She couldn’t fix everything wrong in the world, but she could fix this.
“Oh.” Bailey considered that. “How do you do dog sharing? A dog isn’t like peanut butter. You could split peanut butter up. You can’t split a dog up.”
“You work it out. It’s a…a custom solution. That means you make the answer different depending on the situation, do you see? You use flexible thinking.”
“Flexible means bending,” Bailey said. “Like girls who do ballet lessons say, ‘She’s so flexible.’ They think it’s better than being able to play football, even though playing football is way harder than bending.”
If Lily couldn’t afford to fall in love with a dog, she definitely couldn’t afford to fall in love with a boy. She wasn’t hasty anymore, and she wasn’t romantic. Yes, there’d been that little incident with Clay/Rafe. A temporary aberration, not a return to misguided thought patterns, and look how it had turned out. “That’s one meaning,” she said. “It also means being able to adjust to changes. Like you had to be flexible when you came to live with your grandma.”
A step too far. Bailey got that wary-fawn look again and was silent. “And right now,” Lily hurried on, “we definitely need to be flexible. We have to figure out a dog plan, because Chuck can’t keep sleeping under your trailer. But before we do, I’m going to say that it’s not safe for you to go into somebody’s house or in their car unless your grandma says so. You know that, right?”
Bailey shrugged and scratched his mosquito bites some more. “Yeah, like stranger danger. But stranger danger is strangemen.And I don’t think Montana has it. I learned about that before, but it was in Phoenix. Which is Arizona. Ms. Swan never talked about it, so I don’t think they have it here.”
“Anybody,” Lily said firmly. “We’re not going into my house, and we’re not going in my car. We’re riding our bikes down the road a little ways, and that’s all. We’ll bring Chuck, and you can ride off any time.”
“OK,” Bailey said. “Except I kind of have to…um…” He was looking wiggly.
“Oh.” That one stumped Lily for a second. “OK. You and Chuck come in, and I’ll point to my bathroom, and then I’ll come back out and wait for you.”
Bailey eyed her with disillusion. “If it was stranger danger, I wouldn’t be supposed to listen to you.”
Lily had to laugh. “You’re very smart. You can go pee behind the house, or I can point to the bathroom. Your choice.”
Bailey thought it over. “I’m going to go to the bathroom. Because I don’t think stranger danger is ladies, and because I have Chuck.”
“Good,” Lily said. “Then let’s get going. We’ve got dog food to borrow.”
Behind Lily, garden chores went undone. Around her, insects buzzed and a blue jay called, raucous and insistent. Ahead of her, Bailey rode down the road a ways, then back up, standing on the pedals, his wiry body surprisingly strong, while Chuck bounced along beside him in happy exuberance. Warmth radiated from the roadbed, but Chuck didn’t seem to be having any trouble with his paw pads. Chuck was made of tough stuff. Chuck was a survivor.
Before Lily turned her bike into Jace’s winding gravel driveway, she pulled open the door of the mailbox and checked through the stack inside. All junk, as she’d expected. She’d toss it into the trash bag at the cabin.
Two more weeks of checking Jace’s mail, and then she’d be staying far, far away.Being with Rafe in Australia had been bad enough, when she’d had his whole family plus Paige as a buffer.
When they got to the cabin, she told Bailey, “Hang on,” then went around to the side of the garage, felt under the eaves, retrieved the key, anddidn’tthink about what the rest of the summer would look like, about running into Rafe at the grocery store, about what she’d say and what he’d answer.
She wasn’t a fragile blossom. If she ever had been, she wasn’t anymore. Right now, she had a dog to feed, and that was all.
Up the wooden steps, then, strewn with tiny Douglas Fir cones and branches brought down in the last windstorm, with Bailey and Chuck following behind. Chuck would like the creek, she thought, turning the key. Maybe they could feed him his first meal here, and then go…
The door swung open with a protest of unoiled hinges. Twelve feet away, in a doorway under the staircase, a man clad only in black gym shorts and a pair of running shoes paused at the top of a chin-up, his silver-blue gaze locking hard on her. He held himself there for a long moment, every muscle in his shoulders and arms standing out in high relief, then lowered himself slowly, dropped to the floor with absolute control, grabbed a shirt from the couch, and walked over to her.
Also slowly. Or maybe you’d call it “stalked,” because it seemed to take forever. His abs shifted with every step he took as if he had tiny animals under there. As if he had so many muscles, they’d taken on a life of their own.
