Uncommon Pleasure (16 page)

He got nothing, exactly what he deserved.

Today she didn’t have an e-reader with her. Today she had a man.

He was about her height, wore a nice pair of slacks, a button-down shirt, and a blazer, in this heat, for fuck’s sake, and he did all the right things. He held the door open and let her walk through it first, gave her the seat with more shade, made sure she had room for her lunch box as they went through the ritual of opening sacks and arranging food for consumption. She crossed her legs at the ankle but tilted her knees toward him, a listening posture, her head cocked as she chewed. He spoke for a while, then asked a question and listened just as attentively as Lauren talked, her hair neatly restrained at the nape of her neck with two sticks that gleamed in the sunlight. He nodded, offered her a french fry from a foam box, gave her a napkin when mustard oozed out of her sandwich onto the bench.

Ty wanted to hurt him. Slowly. Painfully. Permanently.

“You haven’t talked to her yet, have you?”

Sean again. After Ty missed Richards leaving they rearranged the surveillance positions. Now the guy in the truck parked at the edge of the lot where he could watch the lake and the cars. “You’re like my fairy fucking godmother, Winthrop,” he said.

“Bippity boppity boo,” Sean said, startling a huff of laughter from Ty. “Don’t be a pussy, or you’ll lose her forever. She’s strong. Trust her.”

She was steel-like, sunlight glinting in her ash-brown hair, reflecting off the silver ring she wore on her right hand. He was back in where he felt comfortable, with John and Sean and a few other guys in the area. He’d found a veterans’ group, gone to the
first meeting wary and walled off, and to his surprise helping other guys helped him, too. But asking for Lauren’s forgiveness, laying himself open to her, involved a depth of vulnerability he wasn’t sure he could take. He’d charged enemy positions without a second thought, but after what he’d said to her on this very bench, he couldn’t bring himself to sit down next to her at lunch.

He sat and watched them finish their meal. Watched her split her cupcake with him. Watched them get up and go back inside. She’d never glanced his way. Not a taunting look, or a curious one, or a sly, sneaky one. He’d wanted nothing, and he’d gotten nothing.

The hard knock of his heart against his sternum told him the uncomfortable truth. Sex couldn’t heal him, but Lauren’s strength and confidence, her roots, and the way she saw him pulled him back from the edge. Lauren wouldn’t let him get away with being anything less than whole and himself.

Maybe you don’t want to be let off that hook.

He didn’t. If he had, he would have cut ties rather than making himself hateful and difficult. He’d pushed and shoved, lashed out inexcusably, but he couldn’t move good people. John and Sean were the brothers he never had, would be until the day he died. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance Lauren would put him back on the hook, hold him to the standards of honor and decency until he could hold himself there.

He finished out the shift, rode back to John’s office with Sean, gave a routine summary of a routine day. Got in his truck and went back to the hotel to take a shower. Dressed. Sat in front of the TV without seeing it, until the sunlight shifted enough to tell him it was evening. Got back in his truck. Drove to Lauren’s place. He wasn’t thinking much. All the while he paid attention to that quiet space inside, his sixth sense, his radar, listening for the ping that told him to walk away.

The driveway and street in front of her house were empty, so it
wasn’t likely she had a guest. He parked on the street and walked up her front steps and knocked on the door.

An indistinct babble of words preceded her as she flew at the door and hauled it open. She had her car keys in one hand, and behind her a bowl of peaches sat in the middle of her dining room table. Mrs. Kennedy’s peaches, waiting to ripen and be turned into pie.
Roots.
A house, a dog, neighbors she helped and who helped her. Her jeans were muddy to the knee, and the skin covering her shoulders and collarbone, exposed by her low-cut tank top, gleamed with sweat. Desperate expectation widened her eyes, then melted into despair when she saw him. She lifted the back of her hand to her forehead. “Ty, I can’t—”

“How long has she been gone?”

At the words a strong ping registered on his internal radar, but not one of warning. Instead, the vibrations reverberating through him affirmed what he’d always known and tried to ignore.
This is who you are.
So he tried again. More bluntly and emphatically, using words of one syllable and his NCO voice. “I want to help you find her. Let me help.”

Lauren looked at him, as if trying to decide whether he was worth a second chance. “I was in the garden, pulling weeds. I…I got distracted. It was warm and sunny and a really nice evening and for the first time since…”

He could fill in the
since
himself, knew this wasn’t a second chance. She’d just tabled the discussion until after they found Gretchen.

“…I wasn’t thinking about anything but what I was doing. Pulling weeds. I kept an eye on her for a while, but she was curled up in the sun by the deck, and I just…I got distracted, and when I remembered and turned around, she was gone.”

“How long ago?”

“A couple of hours.”

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got this. You have treats?”

“I’ve been all over the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m out of hot dogs. I was just about to go to the store when I thought I should call some of the people who live farther away to find out if they’ve seen her. I don’t want to call and search at the same time. I’ll be distracted, and it’s getting dark. It will be easy to miss her.”

He pulled his keys from his pocket. “I’ll go. Call your neighbors.”

He made it to and from the store in record time, and when he came back, Lauren was waiting on the porch, her cell phone in hand, two empty plastic bags, a flashlight, and a pair of scissors beside her. He flung himself out of the truck but she still met him by the hood, scissors at the ready when he opened the grocery sack.

She peered inside, then said, “How many hot dogs did you buy?”

“Every package they had,” he said. “You’re getting your dog back.”

They hunkered down in the driveway, and Ty pulled out his pocketknife and sliced into a package. While he used the knife to slice and chop right on the cement she wielded the scissors, and in a minute they had a mound of cut-up hot dogs. Lauren divided them between the two bags, and wiped her hand on her jeans. Ty got his Maglite from the toolbox on his truck.

“I’ve already looked everywhere,” Lauren said. “I called six people in a four-block radius. No one’s seen her.”

Her despairing tone sliced into his heart. “She’s mobile. Curious. She could have retraced her steps, found a different hiding place. Hey,” he said, and tipped up her chin with his knuckles to avoid smearing her with hot dog grease. “We’ll find her.”

They set off in opposite directions down the block. Eventually the deepening twilight made every shift of leaves into a small, barrel-chested dark brown dog with floppy ears and a whip of a tail who never materialized. When Ty’s phone vibrated he was standing on the corner, his bag still full of hot dogs. The streetlight buzzed on
as he pulled the phone from his pocket to see a message from Lauren.

The text was full of hope, and he hated to disappoint her.
No. I’m sorry
.

But it wasn’t. She loved Gretchen, would never give up on that dog, and he couldn’t bear to think of her heart breaking again. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he heard the rustle of leaves, the sound slightly out of rhythm with the wind. A moment later came the slightest movement under Mr. Minnillo’s rosebushes. Keeping his body entirely still, he turned his head and looked more closely at the nearest bush. Two round, dark eyes gleamed in the streetlight’s glare, and as his eyes adjusted to the contours of the shadows, he could make out Gretchen’s round body.

“You little shit,” he said, crooning like he’d heard Lauren do. “I’ve been by this house four times in the last hour. But you weren’t coming out, were you?”

Moving slow and easy he approached the rosebush. Gretchen shrank back, so he stopped one bush before the one she cowered under, and began to lay a trail of warm, disgusting hot dogs from the bush down the path, placing piles of them a couple of body lengths apart, through the gardens, to the sidewalk. Then he sat down on the last step and blew out his breath.

“Why do you keep running?” he asked. “You don’t know how good you have it, you dumb dog.” He dangled his hands from his knees, and laughed at himself. “Sometimes you have to fight your instincts, Gretchen.”

Behind him the door opened. “Can I help you, young man?”

“Just waiting for a dog to come out from under your bushes, sir,” he said. “Sorry about the hot dogs.”

“Oh, that’s quite all right. You’re a friend of Lauren’s?”

He hoped to hell he still had that chance. “Yes, sir,” he said. “But Gretchen’s still making up her mind about me.”

A soft chuckle. “Good luck. You tell Lauren I said hello.”

“I will, sir. Thank you.”

Behind him the bushes rustled, but he didn’t turn around, not even when he heard the first pile of hot dogs devoured in a couple of slurps, or the click of her nails on the cement as, after a moment, she trotted up to the second pile of meat and licked it up.

She paused, so he started talking in the same soft voice. “Cut me some slack, girl. I fucked up big-time, and I could use a little help. Showing up with you might get me back in the door so I can throw myself at her feet and grovel. What do you say? Want to see me grovel?”

Nails scritched against cement, then she ate another offering. Maybe groveling was on the menu with hot dogs tonight.

“You and me, we were two of a kind. Except I wasn’t letting her in, and you weren’t going to let me in.”

She was close enough now that he could hear her breathing. Maybe two piles left. “You were the smart one. Not getting too close to me. You knew I wasn’t good for her. But I am now. Getting there, anyway. So how about you and me, we call a truce. Let me take you back to her, and I promise I won’t hurt her again.”

Gretchen’s black nose nudged at his elbow. Slowly, like there was a scorpion, not a dachshund at his side, he turned to look at her. Another nudge, so he lifted his arm. She climbed onto his lap and sniffed at the bag. He dumped the remaining hot dogs into his palm. Gretchen’s velvet tongue licked over his skin, and the hot dogs disappeared. She sniffed again, then settled into his lap and looked up at him, her brown eyes guileless, trusting. He lifted his hand and stroked the length of her sleek body from skull to tail, nice and slow, as if this was no big deal. As if she was just a dog.

Connections were already forming. People recognized him as a
friend of Lauren’s, asked him to say hey to her, which was, in the South, a request not handed out lightly and expected to be honored. So he should go do that. Bring her dog back to her, and say hey from Mr. Minnillo. Then throw himself on her mercy and beg for a second chance.

Keeping the length of his arm under Gretchen’s body he got to his feet, cradling her like he used to cradle his rifle. Then he set off down the sidewalk, toward Lauren’s house.

Lauren stood at the end of her driveway and watched Ty emerge
from Mr. Minnillo’s gate, then disappear into the darkness between streetlights. He moved slowly, almost at a stroll, and underneath her worry for Gretchen simmered the same visceral appreciation for his lanky, powerful body. She wondered if what brought him back to her door had disappeared in a two-hour search for an abused, escape artist dog that’d probably never fully trust anyone again, even Lauren.

She knew what drove him back. Guys like Ty were territorial, and today at lunchtime when he was two hundred feet away and across the lake she could feel waves of alpha male rolling at her, hackles raised, growling. Which wasn’t the nothing he’d said he wanted, but twenty-first century or not, at some primitive level sex with the right man still marked a woman. They weren’t going there. No more hookups, no more booty calls for wounded warriors. But of all the surprises he could have sprung, the willingness to search for her dog topped the list.

He strode into the circular spill of a streetlight halfway down the block, his slow, rhythmic stride meshing with her heartbeat. He cradled something in both arms, but whatever he held was too dark to see against his black T-shirt. The corner of the plastic bag poked up from his jeans pocket. He disappeared into blackness between streetlights again, then reappeared two driveways down. Shoulders squared, spine straight, his gaze met hers, and he smiled, so little-boy victorious that her heart leaped hard against her breastbone. He looked happy, utterly pleased with himself and the world, and then she knew why.

Gretchen rode in his strong arms like the royalty she was. She equably considered the view from this new vantage point until her brawny, six-foot-tall ride neared Lauren, then began to wriggle free. Her arms brushed Ty’s abdomen and forearms as he shifted the dog to her. Gretchen promptly gave her a hot dog-scented face licking. She squeezed her and said, “Thank you! Oh Ty, thank you! Wherever did you find her?”

“She was under Mr. Minnillo’s rosebushes,” he said, then reached out to stroke the dog’s tiny head with the back of his index finger. Gretchen didn’t flinch, just turned and licked his finger. “She’s probably going to be sick tonight. I used half a bag of hot dogs to tempt her out.”

“And then grabbed her?”

“And then she jumped right into my lap.” At Lauren’s surprised glance he cupped his palm in demonstration and added, “I baited the trap. I didn’t want her getting away again.”

“She came to you?” Lauren asked, looking up at him.

He wouldn’t meet her eyes, just kept petting Gretchen. “We made a deal, your useful little dog and me.”

“And what was that?”

He met her eyes, and the remorse and hope blended in the dark chocolate depths took her breath away. “The deal was, if she let me bring her back to you I wouldn’t hurt you again.”