Diamond In The Ruff

Smiling at her, he made a quick assessment before he spoke. “This isn’t your dog, is it?”

Lily looked at the veterinarian, stunned. “How can you tell?” she asked.

All she had given the receptionist out front was her name. The dark-haired woman had immediately nodded and told her that “Mrs. Manetti called to say you’d be coming in.” The young woman at the desk, Erika, had then proceeded to call over one of the veterinary aides, who promptly ushered her and Jonathan into an exam room. As far as she knew, no details about her nonrelationship to the animal she’d brought in had been given.

Maybe she was wrong, Lily realized belatedly.

“Did Theresa tell you that?” she asked.

“Theresa?” Christopher repeated, confused.

Okay, wrong guess, Lily decided. She shook her head. “Never mind,” she told him, then repeated her initial question. “How can you tell he’s not mine?” Was there some sort of look that pet owners had? Some sort of inherent sign that the civilian non–pet owners obviously seemed to lack?

Christopher nodded toward the antsy puppy who looked as if he was ready to race around all four of the exam room’s corners almost simultaneously. “He has a rope around his neck,” Christopher pointed out.

He probably equated that with cruelty to animals, Lily thought. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” she told him, then explained her thinking. “I made a loop and tied a rope to it because I didn’t have any other way to make sure that he would follow me.”

There was a stirring vulnerability about the young woman with the long, chestnut hair. It pulled him in. Christopher looked at her thoughtfully, taking care not to allow his amusement at her action to show. Some people were thin-skinned and would construe that as being laughed at. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

“No leash,” he concluded.

“No leash,” Lily confirmed. Then, because she thought that he needed more information to go on—and she had no idea what was and wasn’t important when it came to assessing the health of a puppy—she went on to tell the good-looking vet, “I found him on my doorstep—I tripped over him, actually.”

The way she said it led Christopher to his next conclusion. “And I take it that you don’t know who he belongs to?”

“No, I don’t. If I did,” Lily added quickly, “I would have brought him back to his owner. But I’ve never seen him before this morning.”

“Then how do you know the dog’s name is Jonathan?” As far as he could see, the puppy had no dog tags.

She shrugged almost as if she was dismissing the question. “I don’t.”

Christopher looked at her a little more closely. Okay, he thought, something was definitely off here. “When you brought him in, you told my receptionist that his name was Jonathan.”

“That’s what I call him,” she responded quickly, then explained, “I didn’t want to just refer to him as ‘puppy’ or ‘hey, you’ so I gave him a name.” The young woman shrugged and the simple gesture struck him as being somewhat hapless. “He seems to like it. At least he looks up at me when I call him by that name.”

Christopher didn’t want her being under the wrong impression, even if there was no real harm in thinking that way.

“The right intonation does that,” he told Lily. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” Christopher went on, lowering his voice as if this was a guarded confession he was about to impart. “He’d respond to ‘Refrigerator’ if you said it the same way.”

To prove his point, Christopher moved around the exam table until he was directly behind the puppy. Once there, he called, “Refrigerator!” and Jonathan turned his head around to look at him, taking a few follow-up steps in order to better see who was calling him.

His point proven, Christopher glanced at the woman. “See?”

She nodded, but in Christopher’s opinion the woman appeared more overwhelmed than convinced. He had been born loving animals, and as far back as he could remember, his world had been filled with critters large and small. He had an affinity for them, something that his mother had passed on to him.

He was of the mind that everyone should have a pet and that pets improved their owners’ quality of life—as well as vice versa.

“Just how long have you and Jonathan been together?” he asked. His guess was that it couldn’t have been too long because she and the puppy hadn’t found their proper rhythm yet.

Lily glanced at her watch before she answered the vet. “In ten minutes it’ll be three hours—or so,” she replied.

“Three hours,” he repeated.

“Or so,” she added in a small voice. Christopher paused for a moment. Studying the petite, attractive young woman before him, his eyes crinkled with the smile that was taking over his face.

“You’ve never had a dog before, have you?” The question was rhetorical. He should have seen this from the very start. The woman definitely did not seem at ease around the puppy.

“It shows?” She didn’t know which she felt more, surprised or embarrassed by the question.

“You look like you’re afraid of Jonathan,” he told her.

“I’m not,” she protested with a bit too much feeling. Then, when the vet made no comment but continued looking at her, she dialed her defensiveness back a little. “Well, not entirely.” And then, after another beat, she amended that by saying, “He’s cute and everything, but he has these teeth...”

Christopher suppressed a laugh. “Most dogs do. At least,” he corrected himself, thinking of a neglected dog he’d treated at the city’s animal shelter just the other day, “the healthy ones do.”

She wasn’t expressing herself correctly, Lily realized. But then, communication was sometimes hard for her. Her skill lay in the pastries she created, not in getting her thoughts across to people she didn’t know.

Lily tried again. “But Jonathan’s always biting,”

“There’s a reason for that. He’s teething,” Christopher told her. “When I was a kid, I had a cousin like that,” he confided. “Chewed on everything and everyone until all his baby teeth came in.”

As if to illustrate what he was saying, she saw the puppy attempt to sink his teeth into the vet’s hand. Instead of yelping, Christopher laughed, rubbed the Labrador’s head affectionately. Before Jonathan could try to bite him a second time, the vet pulled a rubber squeaky toy out of his lab coat pocket. Distracted, Jonathan went after the toy—a lime-green octopus with wiggly limbs.

High-pitched squeaks filled the air in direct proportion to the energy the puppy was expending chewing on his new toy.

Just for a second, there was a touch of envy in her eyes when she raised them to his face, Christopher thought. Her cheeks were also turning a very light shade of pink.

“You probably think I’m an idiot,” Lily told him.

The last thing he wanted was for her to think he was judging her—harshly or otherwise. But he could admit he was attracted to her.

“What I think,” he corrected, “is that you might need a little help and guidance here.”

Oh, God, yes, she almost exclaimed out loud, managing to bite the gush of words back at the last moment. Instead, she asked hopefully, “You have a book for me to read?”

Christopher inclined his head. He had something a little more personal and immediate in mind. “If you’d like to read one, I have several I could recommend,” he conceded. “But personally, I’ve always found it easier when I had something visual to go on.”

“Like a DVD?” she asked, not altogether sure what he meant by his statement.

Christopher grinned. “More like a P-E-R-S-O-N.”

For just a second, Lily found herself getting caught up in the vet’s grin. Something akin to a knot—or was that a butterfly?—twisted around in her stomach. Rousing herself, Lily blinked, certain that she’d somehow misunderstood the veterinarian.

From his handsome, dimpled face, to his dirty-blond hair, to his broad shoulders, the man was a symphony of absolute charm and she was rather accustomed to being almost invisible around people who came across so dynamically. The more vibrant they were, the more understated she became, as if she was shrinking in the sunlight of their effervescence.

Given that, it seemed almost implausible to her that Christopher was saying what it sounded as if he was saying. But in the interest of clarity, she had to ask, “Are you volunteering to help me with the dog?”

To her surprise, rather than appearing annoyed or waving away the question entirely, he laughed. “If you have to ask, I must be doing it wrong, but yes, I’m volunteering.” Then he backtracked slightly as if another thought had occurred to him. “Unless, of course, your husband or boyfriend or significant other has some objections to my mentoring you through the hallowed halls of puppy ownership.”