Operation Soldier Next Door

It really wasn’t fair, Lacy thought as she paused in the garden to check the status of her recently transplanted tomatoes.

Grumpy people should look it, wear permanent scowls or have eyebrows forever lowered over irritated expressions.

They should not be tall, built and sexy, with gorgeous hazel eyes that seemed to change color as you looked.

So quit looking, she ordered herself.

Besides, no amount of sexy attractiveness made up for coldness toward an innocent animal. A helpful innocent animal, in fact. Hadn’t the dog discovered the source of the explosion, led the investigator right to it?

She herself found the dog charming, with his alert look and apparently instinctive knowledge of what was needed. He’d gotten her prickly neighbor to sit down when he needed to, when he’d been clearly determined to stay on his unsteady feet, hadn’t he? The dog was clever and—

Here.

She thought he’d gone, but Cutter had merely decamped to her yard and was now approaching her, slowly. She straightened from her inspection of a branch filled with tiny yellow blossoms that would hopefully become tasty, sweet, homegrown tomatoes, and some that had already begun growing tiny green rounds the size of a pea. She smiled at him.

“Well, hello, my fine lad. Looking for a better welcome? You’ll certainly find that here.”

At her first words, or maybe her tone, the dog’s tail began to wag and he trotted up to her. She was scratching his ears, smiling at the way he leaned into it. When she glanced back next door, she almost hoped her new neighbor was there, noticing the welcome the dog was getting here. A proper welcome for a sweet dog. The kind of welcome Martin would have given him. Funny, she still thought of the house as Martin’s, even though—

He was there, all right. Movement caught her gaze, and she looked in time to see him bend to pick up the tools he’d been using to affix the panel she’d provided over the damage. But he suddenly stopped, grabbing at his left shoulder in an oddly jerky motion. As he rubbed at the back of it, she remembered the scar. And the new damage done in the blast. Remorse flooded her. He had reason to be cranky. She chastised herself for judging—again—and vowed not to do it anymore, no matter how grouchy Tate McLaughlin got.

A sudden bark from Cutter drew her attention back. It was a short, happy sound, and the dog whirled and left at a run. Lacy wasn’t surprised when she looked up to see the Foxworths approaching. She followed, albeit much more slowly, smiling as they got nearer.

“Morning,” she called out.

“Hi,” Hayley Foxworth said. “Sorry about the trespasser. He just took off on us. I think he wanted to be sure everything was okay around here.”

Lacy nodded. “He checked out next door first, but my neighbor’s in a mood.” Remembering her vow she added, “I think he’s hurting a bit.”

“New or old?” Quinn asked.

“Both, I think,” Lacy said, assuming he was asking if there were any aftereffects from last night. She indicated the back of her own left shoulder. “He was kind of rubbing at the scar there.”

“Poor guy,” Hayley said.

“Don’t say that to him,” Quinn recommended. “I doubt he’d appreciate it.”

“I’m not sure he appreciates anything at the moment,” Lacy said frankly. “Not that he doesn’t have cause,” she hastened to add.

“It was a heck of a welcome to the neighborhood,” Hayley said. “We should go apologize for Cutter’s intrusion.”

“Apparently so.” Quinn’s tone was dry, and when his wife gave him a curious look he nodded toward their dog, who was already started that way. Cutter paused and looked back over his shoulder, and Lacy would have sworn his expression said, “Hurry up!”

Hayley smiled. “You know he’s got a plan.”

“He always does,” Quinn agreed, but with a roll of his eyes.

“And Tate has a problem.”

“Yes. That was definitely Cutter’s ‘fix it’ look last night.”

Lacy watched the exchange in quiet fascination, and when they started to follow the dog, she went along. Torn between what to ask first, she blurted out both of her questions. “This is a dog we’re talking about, right? And do you mean more of a problem than what happened last night?”

Hayley grinned at her. “Sort of, and yes.”

Lacy blinked. “In that order?”

Hayley laughed. “Yes.”

So, Cutter was “sort of” a dog who somehow knew that Tate had more of a problem than a freak explosion that had taken out a big chunk of his wall, barely feet from where he would have been sleeping had he not been too tired to make it to the bed? She wondered what on earth could be more of a problem than coming that close to dying, so soon after surviving another close call. It had to be big, to top that.

Then she realized she was taking them seriously about the animal knowing about said problem. She knew dogs could be incredibly sensitive and perceptive about their humans, but Tate was a complete stranger. Yet Quinn and Hayley, two perfectly normal people she suspected were very smart, had accepted easily that their dog not only knew about this problem, but had A Plan.

She watched as Cutter came to a halt, not near the hole in the wall and the temporary fix, but near the back door that opened out onto the flagstone patio Martin had been so rightfully proud of, having done it himself. The dog sat and stared at that back door as if willing it to open, sort of in the way she’d seen border collies will sheep to do their bidding.

Quinn and Hayley waited silently. Or, at least, not communicating with words; she saw them look at each other and guessed they were one of those couples who didn’t always need to talk to know what each other was thinking. Or apparently what their dog was thinking.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know dogs were amazing. She loved them, had often thought about adopting one since she’d moved here, but she’d been too busy getting her home-based tutoring service up and couldn’t give an animal the attention it deserved.

And she could accept that Cutter was particularly perceptive; she’d seen it herself. But however sensitive, perceptive and amazing dogs were, it was a jump from that to reading minds, hearts and the unseen. Wasn’t it?

“What kind of problem do you think he has?” It was all she could think of to say.

“Quinn has his doubts about the explosion,” Hayley said.

Lacy frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said last night,” Quinn answered. “It takes a great deal to get one of those tanks to explode. Just a leaky or open valve wouldn’t do it. It takes something like that plus extreme heat.”

“You mean it must have caught fire?”

“Even then the escaping vapor would likely just burn, not explode. But if that second tank was close, or stacked on top of the leaking one...”

“Then it would explode?”

“Could.”

Lacy looked toward Martin’s house. Her brows lowered in puzzlement. “But how could it just catch fire?”

“Exactly,” Quinn said, his voice grim.

She was pondering the ramifications of that when Hayley said quietly, “Here he comes. Probably wondering what we’re all doing out here.”

The door Cutter had been so intent on swung open. Tate stepped out and let it shut on its own behind him. He stopped a yard or so away. Outside personal space, Lacy thought. Expressing that he didn’t consider them friends enough to get closer? Wary, or just unsociable? Or perhaps just plain rude?

“Make a habit of trespassing?” were his first words.

Lacy’s brows rose. Okay, rude won that one, she thought.