Chapter Three
The next morning, Tyler put Bronco in the back of his new Crown Victoria. A fresh spring scent wafted in the air, sharpening his senses that were dulled from sleep deprivation. Driving with his one good foot, he negotiated the winding country roads en route to Number 4 Old Pine Road, anticipation beating back his dark mood.
Driving made him miss his old Mustang with its supercharged V8 engine, but the clutch had necessitated a left foot, and now he didn’t have one. He’d traded in the Mustang for this more subdued looking car. He resented the hell out of having to drive a tame-looking automatic, but he had to admit, the Vic was roomier and made for a smoother ride. Bronco had plenty of room in the back, looking out first one window then another, tail wagging as if to say, “Where are we goin’, huh?”
Four minutes later, Tyler slowed at the black and white sign that read CANINE COMPANIONs. Boarding. Training. Therapy. He coasted into the driveway recalling how he and his friends had haunted this place back in high school. A swarm of butterflies launched inexplicably inside him.
Approaching women had never aroused nervousness in him before. But then he’d been a popular jock in high school, and then an elite Navy SEAL. Now he was just an ordinary man—and a cripple at that. Katie Crowley was the first woman he’d attempted to approach since he’d lost his foot. What if she rejected him? His spirits sank at the distinct possibility.
A thick layer of gravel smoothed the once-pocked dirt track to the abandoned house. Sunlight danced on Tyler’s windshield as he drove through the copse of pines toward the house, now visible through the tree branches.
Wow. He blinked in surprise. What had once been a gray husk of a house on a sheltered cove of Lake Anna had been transformed into a gleaming Victorian with a brand new tin roof. A coat of blue paint, white trim and lattice work, large glinting windows, and a wrap-around porch graced by a bench swing testified to its loving restoration.
“Nice,” he breathed, impressed with Katie’s accomplishment.
The white barnlike building behind the house wrested his attention to the kennel she’d made reference to. A sturdy chain-link fence jutted out on one side to form a sizeable outdoor holding pen. Several dogs in individual cages heralded his arrival. A couple of young black labs, a shepherd, and some breed he didn’t recognize announce his arrival as he braked to a stop.
He stepped gingerly out of the car on the prosthesis that hurt his ankle, and let Bronco out of the back, keeping him on a short leash.
The dogs quieted at his approach. Tails wagging, they circled their pens and pressed their noses to the chain-link, eager to greet the dog they most certainly recognized.
Tyler entered the building proper and found himself in a bright receiving room where the sound of Katie’s voice doubled his heart rate. Bronco pulled him through the open door at the back and into a hallway with the kennels on one side and some sort of training room at the other.
Katie’s voice came from the training room, but Bronco was tugging Tyler toward the dogs who’d burst through the doggie doors of their individual pens into the indoor portion of their runs. As they waged their tails, whined and postured to Bronco, Tyler looked at the remaining empty pens and frowned.
Katie had told him her kennel was full. That was the reason she’d needed him to dog-sit, right? So where were all the dogs now? In the room with her?
Tying Bronco’s leash to a pen so he could socialize, Tyler drifted toward the training room where he could hear Katie giving instructions. Through the cracked door, he spotted a teenaged boy in a wheel chair. The boy’s mother hovered behind him, and a single yellow lab stood at the end of a leash by his side.
“Always pair the command with the gesture,” Katie was saying, “and that way she’ll respond to either a verbal or visual cue.”
“Pick it up,” said the youth with a plucking gesture.
The lab pounced eagerly at the red handkerchief lying on the ground. She snatched it up and offered it to the youth, but then she didn’t want to let go.
“Sheena, drop it,” Katie commanded with an air of authority that made Tyler’s eyebrows rise.
The dog deposited the moist cloth reluctantly on the boy’s lap.
“She’s still very much a puppy, as you can see,” Katie apologized with a fond smile and a treat for the dog. “But that’s a good thing. She’ll give you ten to eleven years of quality living.”
A sudden thought stabbed Tyler’s consciousness. Quality living. The sign at the head of Katie’s driveway flashed across his mind’s eye. Boarding. Training. Therapy Certification. He looked over at Bronco, who looked back at him as if sensing the sudden shift in Tyler’s mood.
Wait one damn minute. What if Katie hadn’t asked him to dog sit as a favor to her? What if she’d tricked him into a taking a therapy dog because she figured he needed help?
The appalling thought had him reassessing her from the shadows of the hallway.
Caught up in her instruction, she had yet to notice him. Everything about her appearance from the hip-hugging jeans that accentuated her athleticism to the plaid shirt that strained across her breasts appealed to him. His body responded like a red-blooded, testosterone-driven male who’d gone without sex for almost five months. But his pride bristled at the certainty that she’d lied to him. Worse than that, she had pitied him. That had to be the real reason behind her request that he take Bronco off her hands.
The dog was a stinking service dog for handicapped people! Tyler ground his molars together as a wave of mortification and outrage rolled through him. He must have made a sound or a gesture of some kind because just then Katie glanced toward the door and caught sight of him. “Tyler,” she exclaimed.
He glowered at her, too stunned and chagrined to say anything.
“Would you excuse me for a minute?” With a forced smile, Katie left the youth and his mother and joined him in the hall, closing the door behind. Her cat-like gaze slid from where Bronco was tied to Tyler’s stricken expression. “Is everything okay?” she asked him.
“You tell me.” He hated the tremor in his voice. To think he’d driven over here intending to talk her into that date she’d promised him when all along she thought of him as nothing more than a cripple and a potential client for one of her dogs!
She didn’t bother to continue the pretenses. “Tyler, I’m sorry, I—”
“You’re kennel isn’t even full. You lied to me. You tricked me into thinking I was helping you,” he accused, steamrolling over her apology.
“I know,” she said quietly. “If I’d told you the truth, you would never have taken him, would you?”
“Damn right. I don’t need a therapy dog just because my foot’s missing. There’s nothing else wrong with me. I can still walk; I can still drive. I don’t need a damn thing from anyone. I can do this myself!”
By the end of his tirade, her eyes reflected wariness and his face was burning hot.
“You can take care of your own damn dog,” he added. And then he swung around and hobbled painfully toward the exit, where he paused ever-so-briefly to glance over at Bronco who had started to follow him, only to be halted by the leash. The dog returned his gaze expectantly.
Disgusted with himself, with life, with everything, Tyler hastened out of the building and strode as fast as his prosthesis allowed to his car. He half expected Katie to chase after him, offering abject apologies and stammering out excuses for her subterfuge. But he made it to his car without being assaulted.
Dropping behind the wheel, he swung his feet in, wincing when his prosthesis struck the door frame. He jammed the key into the ignition. When he glanced up, Katie was standing at the door of her establishment watching. It was then that he noticed the dark half-moons under her eyes and the unhealthy pallor of her face. She lifted a single hand in farewell, dignifying his rude behavior by acknowledging his departure.
His face burned anew. He nodded back, cranked the engine, and swung his car around in the narrow parking area. As h
e drove away, he glanced back once to see Katie bow her head and rub her eyes in a gesture of defeat.
Terrific, Katie thought, rubbing her eyes in the hopes of easing the ache behind them. Tyler Rexall had seen straight through her deception and now he hated her. His furious reaction had been heartbreaking. This was just what she didn’t need right now—one more reason to lose sleep at night.
She looked up just as his brake lights disappeared from sight.
Recalling the couple waiting for her in the training room, she had no choice right now but to shake off her depression. Tonight, however she knew that she would wallow in it. With a heavy step, she reentered the kennel where Bronson cocked his head at her as if asking a question.
“It’s not your fault, buddy,” she assured him. Unclipping his leash, she opened an empty pen and ushered him inside it. Then she returned to the training room to continue working with her clients.
Tyler punched up his pillow and groaned in frustration.
During Basic Underwater Demolition Training, the grueling candidate-elimination camp for wanna-be SEALs, he’d gone three full days without sleep. As a SEAL proper, he’d managed to scrape by on just four hours of sleep a night. However, the last time he could recall sleeping more than two hours in a row was in the hospital when he’d been hooked up to an IV laced with pain-killer.
The lack of sleep was torturing him. The dark of night seemed to stretch on forever. And there was nothing to do—no time-critical missions. No known enemies. Just…meaningless nothingness that went on and on and on.
For a change, his thoughts tonight didn’t revolve around the incident that had robbed him of purpose. His thoughts had fixated on the scene between him and Katie that afternoon, and his words replayed over and over again, giving him leisure to analyze every nuance of what he’d said.
I don’t need a therapy dog just because my foot’s missing.
Possibly true. He could still walk with a prosthesis, even though it pained him. He could still drive. He wasn’t a cripple like the youth in the wheelchair.
There’s nothing else wrong with me.
Really? Well, if that were true then he’d be sleeping like a baby right now, wouldn’t he? He’d have moved past the tragedy that had left him physically and emotionally imbalanced, and he’d have figured out what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life.
I don’t need a damn thing from anyone. I can do this myself!
What a crock. He’d come home because he needed his family. Sure, they’d tried to be there for him. They’d taken the time to welcome him home and to feel out his state of mind. But his sister was busy with school, and his father had his hands full coping with his wife’s decline. And then there was his mother, whom he needed most, who had kissed his scrapes and bruises all his life and told him he was good to go. She didn’t even recognize him.
And that sucked. That sucked more than anything.
Hot tears slid from the corner of Tyler’s eyes and slid toward his pillow.
You can take care of your own damn dog.
The memory of his last sentence to Katie made him wince. Never in his life had he spoken to a woman like that. His parents had raised him to be a gentleman, a role that he had taken seriously. He’d opened doors for women, showed them kindness and respect, never pushed for physical intimacy just because he could. While there’d never been any shortage of women in his life, he had still held himself aloof for one reason. He wanted a relationship born of respect, like the kind that his parents had.
Along came Katie, who’d planted a seed of interest regarding the future, and he’d ruined everything by squashing her selfless gesture. What an ass he’d made of himself. Hell, he owed her an apology.
Remorse burned in his gut, making it impossible to find sleep. Sitting up in bed, he found himself staring at the blanket on the floor where Bronco had curled up for the past two nights. Strange how quickly he’d gotten used to the dog there.
Now the house seemed emptier than ever.
Loneliness carved a hole in his aching chest. He swallowed hard, managed a shuddering indrawn breath before the dam burst unexpectedly.
A salvo of racking, awful noises issued from his throat. I’m crying, he realized, half relieved, half terrified to let his emotions get the better of him.
Let it go, urged the voice of his psychologist.
And so he did, one part of him chagrined to realize what he had been reduced to—a man with only one foot, with no future, no hope.
He sobbed until the tears ran from the hands covering his face, down his forearms to his elbow, until he felt like a wrung-out SEAL trainee in BUDs. And then, by degrees, his weeping subsided and he managed to fill his lungs without them convulsing. He felt better. But he still owed Katie an apology, and he doubted he would sleep until he’d put that chore behind him.
He reached for the phone by his bed. As usual, his former teammates Sam and Bronco and several others had sent him text messages meant to cheer him up. He decided to respond to them, but first he’d leave Katie a voicemail.
Looking up her number was the easy part. He’d taken it off her business card and put it into his contact list. Finding the words he needed to say while her phone rang was harder. But hell, it would be even tougher to talk to her in person, so he could do this.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice answered on a note of dread.
“You weren’t supposed to pick up.” He said the first words to enter his head.
“Tyler.” She heaved a sigh of relief, making him wonder whom she’d thought was calling. “What’s up?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, I was calling to apologize for today. I thought you’d be asleep and I could leave a message, but that’s kind of cowardly,” he admitted.
“I wasn’t sleeping. I can hang up if you want and you can call again and leave your message.”
He smiled at the offer. “No that’s all right. You deserve an actual apology.” He took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “I was completely out of line today. I said things that weren’t true, and I was disrespectful to you. I’m really sorry.”
The silence that answered his apology had him counting his heartbeats.
“Actually, it’s my fault, Tyler,” she finally replied. “I should never have misled you about my reason for dumping a dog on you. His people did abandon him on my doorstep, but that was months ago. I’ve been training Bronson ever since.”
“Bronco,” he corrected. “He likes the name Bronco better.”
“Okay.” She gave a curious little laugh. “I’d like to hear the reason behind that.”
“I’ll share it with you,” he promised, “on that date you owe me.”
Another silence followed his veiled proposition. “Um, as I recall,” she finally replied, “you were going to have to watch Brons—Bronco—for ten days, and then I’d take you out to dinner.”
He loved that she was playing hard to get. “How about I promise to watch Bronco for as long as you want, and we go to dinner at that new restaurant tomorrow night?”
“Deal,” she said. “But I’m paying.”
“We’ll go dutch,” he countered.
“Fine,” she agreed. “You can pick me up at seven.”
She had no difficulty giving orders, either. He liked that, too. “Yes, ma’am.”
A comfortable silence fell between them. “Why aren’t you asleep?” he heard himself ask.
She made a little whimpering noise. “There’s this man who’s been following me. He’s tried to break into my house, twice.”
Alarm tightened Tyler’s scalp. “Seriously? Have you told the police?”
“I have. My uncle—he’s the sheriff now. He drops by every three hours to check on me.”
Well, that was something, but Tyler could think of more effective deterrents. “I guess you’re pretty spooked about it,” he observed.
“A little.”
He found himself wanting to comfort her. “Let’s talk more about this tomor
row,” he suggested “I’d like to help catch this guy. Can’t have you losing your beauty sleep.”
Katie snorted. “Implying that I need it?”
“Not at all. Even with bags under your eyes, you look good.”
“That’s what you call a back-handed compliment.”
“You want compliments? I can think of several.”
“No, I’m not fishing. I’m just flattered that you’re talking to me—considering I lied to you.”
“But you did it for good reason,” he admitted.
“Thank you,” she said simply.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night. Casual dress?”
“Completely casual. Good night, T-Rex.”
“Good night, Katie Cat.” He came up with the nickname on the spot.
He waited for her to hang up first, and then he severed the call with a warmth that spread to his extremities. Their repartee on the phone had been wonderful and unexpected. Suddenly, he couldn’t wait for the hours to melt away between then and tomorrow evening when he got to take her out to dinner.
With a smile on his face, he texted back his buddies, letting them each know that he was doing okay and missing them. He finally put his phone away and lay back against his pillow. Closing his eyes, he pictured Katie as she’d looked the day she’d first come to his house. Her intelligent and insightful gaze was as sexy as her perfect curves. Lucky me, he thought.
The next time he opened his eyes the sun was shining and the morning was half gone.