Diamond In The Ruff

“Sure you could,” Alfredo contradicted with a knowing attitude. “That you didn’t want to means that you’ve already bonded with the little ball of flying fur.”

“No, no bonding,” Lily denied firmly, then made her final argument on the matter. “I don’t even know how to bond with an animal. The only pet I ever had was a goldfish and Seymour only lived for two days.” Which firmly convinced her that she had absolutely no business trying to care for a pet of any kind.

Alfredo obviously didn’t see things in the same light that she did. “Then it’s high time you got back into the saddle, Lily. You can’t accept defeat that easily,” he told her.

Finding no support in that quarter, Lily appealed to her boss. “Theresa—”

Theresa placed a hand supportively on the younger woman’s shoulder. “I’m with Alfredo on this,” she told Lily. “Besides,” she pointed out, “you can’t give the dog away right now.”

“Why not?” Lily asked.

Theresa was the soul of innocence as she explained, “Because his owner might be out looking for him even as we speak.”

Lily blew out a breath. She’d forgotten about that. “Good point,” she admitted, chagrinned by her oversight. “I’ll make flyers and put them up.”

“In the meantime,” Theresa continued as she thoughtfully regarded the black ball of fur and paws, “I suggest you make sure the little guy’s healthy.”

“How do I go about doing that?” Lily asked, completely clueless when it came to the care of anything other than humans. She freely admitted to having a brown thumb. Anything that was green and thriving would begin to whither and die under her care—which was why she didn’t attempt to maintain a garden anymore. The thought of caring for a pet brought a chill to her spine.

“Well, for starters,” Theresa told her, “if I were you I would bring him to a veterinarian.”

“A vet?” she looked at the puppy that now appeared to be utterly enamored with Alfredo. The chef was scratching Jonathan behind the ears and along his nose, sending the Labrador to seventh heaven. “He doesn’t look sick. Is that really necessary?”

“Absolutely,” Theresa answered without a drop of hesitation. “Just think, if someone is looking for him, how would it look if you handed over a sick dog? If they wanted to, they could turn around and sue you for negligence.”

Lily felt hemmed in. The last thing she wanted was to have to take care of something, to get involved with a living, breathing entity.

Eyeing the puppy uncertainly, Lily sighed. “I should have never opened the door this morning.”

“Oh, how can you say that? Look at this adorable little face,” Theresa urged, cupping the puppy’s chin and turning his head toward Lily.

“I’m trying not to,” Lily answered honestly. But Theresa was right. She didn’t want to chance something happening to the puppy while it was temporarily in her care. Emphasis on the word temporarily, she thought. “Okay, how do I go about finding an animal doctor who’s good, but not expensive? I wouldn’t know where to start,” she admitted, looking to Theresa for guidance since the woman had been the one to bring up the matter of a vet to begin with.

Theresa’s smile bordered on being beatific. “Well, as luck would have it, I happen to know of one who just opened up a new practice a few doors down from one of my best friends. She took her dog to him and told me that he performed nothing short of a miracle on Lazarus.” The fact that Maizie didn’t have a dog named Lazarus, or a dog named anything else for that matter, was an unimportant, minor detail in the grand scheme of things. As a rule, Theresa didn’t lie, but there were times—such as now—when rules were meant to be bent if not altogether broken. “Why don’t I call her to get his phone number for you?” she suggested, looking at Lily.

That sounded like as good a plan as any, she supposed. “Sure, why not?” Lily replied with a vague shrug, resigned to this course of action. “What do I have to lose? It’s only money, right?”

Theresa knew that times were tight for the younger woman. She saw what she was about to propose as an investment in Lily’s future happiness.

“I tell you what. We’ve had a great month. I’ll pay for ‘Jonathan’s’ visit,” she offered, petting the eager puppy on the head. The dog stopped roaming around long enough to absorb the head pat and then went back to sniffing the entire area for a second time. “Consider it my gift to you.”

“How about me?” Alfredo said, pretending to feel left out. “Got any gifts for me, boss?”

“I’ll pay for your visit to the vet, too, if you decide you need to go,” Theresa quipped as she retreated into her office.

Once inside, Theresa carefully closed the door and crossed to her desk. She didn’t care for cell phones. The connection was never as clear as a landline in her opinion. Picking up the receiver, she quickly dialed the number she wanted to reach.

Maizie picked up on the second ring. “Connors’ Realty.”

“Houston, we have liftoff,” Theresa announced in what sounded like a stage whisper to her own ear.

“Theresa?” Maizie asked uncertainly. “Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me. Who else would call you and say that?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea. Theresa, I mean this in the kindest way, but you’ve definitely been watching too many movies, woman. Now, what is it that you’re trying to say?”

Impatience wove through every word. “That Lily is bringing the puppy to Frances’s son.”

“Then why didn’t you just say so?”

“Because it sounds so ordinary that way,” Theresa complained.

“Sometimes, Theresa, ordinary is just fine. Is she bringing the puppy in today?”

“That’s what I urged her to do.”

“Perfect,” Maizie said with heartfelt enthusiasm. “Nothing like being two doors down from young love about to unfold.”

“I don’t see how that’s any different from Houston, we have liftoff,” Theresa protested.

“Maybe it’s not, Theresa,” Maizie conceded, not because she thought she was wrong, but because she knew Theresa liked to be right. “Maybe it’s not.”

Chapter Two

The first thing that struck Christopher when he walked into Exam Room 3 was that the woman was standing rather than sitting. She was clearly uneasy in her present situation. The puppy with her appeared to have the upper hand.

Smiling at her, he made a quick assessment before he spoke. “This isn’t your dog, is it?”

Lily looked at the veterinarian, stunned. “How can you tell?” she asked.

All she had given the receptionist out front was her name. The dark-haired woman had immediately nodded and told her that “Mrs. Manetti called to say you’d be coming in.” The young woman at the desk, Erika, had then proceeded to call over one of the veterinary aides, who promptly ushered her and Jonathan into an exam room. As far as she knew, no details about her nonrelationship to the animal she’d brought in had been given.

Maybe she was wrong, Lily realized belatedly.

“Did Theresa tell you that?” she asked.

“Theresa?” Christopher repeated, confused.

Okay, wrong guess, Lily decided. She shook her head. “Never mind,” she told him, then repeated her initial question. “How can you tell he’s not mine?” Was there some sort of look that pet owners had? Some sort of inherent sign that the civilian non–pet owners obviously seemed to lack?

Christopher nodded toward the antsy puppy who looked as if he was ready to race around all four of the exam room’s corners almost simultaneously. “He has a rope around his neck,” Christopher pointed out.

He probably equated that with cruelty to animals, Lily thought. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” she told him, then explained her thinking. “I made a loop and tied a rope to it because I didn’t have any other way to make sure that he would follow me.”

There was a stirring vulnerability about the young woman with the long, chestnut hair. It pulled him in. Christopher looked at her thoughtfully, taking care not to allow his amusement at her action to show. Some people were thin-skinned and would construe that as being laughed at. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

“No leash,” he concluded.

“No leash,” Lily confirmed. Then, because she thought that he needed more information to go on—and she had no idea what was and wasn’t important when it came to assessing the health of a puppy—she went on to tell the good-looking vet, “I found him on my doorstep—I tripped over him, actually.”

The way she said it led Christopher to his next conclusion. “And I take it that you don’t know who he belongs to?”

“No, I don’t. If I did,” Lily added quickly, “I would have brought him back to his owner. But I’ve never seen him before this morning.”

“Then how do you know the dog’s name is Jonathan?” As far as he could see, the puppy had no dog tags.

She shrugged almost as if she was dismissing the question. “I don’t.”

Christopher looked at her a little more closely. Okay, he thought, something was definitely off here. “When you brought him in, you told my receptionist that his name was Jonathan.”

“That’s what I call him,” she responded quickly, then explained, “I didn’t want to just refer to him as ‘puppy’ or ‘hey, you’ so I gave him a name.” The young woman shrugged and the simple gesture struck him as being somewhat hapless. “He seems to like it. At least he looks up at me when I call him by that name.”

Christopher didn’t want her being under the wrong impression, even if there was no real harm in thinking that way.

“The right intonation does that,” he told Lily. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” Christopher went on, lowering his voice as if this was a guarded confession he was about to impart. “He’d respond to ‘Refrigerator’ if you said it the same way.”

To prove his point, Christopher moved around the exam table until he was directly behind the puppy. Once there, he called, “Refrigerator!” and Jonathan turned his head around to look at him, taking a few follow-up steps in order to better see who was calling him.

His point proven, Christopher glanced at the woman. “See?”

She nodded, but in Christopher’s opinion the woman appeared more overwhelmed than convinced. He had been born loving animals, and as far back as he could remember, his world had been filled with critters large and small. He had an affinity for them, something that his mother had passed on to him.

He was of the mind that everyone should have a pet and that pets improved their owners’ quality of life—as well as vice versa.

“Just how long have you and Jonathan been together?” he asked. His guess was that it couldn’t have been too long because she and the puppy hadn’t found their proper rhythm yet.

Lily glanced at her watch before she answered the vet. “In ten minutes it’ll be three hours—or so,” she replied.

“Three hours,” he repeated.

“Or so,” she added in a small voice. Christopher paused for a moment. Studying the petite, attractive young woman before him, his eyes crinkled with the smile that was taking over his face.

“You’ve never had a dog before, have you?” The question was rhetorical. He should have seen this from the very start. The woman definitely did not seem at ease around the puppy.

“It shows?” She didn’t know which she felt more, surprised or embarrassed by the question.

“You look like you’re afraid of Jonathan,” he told her.

“I’m not,” she protested with a bit too much feeling. Then, when the vet made no comment but continued looking at her, she dialed her defensiveness back a little. “Well, not entirely.” And then, after another beat, she amended that by saying, “He’s cute and everything, but he has these teeth...”

Christopher suppressed a laugh. “Most dogs do. At least,” he corrected himself, thinking of a neglected dog he’d treated at the city’s animal shelter just the other day, “the healthy ones do.”

She wasn’t expressing herself correctly, Lily realized. But then, communication was sometimes hard for her. Her skill lay in the pastries she created, not in getting her thoughts across to people she didn’t know.

Lily tried again. “But Jonathan’s always biting,”

“There’s a reason for that. He’s teething,” Christopher told her. “When I was a kid, I had a cousin like that,” he confided. “Chewed on everything and everyone until all his baby teeth came in.”

As if to illustrate what he was saying, she saw the puppy attempt to sink his teeth into the vet’s hand. Instead of yelping, Christopher laughed, rubbed the Labrador’s head affectionately. Before Jonathan could try to bite him a second time, the vet pulled a rubber squeaky toy out of his lab coat pocket. Distracted, Jonathan went after the toy—a lime-green octopus with wiggly limbs.

High-pitched squeaks filled the air in direct proportion to the energy the puppy was expending chewing on his new toy.

Just for a second, there was a touch of envy in her eyes when she raised them to his face, Christopher thought. Her cheeks were also turning a very light shade of pink.

“You probably think I’m an idiot,” Lily told him.

The last thing he wanted was for her to think he was judging her—harshly or otherwise. But he could admit he was attracted to her.

“What I think,” he corrected, “is that you might need a little help and guidance here.”

Oh, God, yes, she almost exclaimed out loud, managing to bite the gush of words back at the last moment. Instead, she asked hopefully, “You have a book for me to read?”

Christopher inclined his head. He had something a little more personal and immediate in mind. “If you’d like to read one, I have several I could recommend,” he conceded. “But personally, I’ve always found it easier when I had something visual to go on.”

“Like a DVD?” she asked, not altogether sure what he meant by his statement.

Christopher grinned. “More like a P-E-R-S-O-N.”

For just a second, Lily found herself getting caught up in the vet’s grin. Something akin to a knot—or was that a butterfly?—twisted around in her stomach. Rousing herself, Lily blinked, certain that she’d somehow misunderstood the veterinarian.

From his handsome, dimpled face, to his dirty-blond hair, to his broad shoulders, the man was a symphony of absolute charm and she was rather accustomed to being almost invisible around people who came across so dynamically. The more vibrant they were, the more understated she became, as if she was shrinking in the sunlight of their effervescence.

Given that, it seemed almost implausible to her that Christopher was saying what it sounded as if he was saying. But in the interest of clarity, she had to ask, “Are you volunteering to help me with the dog?”

To her surprise, rather than appearing annoyed or waving away the question entirely, he laughed. “If you have to ask, I must be doing it wrong, but yes, I’m volunteering.” Then he backtracked slightly as if another thought had occurred to him. “Unless, of course, your husband or boyfriend or significant other has some objections to my mentoring you through the hallowed halls of puppy ownership.”

Her self-image—that of being a single person—was so ingrained in her that Lily just assumed she came across that way. That the vet made such a stipulation seemed almost foreign to her.

“There’s no husband or boyfriend or significant other to object to anything,” she informed the man.

She was instantly rewarded with the flash of another dimpled grin. “Oh, well then, unless you have any objections, I can accompany you to the local dog park this weekend for some pointers.”

She hadn’t even been aware that there was a dog park anywhere, much less one here in Bedford, but she kept that lack of knowledge to herself.

“Although,” the vet was saying, “I do have one thing to correct already.”

Lily braced herself for criticism as she asked, “What am I doing wrong?”

Christopher shook his head. “Not you, me,” he told her affably. “I just said puppy ownership.”

She was still in the dark as to where this was going. “Yes, I know, I heard you.”

“Well, that’s actually wrong,” he told her. “That phrase would indicate that you owned the puppy when in reality—”

“The puppy owns me?” she guessed. Where else could he be headed with this? She could very easily see the puppy taking over.

But Christopher shook his head. “You own each other, and sometimes even those lines get a little blurred,” he admitted, then went on to tell her, “You do it right and your pet becomes part of your family and you become part of his family.”

For a moment, Lily forgot to resist experiencing the exact feelings that the vet was talking about. Instead, just for that one sliver of time, she allowed herself to believe that she was part of something larger than just herself, and it promised to ease the loneliness she was so acutely aware of whenever she wasn’t at work.

Whenever she left the people she worked with and returned to her house and her solitary existence.

The next moment, she forced herself to lock down and pull back, retreating into the Spartan world she’d resided in ever since she’d lost her mother.

“That sounds like something I once read in a children’s book,” she told him politely.

“Probably was,” Christopher willingly conceded. “Children see the world far more honestly than we do. They don’t usually have to make up excuses or search for ways to explain away what they feel—they just feel,” he said with emphasis as well as no small amount of admiration.

And then he got back to the business at hand. “Since you can count the length of your relationship with Jonathan in hours, I take it that means you have no information regarding his rather short history.”

She shook her head. “None whatsoever, I’m afraid,” she confessed.

Christopher took it all in stride. He turned his attention to his four-footed patient. “Well, I’m making a guess as to his age—”

Curious about the sort of procedures that involved, she asked, “How can you do that?”

“His teeth,” Christopher pointed out. “The same teeth he’s been trying out on you,” he added with an indulgent smile that seemed incredibly sexy to her. “He’s got his baby teeth. He appears to be a purebred Labrador, so there aren’t any stray factors to take into account regarding his size and growth pattern. Given his teeth and the size of his paws in comparison to the rest of him, I’d say he’s no more than five or six weeks old. And I think I can also safely predict that he’s going to be a very large dog, given the size of the paws he’s going to grow into,” the vet concluded.

She looked down at the puppy. Jonathan seemed to be falling all over himself in an attempt to engage the vet’s attention. No matter which way she sliced it, the puppy was cute—as long as he wasn’t actively biting her.

“Well, I guess that’s something I’m not going to find out,” she murmured, more to herself than to the man on the other side of the exam table.

Christopher watched her with deep curiosity in his eyes. “Do you mind if I ask why not?”

“No.”

“No?” he repeated, not really certain what the answer pertained to.

Her mind was really working in slow motion today, Lily thought, upbraiding herself. “I mean no, I don’t mind you asking.”

When there was no further information following that up, he coaxed, “And the answer to my question is—?”

“Oh.”

More blushing accompanied the single-syllable word. She really was behaving like the proverbial village idiot. Lily upbraided herself. What in heaven’s name had come over her? It was like her brain had been dipped in molasses and couldn’t rinse itself off in order to return to its normal speed—or even the bare semblance of going half-speed.

“Because as soon as I leave here with Jonathan, I’m going to make some flyers and post them around town,” she told the vet. She was rather a fair sketch artist when she put her mind to it and planned to create a likeness of this puppy to use on the poster. “Somebody’s got to be out looking for him.”

“If you’re not planning on keeping him, why did you bring him in to be examined?”

She would have thought that he, as a vet, would have thought the reason was self-explanatory. She told him anyway.

“Well, I didn’t want to take a chance that there might be something wrong with him. I wouldn’t want to neglect taking care of something just because I wasn’t keeping it,” she answered.

“So you’re like a drive-by Good Samaritan?”

She shrugged off what might have been construed as a compliment. From her point of view, there was really nothing to compliment. She was only doing what anyone else in her place would do—if they had any kind of a conscience, Lily silently qualified.

Out loud, she merely replied, “Yes, something like that.”

“I guess ‘Jonathan’ here was lucky it was your front step he picked to camp out on.” He crouched down to the dog’s level. “Aren’t you, boy?” he asked with affection, stroking the puppy’s head again.

As before, the dog reacted with enthusiasm, driving the top of his head into the vet’s hand as well as leaning in to rub his head against Christopher’s side.

Watching the puppy, Lily thought that the Labrador was trying to meld with the vet.

“Tell you what,” Christopher proposed after giving the puppy a quick examination and rising back up again, “since he seems healthy enough, why don’t we hold off until after this weekend before continuing with this exam? Then, if no one responds to your ‘found’ flyers, you bring Jonathan here back and I’ll start him out on his series of immunizations.”

“Immunizations?” Lily questioned.

By the sound of her voice, it seemed to Christopher that the shapely young woman hadn’t given that idea any thought at all. But then she’d admitted that she’d never had a pet before, so her lack of knowledge wasn’t really that unusual.

“Dogs need to be immunized, just like kids,” he told her.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a stray fact fell into place. She recalled having heard that once or twice. “Right,” she murmured.

Christopher smiled in response to her tacit agreement. “And,” he continued, “if you don’t get a call from a frantic owner by this weekend, why don’t we make a date to meet at the park on Sunday, say about eleven o’clock?” he further suggested.

“A date,” she echoed.

Given the way her eyes had widened, the word date was not the one he should have used, Christopher realized. It had been carelessly thrown out there on his part.

Very smoothly, Christopher extricated himself from what could potentially be a very sticky situation. “Yes, but I have a feeling that Jonathan might not be comfortable with my advertising the situation, so for simplicity’s sake—and possibly to save Jonathan’s reputation,” he amended with a wink that had her stomach doing an unexpected jackknife dive off the high board—again, “why don’t we just call the meeting a training session?”

Training session.

That phrase conjured up an image that involved a great deal of work. “You’d do that?” she asked incredulously.

“Call it a training session? Sure.”

“No, I mean actually volunteer to show me how to train Jonathan—provided I still have him,” she qualified.

“I thought that part was clear,” Christopher said with a smile.

But Lily had already moved on to another question. “Why?”

“Why did I think that was clear?” he guessed. “Because I couldn’t say it any more straightforwardly than that.”

She really did need to learn how to express herself better. “No, I mean why would you volunteer to show me how to train the dog?”

“Because, from personal experience, I know that living with an untrained dog can be hell—for both the dog and the person. Training the dog is just another name for mutual survival,” he told her.

“But aren’t you busy?” she asked him, feeling guilty about taking the vet away from whatever he had planned for the weekend. Grateful though she was, she wondered if she came across that needy or inept to him.