Part 2 (1/2)

”Not only were most of the workers we found less qualified than claimed, but our hidden cameras revealed unsanitary work habitsa””

Back to the cruise s.h.i.+p. No, that wasn't right, they'd been talking about rabies, she was sure of it. A new kind of rabies. . . .

Yeah, right. Or maybe it was just her imagination, fueled by a pack of loose dogs and one spooky moment in the dog room. Brenna drew the afghan closer, curling into a tighter ball on the couch, letting her hair become a shroud in which she could hide while she thought.

And abruptly decided that she didn't want to think. She had things to do, and then she wanted to go to bed. Let Emily tease her about hitting the sack earlier than Emily's two kids; the kids didn't get up as early as she. Holding the afghan around her shoulders, she got a garbage bag and went from room to room, gathering the week's garbage in semidarkness out of sheer laziness when it came to turning on the lightsa”only to realize, as she reached the kitchen on her way out, that there was no way she was going to put out garbage with the feral dogs running crazed. She left the sack in the corner behind the kitchen door and went through her mail, pulling out the bills and dumping the rest, and then relinquished the afghan long enough to clean up the kitchen sink and table.

She ought to pay some of those bills while the table was clear enough to do ita”she had a desk in one of the second-floor rooms, but its main purpose seemed to have evolved into providing a delicate balance of s.h.i.+fting and layered papersa”old records, grooming newsletters, and a growing stack of clipped articles on introducing yourself to the computer age, keeping business records, and thrifty advertising methods. She ought to pay some of those bills . . . but not tonight.

Tonight she would beat Em's kids to bed; tomorrow she'd deal with the bills and other such things that hadn't been done over the course of this week. Spring grooming season getting into gear . . . it was always like this.

Sunny waited for her, back to snorting at the doorjamb. Brenna couldn't blame her; the dog wasn't used to being confined during the evening. ”Let me find you that longe line,” she said, and started poking around on the metal shelves. Theoretically this was all dog stuff and not horse stuffa”the barn held the old horse geara”but maybe if she was lucky . . . she hadn't sorted the shelves in some time, and that gave her some hope.

”Whoouh,” Sunny said to hera”said to the door, actually, and Brenna jerked to look at her with no little dreada”but the dog's hackles were right where they belonged, smooth and slick all the way down her backbone. And her tail swung in an even, happy arc, steady at hip level.

Of course Brenna had to look, even as her hand closed over a tangled skein of flat cotton line. Absently shaking the line out so she could re-loop it around her hand and elbow, she went to the back door. Not so long ago she'd stood here shaking; now there was no menacea”only her back door with a light she ought to have turned off burning outside in the cold night.

And there, standing at the top step, was the mud-dipped Cardigan Welsh Corgi. Stone-still, as if he had been that way for hours and would stay that way for hours yet. As she appeared in the doorway, Brenna thought she saw the slight tilt of one of those big ears, but she couldn't be sure; it didn't happen again. Finally she nudged Sunny into her crate and put her hand on the doork.n.o.b, slowly turning it.

He heard it, all right. You couldn't get any more alert than that pair of ears, radar-scoped at the door. But his expression was entirely different from the first time she'd seen him. Then he had been terrified beyond rational thought; now he stood at attention, his posture suddenly full of antic.i.p.ation despite the fact that he hadn't truly moved.

Slowly, she pulled the door open. Slowly, she pushed the creaky screen door out.

They stared at one another.

Finally she said, ”Would you like to come in?”

He trotted in as if she had been a doorman holding the door to his personal doghouse.

Her eyes widened; that was all. Until she had the door closed behind him, it was the only reaction she could afford. But she needn't have worried. He went to the center of the shallow room and plunked his bottom down, his eyes never leaving her facea”and her eyes never leaving hisa”as she closed and latched the doors. From her crate, Sunny made a noise of protesta”she still wanted outa”but Brenna shook her head. ”In a minute,” she said, never moving her gaze from the mud-coated Cardigan. She crouched down and patted the floor. ”C'mere,” she said, an offhand tone.

He came.

He not only came, he rested his muddy face against her leg and gave a sigh of contentment that verged on being an outright groan. Surprised, she hesitated, her hand hovering over his filthy coata”and in the end rested her hand on his shoulder, so d.a.m.n happy to have him there that she couldn't quite believe herself. Didn't believe herself. This was the happiness of a dog long-lost, regaineda”not the simple relief that she'd pulled a stray in out of reach of trouble. It made no more sense than his flip-flop in behavior.

”Only a little while ago,” she murmured, searching for her equilibrium, ”you were so terrified of me that you practically did a backflip over the porch rail. Now you think I'm mama?”

Unless he had never been terrified of her at all.

Unless that which had come so soon afterward, that which had so frightened both Brenna and Sunny, had not been their combined imagination at all, and this dog had felt it too.

Something else that made no sense. Brenna s.h.i.+ed away from thinking about it.

Sunny's antics in the crate acquired a certain fevered intensity, and Brenna retrieved the longe line, snapped it to Sunny's collar, and tied the end around a porch pillar, all while keeping half an eye on their guest. He sat waiting with all the patience in the world, and when she stuffed her hair down the back of her sweats.h.i.+rt, grabbed a handful of towels from the top of Sunny's crate, and crouched by him again, he stoically allowed her to sop up what mud she could. That gritty, black mud, as if something had driven him through one of the many local mini-swamps at top speed.

Though she didn't know what it could have been, that wouldn't have caught him. Nimble and speedy as the Corgis werea”and well they should be, having been bred to herd cattlea”those short legs wouldn't outrun anything big enough to be a threat, not in the long haul.

Then again, she hadn't actually seen anything out there tonight, and he had performed Corgi gymnastics to run from that.

Quit trying to make it make sense. Sometimes things just didn't. What she knew for sure was that she had a Cardigan Welsh Corgi in her dog room, and that even the generous pile of towels accruing beside her wouldn't do anything but soak up dirty water, leaving the grit in his coat and a bath the only recourse. She couldn't be surea”not in this light, not without someone holding him so she could step back and take a looka”but she had the feeling he was a fine dog, lots of good bone and without the exaggeratedly twisted ankles so many of them had. Someone would be missing him. She ran her hands around his neck and finally came up with a narrow nylon stripa”not a collar, no more than a tag holder. And the tags, too, clinking dully in their wet and mud-coated state.

She tried to make them out, turning them to catch the light, but the engraving would take a good scrubbing before it became legible. The dog c.o.c.ked his head at her, a quizzical expression, and it was then that she realized how she'd squinted her face up in her attempts to read the unreadable. Alert, then, and plenty responsive. She could stick pencils up her nose and waggle her fingers in her ears without getting anything but a bland stare from Sunny.

Not that she ever had. Ever.

In any case, she'd take him into work tomorrowa”stealing a few moments with the tub and dryers was a job benefit for any groomera”scrub him up, clean up the tags, and see what she had to work with. Along with a few phone calls to animal control and the local volunteer adoption group, it would probably be enough to have this fellow home by tomorrow night.

She left the wet collar around his wet neck and pulled out one of the smaller wire crates; a touch too small for him, but for one night he could deal with it. The sharp noise of the shuffled crates put him on edge; his huge ears went from alert to wary as he moved to the far wall, his body hunched and poised for escapea”even if there was nowhere to escape to, not this time. Still, no point in making it hard for him; she took the crate into the kitchen and a.s.sembled it there, flipping the sides into place with practiced ease and snicking the fasteners into place. She had planned to keep him in the kitchen, anywaya”he was too wet to stay out in the cold dog room.

Unlike Sunny, who had been outside quite long enough to take care of her needs. Sunny whined and moaned and threw herself at the door if Brenna tried to keep her inside on a cold night; the most she could enforce was the compromise of the dog room.

Brenna tossed a few towels into the bottom of the new crate and went out to reel Sunny in and crate her with an outlandish bone. She'd been intending to use a slip-lead on the Cardi, but when he got a glimpse of the crate, he pushed his way through the partially open door and installed himself in his new quarters.

Brenna put a hand on her hip and made a face at him. ”So you're crate-trained. Show-off.” She freed her hair from her sweats.h.i.+rt and debated whether or not to feed hima”he'd need it, but she didn't want to dump food down him when he'd been stresseda”and ended up giving him a scant handful of kibble. ”Make yourself at home,” she told him, deciding she wasn't going to be spooked away from her tub. ”I've been waiting for my own bath all day, and I'm about to have it.”

He met her gaze for a few moments, and then deliberately turned to the kibble, nuzzling it first and finally settling in to eat with a catlike finickiness.

”I guess I know when I'm dismissed,” she said, but couldn't help but linger to watch him, so at home in her own kitchen, the very picture of a content dog. It was almost enough to make her forget the strange circ.u.mstances of his arrival.

But not quite.

Chapter 4.

PERTH.

An Initiation

Early afternoon in the Pets! parking lot, a shared lot in a strip mall that no longer held the sparkle of fresh construction but hadn't quite descended into rattiness. Bills paid, laundry done, and she'd even found some old boards in the barn to lay over the mud hole between the house and the car shed. The Cardigan had jumped readily into her pickup and sat quietly on the towel she'd laid over the seat, happy enough to be in the car, happy enough to keep her company. Happy enough to hop out again, onto the warm asphalt of a spring day that had actually chosen to be sunny.

Which left Brenna entirely unprepared when he took one look at the Pets! storefront and screamed like a panicked child.

He tried to bolt, couldn't, and flopped at the end of the leash like an enraged fish out of water, issuing bloodcurdling screams, foaming at the moutha”and whew, there he wenta”blowing his a.n.a.l glands on top of it all. Of course, he could hardly pitch a protest of these proportions and not release his a.n.a.l glands.

In a way, Brenna supposed she was lucky. They were lucky. He was in an empty parking s.p.a.ce, and not in the path of careless parking lot traffic. And unlike the average dog owner, she'd seen this kind of thing before. She'd had dogs squirt out of the tub, screaming in outrage; she'd had cats ping-pong across the wall like something out of The Exorcist. She'd dealt with pets in all stages of temper tantrum and protest. So now she held the end of the leash and rolled her eyes and tried to figure out what had set him off while she waited for it to end.

Not that he hadn't been through enough. The night hadn't been easy on either of them. She had emerged from the tub to find him sleepy and satisfied, and he'd even, after some hesitation, accepted the longe line rigging for his outs before bed. Buta”dry now, if still muddya”he hadn't been so happy about returning to the crate. Once inside, he had given her a look, a this isn't the way it's supposed to be look, and she'd almost let him out.

Almost. But a second look at his dry but no less grimy state brought her up short, and she murmured an apology and took herself to beda”not quite as soon as Emily's children despite her intentions, and exhausted to the bone. Maybe she'd even sleep in, despite her body's natural greet-the-dawn inclinations; she'd certainly sleep hard.

Or maybe not. Maybe it was the dog's fussing that woke her; maybe it was something else. But this time, when she went to the kitchen to check him, she couldn't harden herself to the plea in his eyes. She let him out and grabbed one of the towels; he seemed glad to follow her to the den, and just as glad to settle on the towel she spread before the coucha”although he didn't truly relax until she plopped herself down in the worn cus.h.i.+ons and drew the afghan over herself. Eventually, she let one hand fall to rest on his shoulders, and they dozed that way.

But not for long.

She didn't know what brought her to alert, just that the dog had sensed it, too. He was a tight bundle of muscles anch.o.r.ed to her touch, and she felt his fear creep right up her arm and curl around her heart. It was the only thing she could hear, her hearta”the rest of the house was utter silence, and yet there was a pressure in her ears as if a giant black fist squeezed the house and everything in it. And the moments pounded on and she thought surely the fear would ease, her heart would slow, but it never did.

It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and only then did she start shaking. Only then did the Cardigan let a whine slip out. She reacted automatically, and for both of them. She forgot about his grubby state and she lifted the afghan in silent invitation. He jumped up without hesitation and snuggled in next to her, water-bottle warm and smelling just like the swampy mud he'd run through. She turned to her side, giving him more room, and then lay awake feeling the rise and fall of his ribs against hers and the puff of his breath on her forearm. Somebody's pet, all right.