Читать книгу: «A New Leash On Love»

Chapter One

The gray-muzzled, three-legged Lab mix gnawing on a chew toy in his kennel at the Furever Paws Animal Rescue sure reminded Matt Fielding of himself. The dog was big, and so was Matt, at six foot one, with muscles honed by the United States Army. Matt wasn’t missing a leg, but he’d come scarily close, an IED injuring him to the point that he’d been medically retired three months ago, spending that time—until yesterday—in base rehab. He had only a slight limp now, but kneeling down in front of the old dog’s kennel had taken a good fifteen seconds.

I’d take you home in a heartbeat, Hank, he thought, his gaze on the dog’s chart. The ten-year-old was an “owner surrender.” Among the sadder words, for sure. His heart went out to the old guy stuck in this limbo between homes—like Matt was. But his sister would kill him if he walked through the door of her pristine house with a huge senior dog. And getting on her bad side right now wasn’t a good idea.

The former army corporal had his order—and it was to find his sister’s eight-year-old daughter, Matt’s adored niece, Ellie, a suitable puppy. Suitable, of course, was a relative term. Old Hank might have spoken to Matt’s soul, but he wasn’t here to find himself a dog. Pets required commitment and a solid home, not a guy who had no idea where he’d be a week or two from now. Thirty-six and his life up in the air. If anyone had told Matt, so focused from the time he joined the army at eighteen, that one day he’d be at a loss for what came next, he wouldn’t have believed it. Until three months ago, he was the US Army. Now, he was a civilian. With a slight limp.

It’s barely noticeable and is symbolic of your service, so don’t let it get you down, his sister had said yesterday when he’d arrived back in his hometown of Spring Forest, North Carolina, for the first time in five years. Little Ellie had saluted him, and he’d swept her up in a hug. But living in his sister’s guest room, despite his adorable niece telling him knock-knock jokes that made no sense but still made him laugh, wasn’t ideal. He needed to figure out what came next.

Right now, though, he needed to focus on his mission. One thing at a time, one moment at a time, his doc and the nurses at the rehab had said over and over.

So, back to suitable pups.

“Hank is one of my favorites,” a woman said, and Matt almost jumped.

He knew that voice. He turned to the left and looked up, and standing not ten feet away was Claire Asher.

Claire.

From the look on her beautiful face, it was obvious she hadn’t realized it was him. For a moment he couldn’t find his voice. All he could do was take in the sight of her, his chest tight and his throat closed. He’d spent so many nights over the past eighteen years thinking about her, wondering how she was, where she was, if she was happy, his memories getting him through some iffy times. And now she stood almost within reach, pale brown eyes wide, mouth dropped open.

She had a leash in her hand and a big cinnamon-colored dog in a purple polka-dotted harness beside her. A boxer, maybe? Matt wondered, finding it easier to focus on the dog than the woman—who was staring at him with the same shock that had to be on his face.

“Matt?” she said, wonder in her voice.

The dog next to her tilted her head, his dark-brown ears flopping to the right.

He nodded and stood up, which took the same fifteen seconds getting down had. “I’m here to find a dog for my niece.” Going through his mind was, You look amazing. How are you? I’ve thought about you constantly. What are you doing here? I’ve missed you. Thank God none of that had come rushing out of his mouth.

“Ellie,” she said, surprising him. “I’ve run into your sister a few times over the years.”

He nodded, his gaze going to her left hand. No ring. Hadn’t he heard she’d gotten married a while back?

“You look great, Claire.” She really did. Tall and as slender as she’d been back in high school, she was the Claire Asher he remembered—would never forget. Her silky, wavy, light blond hair was shoulder-length instead of halfway down her back, and the faintest of crinkles at the corners of those green eyes spoke of the passage of years. The last time he’d seen Claire she was seventeen. Now, she was thirty-five.

“Are you on leave?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m a civilian now. Just got back in town yesterday. I’m staying with my sister for a bit. In fact, my sister is why I’m here. She and her husband promised Ellie a puppy for her birthday next month, so I told Laura I’d scout it out. I heard great things about Furever Paws just from asking about pet shelters at the coffee shop.”

Claire beamed. “It’s a very special place. I volunteer here.” She gave the dog beside her a pat. “This is Dempsey. I’m fostering her until she finds a forever home.”

“A furever home,” he said, pointing at the rectangular wooden sign on the wall with the message in silver script: Where furbabies find their furever homes.

She smiled—that beautiful Claire Asher smile that used to drive him wild.

“If only you’d come in yesterday or this morning,” she said. “Every Saturday and Sunday we hold adoption events here at the shelter. Four puppies found forever—furever—homes, plus five adult dogs and five cats.”

“So these dogs in the kennels weren’t chosen?” he asked, eyeing Hank, who was still chewing on his toy bone.

“Not this weekend. But we get a crowd every Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes it takes a while to find an ideal match. That’s the most important part of the process—that the match be just right, for the pet and the adoptive family.”

He nodded. “Is there a match for an eight-year-old girl whose requirements are ‘super cute, snuggly and won’t destroy a prized stuffed animal collection’?”

Claire laughed. “Follow me. I think I know just the pup.” She led him down the row of kennels to the end. A puppy was spinning circles in the kennel, chasing her tail and letting out loud yips.

“My ears,” Matt said with a smile. The puppy sure ticked off the “adorable” requirement. A springer spaniel mix, according to the chart, five months old, she was chestnut-brown and white with long, ruffled, floppy ears. Ellie would go nuts over her.

“Yeah, that’s why she’s still here. She yipped for twenty minutes straight at both adoption events. Including every time someone came near her kennel. She’s only been here a few days, though. Another volunteer and I have been working with her a bit. She just needs some training. She’s very sweet.”

And loud, Matt thought. And...active. “Does she ever actually catch her tail and stop spinning?”

Claire laughed again. “Yes. Peanut butter treats get her to do anything.”

“Would she be right for Ellie?” he asked. “My sister likes calm and orderly. I think she wants an old dog in a puppy’s body.”

“Well, it’s important to match temperaments, and puppies can be trained, but puppies are puppies—little kids. They make noise, they’re super active, they eat shoes.”

“Ellie never ate a shoe, far as I know.”

She laughed and touched his arm, the most casual gesture, but the feel of her fingers on his skin sent a lightning bolt through him. Standing here with her, her hand on him, it was as if they’d never broken up. Claire and Matt, high school sweethearts, married with four kids, four dogs, four cats—that was how many Claire had said she wanted of each. Plus a parrot and lovebirds. And a box turtle. He could go on.

Sometimes, over the years, late at night, Matt would berate himself for breaking up with Claire after graduation. He’d told her he needed to be focused on being the best soldier he could be, leaving it at that, and the pain on Claire’s face had almost made him tell her the truth. That he wasn’t and had never been and never would be good enough for her, that he’d hold her back, keep studious, bookish, intelligent Claire from fulfilling her big dreams of leaving Spring Forest for the big city. Matt wasn’t a big city guy, and he’d planned to be career-army. Now, he didn’t know what he was. Too many rough tours of duty, first as a soldier, then as a mechanic on dangerous missions, had left him...broken.

And here in Spring Forest, he didn’t recognize himself or belong.

Focus on the mission, not yourself, he ordered himself. “I think my sister wants a temperament like Dempsey’s,” Matt said, gesturing at Claire’s foster dog. The pooch was sitting, hadn’t made a peep and didn’t react in the slightest to the commotion around her.

“Dempsey is the best,” Claire said. “A couple months ago, she was found chained outside an abandoned house. I don’t think she ever had a home before I took her in, so I’ve worked hard at acclimating her to the good life—which means passing muster on housetraining, manners, obedience, the whole thing. Now she’s ready for a home, but she keeps getting passed over.”

She knelt down beside the boxer and gave her a double scratch on the sides of her neck, then a kiss on her brown snout. Claire shook her head and stood up, her gaze on the dog.

He might not know Claire anymore, but a stranger could tell how much she loved that dog.

“Can’t you adopt her?” he asked.

“I always want to adopt every dog I foster, but that’s not my calling here,” she explained. “Fostering is about preparing dogs for adoption so they can find homes. If I adopted every dog I fostered, I’d have over twenty at this point. Plus, every time a dog I work with finds a home, I can foster a new pooch.”

“Must be hard to let them go,” he said. “Don’t you get attached?”

“Definitely,” she said. “But because we do such a good job of matching furbabies and adoptive parents, I know they’re going to a great home. I do worry about how attached I am to Dempsey, though. I can’t explain it, but we definitely have a special bond.” She gave the boxer mix another scratch on the head, and the dog looked up at her with such trust in her eyes, even Matt’s battered heart was touched. “Oftentimes, that bond is there right away.”

“I had no idea about any of this,” he said. “There’s more involved in choosing a dog than I realized. Can you help me find the right puppy for Ellie?”

“Of course,” she said. “There are a few other puppies here that Ellie might like, but they all need some training. Maybe you can bring Ellie back with you and we can see who she bonds with. Furever Paws is in the process of finding a new director, so I’m helping with just about everything, from meet and greets to training to fostering to cleaning out kennels.”

He glanced around the kennel area of the shelter, which had a warm, welcoming vibe to it. “It’s great of you to give your time,” he said. “When should I bring my niece in tomorrow?”

“I’m done teaching at the middle school at three, so I usually arrive at three thirty.”

So she had become a teacher. That had always been her dream. But back in high school she’d wanted to leave Spring Forest and see the world, teaching her way through it. Maybe she had, for all he knew. “Works for Ellie too,” he said. “See you tomorrow, then.”

For a second they just looked at each other, neither making a move to leave. He wished he could pull her into his arms and hug her, hold her tight, tell her how good it was to see her, to hear her voice, to talk to her. He’d missed her so much and hadn’t even known it. Which was probably a good thing. He had nothing to offer her.

As he gave Dempsey a pat and turned to walk away, he couldn’t quite figure out how he could be so relieved to be leaving and so looking forward to coming back.

He paused in front of Hank’s kennel. Life is complicated, huh, boy?

Hank tilted his head, and Matt took that as a nod.

To catch her breath and decompress, Claire took Dempsey into the fenced yard, which was thankfully empty of other volunteers. She let Dempsey off leash and for a few moments watched the dog run around the grass, sniffing and wagging her tail.

Matt Fielding. Everyone always said you never forgot your first love, and that had been very true for Claire. She’d truly believed he would be the man she’d marry and spend the rest of her life with. And then boom—a few days after a magical prom night, he’d broken up with her.

Her first boyfriend in college had proposed, and maybe the promised security had had something to do with why she’d said yes when she hadn’t loved him the way she’d loved Matt. To this day, she didn’t know if that had contributed to her divorce, but five years into her marriage, she’d found out that her ex-husband was cheating and in love with someone else. Now, she was living in the house they’d built out in the Kingdom Creek development, without the husband or the kids they’d talked about or the dogs they were going to adopt.

The craziest thing was that, just last week, her sister had said that Claire’s problem was that she’d never gotten over Matt, and to do so she’d need to find a guy who looked like him. Tall and muscular, with those blue eyes, Matt was so good-looking and so...hot that few men in town even came close to resembling him. But apparently her sister had found someone who fit the bill, and had arranged a double date for tonight.

Half of her wanted to cancel. The other half thought she’d better protect herself against Matt’s being back by going out on this date, even if her heart wouldn’t be in it. Claire wanted a relationship—she wanted love and to find the man she’d spend forever with. She wanted a child—children, hopefully—and at thirty-five, she wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.

“How did everything get so topsy-turvy, Demps?” she asked the dog, who’d come over with a half-eaten tennis ball. “I know you know all about that,” she added, throwing the ball. Dempsey, in all her fast, muscular glory, chased after it, leaping through the air like a deer.

There was nothing like watching dogs at play to make Claire feel better and forget about her love life—the old, the nonexistent and the upcoming. She smiled as Dempsey dropped the ball at her feet. She threw it a few more times, then left the dog in the yard to play while she went to help clean the kennels that were now empty due to the lucky pups that had been adopted today.

As she reentered the shelter, she saw Birdie and Bunny Whitaker in their waterproof aprons, hard at work with the disinfectant and hose. Claire adored the sixtysomething sisters—no-nonsense Birdie and dreamer Bunny—who lived together in the lovely farmhouse on Whitaker Acres, the same property the shelter was on. Opening Furever Paws had been a longtime dream of the Whitaker sisters ever since people had begun abandoning animals on Whitaker land, a pocket of rural country in what had become urban sprawl. At first they’d started an animal refuge, but when it became too much for them to handle financially, they filed for nonprofit status and started the Furever Paws Animal Rescue almost twenty years ago. Aside from the shelter with dogs and cats, the sisters kept goats, pigs, geese and even a pair of llamas on the property. They opened up Whitaker Acres to the public a few times a year so that visitors could enjoy the land and animals. Kids loved the place.

As Claire cleaned Snowball’s kennel—the white shepherd-Lab mix had been adopted this morning and immediately renamed Hermione—she was glad the shelter could take in more strays and drop-offs. Furever Paws had room for about a dozen each of dogs and cats, and twice that many were cared for in foster homes, like Dempsey.

“I’ll miss that adorable Snowball,” Birdie said, hosing down the kennel across the way. “For twenty years I’ve been telling myself not to get attached to our animals.” She shook her head. “Old fool.” Tall and strong, her short silver hair gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, Birdie grabbed the mop, dunked it in the cleaning solution and went at the floor of the kennel until it met her satisfaction.

“I already miss Annie Jo,” Bunny said, taking out the bed, blanket and toys in the next kennel and stuffing them in the huge laundry bin. Bunny looked a lot like Birdie but was shorter and plumper, her silver curls soft against her sweet face. “I love what her family renamed her—Peaches. Back in the day, a beau called me that,” she added, wiggling her hips.

Claire smiled. The shelter always named the strays and those left on the doorstep. Every now and then, adopters kept the shelter names—most recently a cat named Princess Leia, who’d been there for months. Birdie and Bunny loved naming the incoming animals, and whenever they couldn’t come up with a name, they held a meeting with the staff—the full-time employees, such as the shelter director, foster director and vet technician—and the volunteers, like Claire.

“Who was that very handsome man here a little while ago?” Bunny asked with a sly smile as she started sweeping out the kennel, reaching over for a stray piece of kibble that Annie Jo—Peaches—had missed. “My, he was nice to look at.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t rush over to ask how you could help him,” Birdie said to her starry-eyed sister, wringing out the mop in the big bucket.

“Well, I would have,” Bunny said, “but I saw Claire come back in with Dempsey and decided to leave him for her. Trust me, if I were even ten years younger...”

Claire laughed as Birdie shook her head again, her trademark move. Neither Whitaker sister had ever married, though Claire did know that Bunny had been engaged in her early twenties until her fiancé had tragically died. Birdie never talked about her love life, and though Claire had tried a time or two to get Bunny to spill about Birdie’s romantic life, the sisters were clearly loyal to each other’s secrets. As they should be.

But no matter how much or how little experience the Whitaker sisters had in the romance department, they were both wise—Birdie in common sense and Bunny in keeping an open mind and heart. Talking to the two always set Claire straight, or at least made her feel better.

Which was why she was going to be honest right now.

“That was the guy who broke my heart into a million pieces after high school graduation,” she said. “Matt Fielding. I cried for six months straight.”

“And then married the first guy who asked you out,” Birdie said with an uh-huh look on her face.

“Yup,” Claire said, spraying disinfectant on the bars of the last kennel and wiping them down with a clean rag. “But there’s hope for me. Guess who has a blind date tonight? My sister and her husband set me up.”

“Ooh,” Bunny said, her blue eyes twinkling. “How exciting. To me, blind dates are synonymous with ‘you never know.’ Could be the man of your dreams.”

Birdie wrinkled up her face. “Blind dates are usually the pits.” She glanced at Claire, instantly contrite, then threw her arms up in the air. “Oh, come on. They are.”

Claire laughed. “Well, if the date takes my mind off the fact that my first love is back in town? Mission accomplished.”

“Oh boy,” Birdie said, pausing the mop. “Someone is still very hung up on her first love.”

“Oh dear,” Bunny agreed.

And before Claire could say that of course she was—you did see him, after all—that cute little springer spaniel she’d shown Matt started howling up a storm.

“Someone wants her dinner now,” Bunny said with a laugh.

“I’m on feeding duty for the dogs,” Claire said, putting the disinfectant back on the supplies shelf and the rag in Bunny’s laundry basket. “If I don’t see you two before I leave for the day, congrats on a great Sunday. Five adult dogs adopted plus the puppies and cats.”

“It was a good day,” Bunny said. “Good luck on that date tonight.”

Claire smiled. “Who knows? Maybe he will be the man of my dreams.”

She was putting on a brave front for the sisters—not that she needed to, since she could always be honest with them. But sometimes Claire reverted to that old need to save face, to not seem like she cared quite so much that she was single, when she wanted to be partnered, to find that special someone to share her life with, to build a life with. She loved Dempsey to pieces, but most nights, unless she had book club or a social event like someone else’s engagement party or birthday, it was her and the boxer mix snuggled on the sofa in her living room, watching Dancing with the Stars or a Netflix movie, a rawhide chew for Dempsey and a single-serve bag of microwave popcorn for her.

There was room on that couch for a man.

But in any case, Matt Fielding was not the man of her dreams, whether she was “hung up or him” or not. Seventeen-year-old Claire had been madly in love. Now, she was a thirty-five-year-old divorced woman staring down her biological clock. “Man of her dreams” was silly nonsense. Hadn’t the supposed man of her dreams dumped her almost two decades ago as if she’d meant nothing? Ha, like that was part of the dream?

Matt Fielding was not the man of her dreams.

If she said it enough, she might believe it.

And if there was no such thing, then what was she looking for in a partner?

She’d never put much stock in checklists, since she could rattle off a list of adjectives, like kind, and nonnegotiables, like doesn’t rip apart his exes or his mother on the date, but everything came down to chemistry. How you felt with someone. How someone made you feel. If your head and heart were engaged. She’d never experienced chemistry the way she had with Matt Fielding. But her motto ever since she’d started volunteering for Furever Paws was: Everything is possible. The most timid dog, the hissiest cat, could become someone’s dearest treasure. Everything is possible. Including Claire finding love again. At thirty-five.

She peeled off her waterproof gloves and tossed them in the used-gloves bin, then headed toward the door to start filling bowls with kibble and sneaking in medicines where needed.

“Oh, Claire,” Birdie said. “Some advice. In the first five minutes, ask your date if he likes dogs. If he says no, you’ll know he’s not for you.”

Bunny tilted her head. “Now, Birdie. Not everyone loves animals like we do.”

Apparently, the entire Whitaker family loved animals to the point that all their nicknames were inspired by animals. Birdie’s real name was Bernadette. Bunny’s was Gwendolyn. There was a Moose—Doug—who’d sadly died long ago. And a Gator, aka Greg, who advised the sisters on financial matters.

“The man of Claire’s dreams will love dogs,” Birdie said. “That’s nonnegotiable. If her blind date says dogs slobber and bark and are a pain in the neck, she can tune him out the rest of the night.”

Claire smiled. As usual, Birdie Whitaker was right.