Page 10 of SEAL'S Baby Surprise
I take another drink of my soda.
“So we waited. It got quiet after a while, then we heard sounds above us. We yelled and hollered but didn’t get any response. Some of us screamed, and the guy with the broken leg startedto cry. But then the sounds got quiet and went away. That just about broke us, I don’t mind telling you. I don’t care who you are, when you are facing the possibility that you might be buried alive, things break inside you, I don’t care how tough and manly you are. Most of us tried to be brave for the other guys, though. No point in starting a pity party. We sedated the guy with the broken leg with some stuff from our med supplies, and we waited.”
For just a second, I’m back there.I remember that bleak time. If we tried to dig, the rubble shifted. Sometimes it seemed to shift on its own. One guy started singing a hymn about resting in Jesus’ arms, but it was too darned depressing, so we told him to shut the fuck up before we all started crying.
He just sighed and told us he would pray for us. We said, “Thank you, but not out loud please.” Like the rest of us weren’t praying, too. You get religious quick when near certain death is in your face.
I go on with my story.
“And then we heard it. Ark! Ark! Ark!” Ark lifts his head, and I scratch his ears. “It was the barking dog, and he just would not shut up. He even dug at the rubble on his own until somebody got the message and broke out their folding shovels and started helping. I could hear them then, voices talking, someone saying ‘Can’t you get that dog to shut up? He’ll have the entire front down on us.’ But he just kept barking. They were excited little barks now, with whines mixed in. Then one of the guys propped up against the wall gave a little girly shriek as something grabbed him by the collar and started to pull. Human hands reached down and helped pull. Then, we knew we were being rescued.”
I pause a moment and get another drink. This one is more for dramatic effect than anything. Time to add the capper.
“So, Ark was a hero. He’s a good dog, so they kept trying to get the bark trained out of him. But it just wouldn’t go. So, yeah, I was glad to bring him home with me. His bark makes me feel safe. And when the nightmares come, as you can be sure they will, he climbs in bed with me and licks my ear until I wake up and the bad things go away.”
Ark sits up and leans against my knee for a minute or two, then he puppy wiggles his way around to each of my listeners, collecting pets, snuggles, and ear scratches. And here’s the thing: what shock collars and other training techniques wouldn’t fix, all you have to do to get Ark to stop barking is to scratch his ears.
He gets this goofy look on his face, and just zens out. But I’m not sorry the trainers didn’t know that.
5
RICHARD
I lookup from my laptop to survey my living room. Kandis is rocking Little Slugger, AKA Charles Andrew Lane.
Charlie is almost two years old now, and the miracle that has saved my life. How? Well, because Kandy might not have been willing to ever see me again if she hadn’t been pregnant with our son.
You see, I had been on a mission to get my hands on the Quinn Vineyard. It made this unbelievably good designer wine from their own grapes.
But Charles “Pops” Quinn wouldn’t sell. Just weeks before, I’d been dumped at the altar by the high society lady who had said, “Yes, I’ll marry you,” then changed her mind at the last minute and had run off with a friend of mine. It was a classic, but that hadn’t make it any more fun.
I had been invited to her wedding. (Yeah, the irony…) And I’d needed a date. I’d decided that maybe going out with Kandis would be my ticket to getting close to the Quinns.
I had seduced her, then blackmailed her by threatening to tell her grandparents she wasn’t a virgin anymore to make sure that she went with me to the wedding.
You gotta understand, when my Kandy is dressed up, she’s an absolute knockout. Actually, she’s a knockout in old jeans and a sweatshirt, or nine-months pregnant.
But back to the story. I had wanted to make my ex so jealous she’d wish she’d stuck around. Stupid? Yeah, you got that part right. It had been stupid. And it’d backfired on me, because I’d fallen in love with Kandis Quinn.
Kandy had had mommy troubles – still does. We have the care of her absolutely feckless, irresponsible mother. But, in spite of everything, Kandy loves her. And in the same inexplicable way, she seems to love me.
It’s a mystery how I got so lucky. She and Little Slugger are almost my entire world. I say “almost” because I do have a brother and a sister, for whom I do have some familial feelings.
Now here’s the weird thing: After refusing to sell the vineyard to me, I married into it. It seems that getting Kandis settled with a “good man” had been her “Pops” and “Mimi” Quinn’s goal before stepping down as managers of the Quinn Vineyard.
Oh, Pops still messes around with new wine combinations, and Mimi holds parties for the staff, but Kandy and I do the day-to-day management, and I’ve never been happier in my life.
My partner, Delard, handles most of the rest of the business, and I only have to rein him in once in a while when he gets too focused on making more money.
But then Something Happens. Seems like when you are at your happiest, something always happens.
My baby sister, Rylie, is missing. It’s almost like deja vu all over again (yeah, I know — redundant) because she ran away during the wedding rehearsal.
Her hubby-to-be, Jason Leroy Wintergreen, is wailing and gnashing his teeth all over television and the Internet, and radio, even. He swears she must have been kidnapped.
Kandis looks over at me. “Fretting again, Rich?”
“Yeah. Rylie hasn’t any more sense than a baby bird about how the world works. She hasn’t called me for help, and she hasn’t checked in with her friend, Rosalee. Her credit and debit cards haven’t been used. In fact, she didn’t even take her purse with her when she ran away. Even so, she’s legally an adult. The police say she hasn’t been missing long enough to start looking.” I pause and think about how to put my next words.
