Diamond in the Ruff (Matchmaking Mamas Book 13) (9 page)

Lily quickly shut down any stray emotions that threatened to overwhelm her.

“Sorry,” she apologized to the puppy. She opened the rear passenger door a crack—just wide enough to allow her to grab his leash. She was learning. “I didn’t mean to forget about you,” she told the dog.

Getting a firm hold of the leash, Lily opened the door all the way.

Jonathan needed no further encouragement. He came bounding out, savoring his freedom like a newly released prisoner after a lengthy incarceration.

“Easy,” she cautioned. “Easy now!”

The words had absolutely no effect on Jonathan, a fact that only managed to frustrate her. And then she remembered what Christopher had taught the dog—and relatedly, what he had taught her.

Grabbing a firmer hold on the leash, she said in the most authoritative-sounding voice she could summon, “Jonathan, stay!”

The dog abruptly stopped trotting toward the house and stood as still as a statue, waiting for her to “release” him from her verbal hold with the single word Christopher had told her to use.

Getting her bearings, Lily turned toward the front of the house so that the dog wouldn’t catch her off guard when he resumed running. Only then did she say, “Okay,” in the same authoritative voice.

Just as she’d expected, the very next moment Jonathan was back to bounding toward the front door.

Lily was right on his heels. “Someday, dog, you are just going to have to get a grip on that enthusiasm of yours. But I guess that day isn’t going to be today,” she said, resigned to having a barely harnessed tiger by the tail—at least for a few more weeks.

The veterinarian’s idea of having her drop the dog off at his animal hospital each morning was beginning to sound better and better, she thought as she unlocked her front door.

Once Jonathan had passed over the threshold, she let the leash go and entered the house herself. She locked her front door a moment later. There had been several break-ins in the development in the past couple of months and she was determined that her house was not going to be part of those statistics.

Turning from the door, Lily looked down at the dog. “Looks like we’re on our own tonight, Jonathan. But that’s okay, we don’t need Christopher around. We’ll do just fine without him.”

The dog whined in response.

Lily sighed, sinking down on the couch. “I know, I know, who am I kidding? We’re not really fine on our own, but we just have to make the best of it, right? Glad to hear you agree,” she told the dog, pretending to take his silence as agreement.

She thought of the housebreaking lessons that lay ahead of her. No time like the present, right?

“What do you say to having some superearly dinner. We’ll fill that tummy of yours and then spend the rest of the evening trying to empty it. Sound like fun to you?” she asked, looking at the puppy. “Me, neither,” she agreed. “But what has to be done, has to be done, so we might as well get started. The sooner this sinks in for you, the happier both of us are going to be.”

Just then, she heard her cell phone ringing. Her first thought was that Theresa had gotten another booking and wanted to run a few desserts past her to see what she thought of them.

Grabbing her purse, she began to dig through the chaotic interior to locate her phone.

“Why is it always on the bottom?” she asked the dog, who just looked at her as if she was speaking in some foreign language. “You’re no help,” she murmured. “Ah, here it is.” Triumphantly, she pulled the phone out of the depths of her purse.

Just before she pressed “accept” she automatically looked at the caller ID.

The caller’s name jumped out at her: Christopher Whitman.

Chapter Eight

L
ily pressed the green band labeled “accept” on her cell. “Hello?”

“Lily, hi, it’s Chris.” The deep voice on the other end of the line seemed to fill the very air around her the moment he began to speak. “I’m afraid there’s been a change of plans. I’m not going to be able to make it over to your place.”

“I kind of figured that part out already,” she told him, trying very hard to sound casual about the whole thing, rather than disappointed, which she was. While she had more or less assumed that he wasn’t going to come over, she had to admit that there was still a small part of her that had held out hope when she saw that the incoming call was from him.

Ordinarily, Christopher would have just left it at that, ending the call by saying goodbye with no further explanation.

But he didn’t want to, not this time.

He’d always been nothing if not honest with himself and he had to admit that this was
not
an ordinary, run-of-the-mill situation. Not for him. He wasn’t sure just what it actually was at this point, but he did know that he wanted to be able to keep all his options open—just in case.

“Rhonda was hit by a car,” he told Lily.

“Oh, my God, how awful.” Lily’s sympathies instantly rushed to the foreground, completely wiping out every other emotion in its path, even though the person’s name meant nothing to her. He hadn’t mentioned the woman before, but she obviously meant a great deal to him. “Is there anything at all that I can do to help?”

“No, I’ve got it covered,” he told her. “But I’d like to take a rain check on that home training session if it’s okay with you.”

“Sure, absolutely.” Her words came out in a rush. The thought of car accidents always ran a cold chill down her spine. She could relate to loss easily. At times she felt
too
easily. “Don’t give it another thought. Go be with Rhonda.”

Whoever that was, she added silently.

It occurred to her that she had no idea if Christopher was talking about a friend, a relative, or possibly a girlfriend, or someone more significant to him than that. What she did know was that the event itself sounded absolutely terrible and she really felt for him.

It did cause her to wonder how he could have even spared a single thought about helping her to start housebreaking Jonathan at a time like this. The man either had an exceedingly big heart, or she was missing something here.

“I really hope she pulls through, Christopher,” Lily told him in all sincerity.

She heard silence on the other end. Just when she’d decided that the connection had been lost or terminated, she heard Christopher respond.

“Yeah, me, too.”

“Let me know how she’s doing—if you get a chance,” Lily added hastily. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was being clingy or pushy at a time like this.

It might have been her imagination, but she thought he sounded a little strange, or possibly slightly confused, as he said, “Yeah, sure.” And then his voice became more urgent and almost gruff as she heard him tell her, “I have to go.”

The line went dead.

She stood looking at her cell phone for a long moment, even though there was no one on the other end anymore.

“Guess it really is just the two of us, Jonathan.” The Labrador made a yipping sound, as if in agreement.

Putting her cell phone down on the coffee table, Lily went to the kitchen to see if her landline’s answering machine had any incoming calls on it. She hadn’t had a chance to check today’s messages and wondered if there were any messages on it from a frantic dog owner who had seen one of her posters.

She had a total of three calls waiting to be heard. For a moment, she stood looking at the blinking light, considering erasing the calls without playing them. Lily reasoned that if she didn’t hear the message, she wouldn’t be responsible for not returning the call.

C’mon, Lil, since when is ignorance the kind of excuse you want to hide behind? You were eager enough to get rid of Mr. Ball of Fur when you first found him, remember? You wouldn’t have posted all those flyers everywhere if you weren’t.

While that was true enough then, she’d had a change of heart in these past few hours. Actually, now that she thought of it, her change of heart had been ongoing and gradual.

With all the problems that having this puppy in her life generated, she still found herself reluctant to just hand him over to some stranger, to in effect close her eyes and banish him from her life.

Lily shook her head, looking at the puppy again. It was amazing to her how quickly she could get used to another creature roaming around in her space.

“You’re getting attached again, Lil,” she reprimanded herself sternly. “You know that was something you didn’t want happening.”

Well, whether or not she wanted it, Lily thought, looking down at the dog again, it was now official. She
liked
this moving repository of continually falling fur.
Really
liked him.

“So, what do you want to do first?” she asked Jonathan.

And then her eyes widened as she saw his tail go up in that peculiar way he had of making it look like one half of a squared parenthesis. The next moment, she remembered the only time he did that was when he wanted to eliminate wastes from his body.

“Oh, no, no, no, you don’t,” she insisted.

Grabbing him by his collar—his leash was temporarily missing in action—keeping her fingers as loose as she could within the confining space, she quickly pulled the dog to the rear of the house and ultimately, to the sliding glass back door.

All the while she kept repeating only one order: “Hold it, hold it, hold it!”

She finally stopped saying that the moment she got Jonathan into the backyard. And that was when the energetic puppy let loose. She would have preferred he hadn’t made his deposit on the cement patio instead of in the grass just beyond that strip, but in her opinion that was still a whole lot better than having that same thing transpire on the rug or—heaven forbid—the travertine in the kitchen. The latter would become permanently stained if she wasn’t extremely quick about cleaning up every last trace of Jonathan’s evacuation process.

“You finished?” she asked the dog. As if in response, he trotted back to the sliding glass door, wanting readmittance to the house. “Okay, I’ll take that as a yes,” she told the animal gamely. “But I want to hear the moment you think you have another overwhelming urge to part company with your breakfast or any of those treats you all but mugged me for in the park.”

Acting as if his mistress had lapsed into silence rather than putting him on notice, Jonathan immediately began sniffing around the corners of the room, making no secret of the fact that he was foraging.

He was able to stick his nose in and under all the tight spots, where the cabinets just fell short of meeting the floor. Crumbs had a habit of residing there and Jonathan was hunting crumbs in lieu of snaring any bigger game.

Lily observed his progress. “You’re not going to find anything,” she warned the animal. “I keep a very clean house—which means that if you have any further ideas about parting ways with your fur—
don’t.
I’ve got better things to do than vacuum twice a day because you shed 24/7.” She turned toward the pantry. “C’mon, I’ll give you your dinner—and then I’d appreciate it if you just stretched out over there on the floor by the sofa and went to sleep.”

She put Jonathan’s food out first, then went to fix something for herself.

The puppy, she noticed out of the corner of her eye, instantly vacuumed up what she’d put into his bowl. Finished, he came over to sit at her feet in the kitchen, waiting for her to either drop something on the floor or pity him enough to share her dinner with him.

“Eye me all you want with those big, sad, puppy eyes of yours,” she told him firmly. “It’s not happening. While I’m in charge of taking care of you, you’re not about to turn into some huge treat-based blimp.”

If he understood her—or appreciated her looking out for his health—Jonathan gave her no indication of it. Instead, he seemed to turn into just a massive, needy, walking stomach, ready to desperately sell his little doggie soul for a morsel of food.

Lily had every intention of remaining firm. She held out for as long as she could, looking everywhere but down as she ate. But he got to her. She could
feel
Jonathan pathetically staring at her. And while she knew she was partially responsible inasmuch as she was reading into that expression, she found she couldn’t hold out against the canine indefinitely.

With a sigh, she broke off a piece of the sandwich she settled on having and put it on the floor in front of Jonathan. It was gone, disappearing behind his lips faster than she could have executed a double take. She’d barely sat up straight in the chair again.

Looking at the animal, Lily could only shake her head incredulously. “Certainly wouldn’t want to be marooned on a deserted island with the likes of you. Two days into it and you’d be eyeing me like I was a pile of raw pork chops—center cut,” she added for good measure.

Jonathan barked and she was sure that he was voicing his agreement.

After clearing away the two dishes and the bowl that she had used, Lily found herself way too wound up as well as just too restless to go to bed or even to watch some mundane television program with the hopes that
it
would put her to sleep.

It was Sunday night and as a rule, there was simply nothing worthwhile watching on any of the countless cable channels that she received at that time.

Still, it was far too quiet without the TV, so she switched it on as she washed off the dishes. She kept it on as soothing background noise, glancing at it occasionally just to see if anything interesting turned up.

It never did.

Without anything to watch and with her new four-footed companion sleeping in the corner, Lily did what she always did when she needed to unwind.

She baked.

She started by taking out everything that might lend itself to baking pastries and lining up the various containers, boxes and jars, large and small, on the far side of the kitchen counter. Seeing what she had to work with, Lily decided what to make.

She was on her third batch of Bavarian-style pastries—low-fat just to prove her point that baking didn’t necessarily mean fattening—when she heard the doorbell ring.

The dog’s head, she noticed, instantly went up. The dog had gone from zero to sixty in half a second. Jonathan was wide-awake and completely alert.

“Hold that pose, I might need you,” she told Jonathan.

Wiping her hands, she went to the front door. Her furry shadow came with her. She didn’t bother wasting time by telling him to stay. Having him there beside her generated an aura of safety that had been missing from her life for a while now. Mentally, she crossed her fingers and hoped it wasn’t anyone in response to the flyer.

Instead of looking through the peephole, which she found usually distorted the person on the other side of the door, she called out, “Who is it and what are you doing here?”

“Dr. Chris Whitman and I’ve come to apologize.”

Lily’s heart ramped up its pace. She fumbled with the lock as she flipped it.

“You already apologized. Don’t you remember?” she asked as she opened the door for him. “When you called to tell me you weren’t coming, you apologized over the phone.”

He remembered, but it hadn’t seemed nearly adequate enough to him. And besides, after what he’d just been through, he didn’t want to immediately go home to his empty house. He wanted to see a friendly face, talk to a friendly person—and relax in her company. The very fact that he did was a surprise to him since toward the end, he felt nothing but relief to get out of his relationship with Irene.

But then, Lily wasn’t Irene. “Then I’ve come to apologize again,” he amended. “And I’m still Dr. Chris Whitman,” he added cheerfully, referring to her initial inquiry through the door.

“You didn’t have to apologize the first time,” she told him. “I mean, it was nice that you thought you had to, but I understand. You had a crisis to handle. By the way, how is she doing?”

He nodded, as if to preface what he was about to say with a visual confirmation. “She’s actually doing better than I expected. It looks like she’s going to pull through.”

It had been touch and go for a while there. It wasn’t as if this was the first operation he’d ever performed but it was by far the most demanding and he had done extensive volunteer work at several animal shelters. The five-year-old Irish setter had required a great deal of delicate work.

“That’s wonderful news,” Lily said, genuinely pleased. She had to raise her voice because Jonathan had decided to become vocal. The animal obviously felt that he was being ignored by the two people in the room, most especially by the man he had taken such a shine to. “But what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be back at the hospital with her?”

Christopher crouched down to scratch the puppy behind his ears. Jonathan fell over on the floor, clearly in ecstasy.

“Under normal circumstances,” Christopher agreed, “I might have stayed the night, but Lara’s there. She volunteered to take over this shift. And my number’s on speed dial if anything comes up.”

That was rather an odd way to put it, Lily thought. Out loud she repeated, “Lara?” Another woman? Just how many women were part of this man’s life?

“Yes.” He realized that he probably hadn’t properly introduced Lily to everyone by name the one time she’d been at his animal hospital. “She’s one of the animal techs. You met her the other day when you brought Jonny in to see me.”

Lily came to a skidding halt mentally. She put up her hand to stop the flow of his words for a minute. She needed to get her head—not to mention facts—straight.

“You have one of your animal techs watching over Rhonda?” Lily asked incredulously, trying her best to unscramble what Christopher was telling her.

“Yes. Why? What’s wrong?” he asked, mystified by the very strange expression that Lily had on her face right now. “It’s not like this is her first time.”