Love at First Bark Read online

  Bubbles could do this. Sophie had done her research, looked into other fire workers with needs similar to Harrison’s, and hand selected an animal based on a careful study of his medical and professional records. This wasn’t some idea she’d come up with on the fly.

  “I’ve already talked to Oscar about this, and he agrees with me.” She crossed her arms and did her best imitation of a woman who inspired awe and confidence in others. “It’s Bubbles, or you don’t go back to the field.”

  As it turned out, admitting to a man that she’d run tattling to his boss wasn’t an ideal way to win him over. Instead of submitting to her autocratic decree, Harrison’s stance became even more rigid.

  Sophie’s natural inclination was to turn to her sisters for help, but she pushed the urge down as far as it would go. To admit defeat now would only foster Lila’s belief that they should have passed on this case. Sophie’d be back on basic training, once again spending her days teaching puppies how to sit and where to pee.

  All things that needed to be done, of course, but those were the easy tasks, the safe ones. The kinds of things a fluffy, skittish ball of fur might be expected to tackle.

  “If you’re willing to try again, I’ll bring Bubbles out to the side yard so you two can get to know one another. But you have to promise not to reject her this time. She didn’t like it.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “And neither did I.”

  “Well done, Soph!” Dawn cheered from the doorway. Before Lila could say anything to undermine Sophie’s swell of confidence, Dawn bustled them both out of the kitchen.

  It was a strange location for an impasse. The house Sophie shared with her sisters was as dainty and feminine as Harrison was rough and masculine. Everywhere the eye landed were massive doilies and vintage finds, with dried flowers next to the sink and artfully arranged silver teaspoons hanging on the wall. Only the kennel through the back door gave any indication that this was as much a place of business as it was a home. Harrison wasn’t so tall that his head brushed the ceiling or anything, but he did have a way of filling the space in a way that felt both unfamiliar and unsettling.

  It’s not just his size, Sophie thought. It’s him. Whatever else might be said about this man, he was certainly a presence. Being in the same room with him seemed to kindle an awareness in every part of her—a tingling awareness that started in her toes and worked upward from there. It was almost as though her limbs were awakening from a long, numbing sleep, and she wasn’t sure they were ready to support her weight just yet.

  “So you really do know Oscar,” Harrison said by way of breaking their strange stalemate.

  “Oh. Um.” Sophie blinked. She’d assumed, when Oscar had asked them to take on this case, that he would have told Harrison all about their personal history. That he hadn’t—and most likely wouldn’t unless Sophie gave him permission to—said a lot about him. “Yes, actually. He and I go a long way back. He asked me to take your case as a kind of favor.”

  A look of strange relief swept over Harrison’s face. His shoulders actually sagged a little. “Then that explains why you put up with me for as long as you did. What did he say about me?”

  “Um.”

  “You don’t have to hold back on my account. He won’t have said anything I haven’t heard a hundred times already, believe me.”

  As if the sudden turn of conversation wasn’t strange enough, Harrison paused and pulled out a chair for her. It was her chair, obviously, and he was offering it in her house, but the gallantry of the gesture was still forefront in her mind.

  She didn’t sit though. She was already so dwarfed by this man.

  “Please,” he said, his voice rough. “One of the things Oscar should have told you first is that my bark is a lot worse than my bite.”

  With that, Sophie relented. She didn’t know if it was the reference to canines that did it, or the fact that he sounded so forlorn, but she took the proffered seat and watched as he lowered himself into the opposite chair. Even in a seated position, he still dwarfed her. Those powerful thighs, the broad shoulders hunched as if ready to pounce—there was no other way she could feel in his presence.

  Before she could think of a tactful way to disclose her earlier conversation with Oscar, Harrison lifted one massive hand and started ticking off fingers instead.

  “I don’t take orders well. I don’t know how to interact with others in a way that doesn’t make them uncomfortable. I’d rather cut off my own foot than admit to a weakness.” He paused and considered the matter before turning a look of inquiry her way. “Let’s see…which one am I missing?”

  Heat rose to the surface of her skin. Sophie didn’t believe any of those things, not when he’d made such a generous and obviously painful effort to return here and apologize of his own volition, but she could see how someone meeting him for the first time might get that impression. Those deep lines, that unsmiling expression… He just looked so hard.

  Harrison took one look at her flaming face and swore. “Dammit. He didn’t sugarcoat it, did he? Did he tell you how half the volunteer firefighters I train end up quitting after less than a week or that some of them take one look at me and don’t even last the day?”

  Sophie had no idea how to answer that question, so she didn’t try. Dawn would have been able to turn it to a joke, but her sister wasn’t here. She’d scurried off so Sophie could have at least one opportunity to prove herself.

  “The week,” Harrison repeated carefully, “or the day?”

  She began tracing the outline of a red wine ring on the table. “Do people really quit after one day?”

  “Your sister took my measure this morning after knowing me for thirty seconds,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Yes, people probably did quit that fast. But people also took one look at her and assumed she had no more courage than a mouse, so what did they know?

  “I’m not going to quit, Mr. Parks,” she said. “Oscar asked me to help you, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. You’re not the only one with flaws, you know.”

  When he didn’t say anything, she held up her hand and started ticking off her own fingers.

  “I’m the baby of the family, and it shows. I’m dependent on my sisters for almost everything. I’ve never gone anywhere or done anything on my own.” She paused. This next one was going to be the toughest to get out.

  As if sensing that, Harrison cleared his throat. “Anything else?”

  She shifted in her seat. “I’m a little intimidated by you, to be honest.” She met his gaze and was surprised to find that he was regarding her with alarm. “But it won’t get in the way of the job, I promise. Bubbles is an amazing puppy, and I’ve got a whole training plan worked out for the next six weeks. I realize that neither one of us is what you were expecting when you signed on for a service dog, but I want to do this.”

  I can do this.

  “Please, Mr. Parks?” she asked, her voice wavering. Whatever bravery his confession had conjured in her was quickly waning under his continued scrutiny. “You might not think much of me yet, but I have a tendency to grow on people, I swear. I’m like a friendly goiter.”

  “Harrison,” he said.

  “What?”

  He sat up, no longer hunched as if ready to pounce. “If we’re going to be working together, I insist you call me Harrison.”

  Her first feeling was one of relief—she’d actually done it. She’d gotten through to him. He was going through with the plan and without Oscar being the one pulling the strings.

  Her second feeling was more difficult to pin down. This small victory was just the start of the process. If even one-tenth of the things Oscar had said about Harrison were true, there were countless skirmishes ahead.

  Strangely enough, she wasn’t scared by the prospect. She’d already engaged him in one battle and come out victorious. The idea of waging another cam
paign—a lengthy one this time—made her chest swell.

  She’d waited twenty-six years for an opportunity like this.

  She stuck her hand out, determined to make their partnership official. It was a good ten seconds before Harrison put her out of her misery, but the end result was worth it. His palm was callused and hard, his skin surprisingly cool for a man of his size. His grip was also much gentler than she expected. She assumed he’d have one of those hypermasculine handshakes, the kind that wrenched her arm out of its socket and nearly crushed the bones of her fingers, but as his palm lingered against hers, it felt more like he was holding her hand than striking a deal.

  But his next words were all business, gruff and pointed.

  “I guess you’d better bring me this damn dog already,” he said.

  She was unable to keep the surprise from showing on her face.

  He saw it, of course, and directed a wry, twisted grimace inward. “I warned you. Believe me when I say it’s for the best that we get this thing started. The sooner she learns how to tolerate me and save my life, the sooner I can get back to work.” He paused a beat and added, “And the sooner you can get back to a life without me in it.”

  * * *

  They both hated him.

  Harrison sat on the front lawn of the Vasquez sisters’ home, staring at a puppy that weighed about as much as a pineapple. Sophie had left the two of them alone with instructions for him to spend some quality time getting to know his new best friend.

  How he was supposed to do that, she hadn’t said. She’d just unleashed the animal and promised to return to check on them in ten minutes.

  She couldn’t get away from me fast enough, he thought grimly. And he had no one to blame for it but himself. As usual, he’d let his frustrations get the better of him, shown his true colors before he could realize the effect it might have on the innocent woman standing no more than a few feet away from him.

  Frustration was, unfortunately, his nemesis. No matter how many times he tried to act like a normal person, he always got buried under his own tongue. He tried to control himself, he really did, but the second that mounting feeling of helplessness took over, all bets were off.

  And so, it seemed, was Sophie.

  “Okay, Bubbles,” he said, trying out the dog’s name. Those perky syllables felt strange on his tongue, but they were no stranger than the golden-haired puffball eyeing him with a mixture of interest and caution. “I understand you’ve got a nose like no other. Show me what you can do with it.”

  Bubbles just blinked at him.

  “Okay, I hear you. New experiences can be scary—so can new people.” He thumbed a finger back toward the house. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m just as terrified of Sophie as she is of me. Probably more.”

  He took it as a good sign that Bubbles tilted her head at him in a look of inquiry. Maybe this puppy wasn’t such a bad choice after all. There was wisdom behind those raisin eyes.

  “Oh, I know it’s ridiculous, believe me,” he said. “She doesn’t seem capable of squishing a gnat. That’s the problem. She…”

  He frowned. He wasn’t sure what Sophie did, except make him feel like a large, ungainly lump. It wasn’t a new feeling for him, but this was the first time he wanted to be more approachable. Scaring pretty, defenseless women wasn’t a thing a man liked to boast of.

  “And who can blame her? Have you ever met anyone as bad at this as me?” He rolled onto his stomach and put his head closer to the puppy. The puppy, seeming to agree with him, barked nervously and backed away.

  Harrison sighed and propped his chin on his hands. Lolling in the damp grass with a puppy wasn’t how he’d pictured his day when he’d woken up this morning, but the truth was, he was grateful to wake up at all. In all his years as a type 1 diabetic, he’d only slipped into a coma one other time, an incident that had occurred during his sleep and led to his initial diagnosis. Even though he’d only been eight years old at the time, it wasn’t an experience he recommended. Few things were worse than going to bed only to wake up several days later in a hospital room with no recollection of any of it. A demon you couldn’t see coming was a demon you couldn’t face in a fair fight.

  And there it was again: that feeling of helplessness, the roiling start of frustration taking over.

  As if already trained to read his moods, Bubbles quivered.

  “It’s not you I’m upset with,” he said, soothing the puppy. The sight of that tiny body shaking in fear—because of him—plucked at a chord deep in his chest. “She said you were some kind of diabetes wizard, and I have no choice but to believe her. So let’s do this thing. There must be a way for us to fast-track our relationship.”

  Struck with sudden inspiration, Harrison reached into his breast pocket and extracted the granola bar he always carried in the event of blood sugar emergencies. Bubbles heard the crinkle of cellophane and immediately perked.

  “You greedy little minx.” He laughed. “Is this how it’s going to go? I have to bribe my way into your heart? It’s a good thing I always have snacks.”

  Since he doubted the dog’s stomach was much bigger than a golf ball, Harrison crumbled the bar into tiny pieces and began offering them one by one. Wary at first and then gaining interest, Bubbles eventually picked her way over the grass and started accepting the morsels from his fingertips. With each bite of her tiny jaws, her fear seemed to diminish. A quarter of the bar in and she was actually approaching him of her own volition.

  “If only it were this easy to gain a person’s affection,” he said. “I doubt I could hand-feed Sophie and get the same response.”

  A sharp female voice sounded above his head. “What are you doing?”

  He rolled over to find Sophie standing with her hands on her hips and a look of consternation on her face. At first, he was afraid she’d overheard his conversation with the dog. To explain his remarks and admit that he only meant he wanted her to like him—not that he wanted her to sit in his lap and take food from his fingertips—was unthinkable. There was no way he’d get through that explanation without making a bungle of it.

  After a moment, however, she set him to rights. “You can’t give a service dog table scraps.” She swooped down to take the granola bar package from him. “She’s not a pet. She’s your companion.”

  Bubbles gave a tiny growl and attempted to take the snack back from Sophie with a leap that lifted her an impressive two inches into the air.

  “See? You’ve had her for ten minutes, and she’s already acting like a spoiled lapdog.” With a stern lowering of her brow, Sophie turned her attention to the puppy. “No, Bubbles. You don’t get to speak to me like that.”

  Bubbles reacted instinctively to the command in Sophie’s voice. She sat and gulped, looking up at her trainer with a remarkable amount of remorse. Harrison was tempted to do the same.

  Since he wasn’t an adorable two-pound ball of fur, however, he settled for a gruff, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t know.”

  At the sound of his voice, all of the indignation in Sophie’s stance melted away. Her eyes widened and a stricken flush colored her cheeks. He could tell he’d done it again—scared her with his inability to react to situations like a normal human being.

  “No,” she said, flustered. “No, of course you didn’t.”

  He attempted to heal the breach by drawing to his feet, but all that did was highlight the difference in their sizes. At six feet tall, Harrison was hardly a giant, but he felt every inch like it was mile, each one carrying him farther away from her.

  In an effort to regain some of that lost ground, he said, “Okay, so no table scraps. What other rules should I know about?”

  Sophie eyed him with misgiving. “Haven’t you ever had a dog before?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Really? Not even as a kid?”

  “We weren’t a cozy,
white-picket-fence-and-puppy sort of family. I never even had a goldfish.”

  “Well, you can’t feed table scraps to goldfish either,” she said. “In case it ever comes up.”

  He was startled into a laugh. She was doing it again—making jokes. About him, with him. “My ignorance doesn’t extend that far, thankfully. Can I at least pet her and stuff?”

  Sophie shifted from one leg to another, watching him with a wariness he couldn’t easily explain. It wasn’t a scared wariness; it was more worry, like she was regretting her promise to train both him and Bubbles.

  Like she wasn’t sure he’d be able to make this work.

  But he could. And he would too. He might not be a prince charming, but he wasn’t an ogre either. At least, not most of the time.

  “You mean I can’t pet her?” he asked.

  “When she’s working, no. You need her to be alert and focused on you, more like an employee than a friend. But during her off time?” She shrugged. “Absolutely. She still needs to be loved, just like everyone else.”

  “Just like everyone else?” he echoed.

  “Yes. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?” Sophie’s voice took on a sharp edge—the same one that had caught his attention in the kennel that morning. “I know she’s not the Great Dane of your dreams, but there’s a lot to like about her. Contrary to what you might think, being giant and strong isn’t everything.”

  Harrison found himself rooted to the spot, more intrigued than insulted by the challenge in her voice. People didn’t speak to him like that very often. Well, Oscar did, but he hardly counted—he’d practically known the man since birth. He’d only known this woman for all of an hour. Although she might claim to be scared of him, something about that puppy brought out the steel in her.

  He wished he knew what it was. His own glance down at that minuscule creature, so helpless and vulnerable, only brought a frown. Bubbles sat exactly where Sophie had told her, awaiting her next command. She was like a stuffed toy soldier, ready to head into battle for no reason other than it was asked of her. The doubts that had assailed him since the start of this preposterous scheme returned anew. He’d been prepared for a big, badass canine companion to head into the flames with him, alert to the changes in his blood sugar that resulted from hard labor and shifts that often lasted more than twenty-four hours. To ask such a sacrifice of a Great Dane or a bulldog or even that nice golden retriever seemed natural.