Diamond In The Ruff

Her self-image—that of being a single person—was so ingrained in her that Lily just assumed she came across that way. That the vet made such a stipulation seemed almost foreign to her.

“There’s no husband or boyfriend or significant other to object to anything,” she informed the man.

She was instantly rewarded with the flash of another dimpled grin. “Oh, well then, unless you have any objections, I can accompany you to the local dog park this weekend for some pointers.”

She hadn’t even been aware that there was a dog park anywhere, much less one here in Bedford, but she kept that lack of knowledge to herself.

“Although,” the vet was saying, “I do have one thing to correct already.”

Lily braced herself for criticism as she asked, “What am I doing wrong?”

Christopher shook his head. “Not you, me,” he told her affably. “I just said puppy ownership.”

She was still in the dark as to where this was going. “Yes, I know, I heard you.”

“Well, that’s actually wrong,” he told her. “That phrase would indicate that you owned the puppy when in reality—”

“The puppy owns me?” she guessed. Where else could he be headed with this? She could very easily see the puppy taking over.

But Christopher shook his head. “You own each other, and sometimes even those lines get a little blurred,” he admitted, then went on to tell her, “You do it right and your pet becomes part of your family and you become part of his family.”

For a moment, Lily forgot to resist experiencing the exact feelings that the vet was talking about. Instead, just for that one sliver of time, she allowed herself to believe that she was part of something larger than just herself, and it promised to ease the loneliness she was so acutely aware of whenever she wasn’t at work.

Whenever she left the people she worked with and returned to her house and her solitary existence.

The next moment, she forced herself to lock down and pull back, retreating into the Spartan world she’d resided in ever since she’d lost her mother.

“That sounds like something I once read in a children’s book,” she told him politely.

“Probably was,” Christopher willingly conceded. “Children see the world far more honestly than we do. They don’t usually have to make up excuses or search for ways to explain away what they feel—they just feel,” he said with emphasis as well as no small amount of admiration.

And then he got back to the business at hand. “Since you can count the length of your relationship with Jonathan in hours, I take it that means you have no information regarding his rather short history.”

She shook her head. “None whatsoever, I’m afraid,” she confessed.

Christopher took it all in stride. He turned his attention to his four-footed patient. “Well, I’m making a guess as to his age—”

Curious about the sort of procedures that involved, she asked, “How can you do that?”

“His teeth,” Christopher pointed out. “The same teeth he’s been trying out on you,” he added with an indulgent smile that seemed incredibly sexy to her. “He’s got his baby teeth. He appears to be a purebred Labrador, so there aren’t any stray factors to take into account regarding his size and growth pattern. Given his teeth and the size of his paws in comparison to the rest of him, I’d say he’s no more than five or six weeks old. And I think I can also safely predict that he’s going to be a very large dog, given the size of the paws he’s going to grow into,” the vet concluded.

She looked down at the puppy. Jonathan seemed to be falling all over himself in an attempt to engage the vet’s attention. No matter which way she sliced it, the puppy was cute—as long as he wasn’t actively biting her.

“Well, I guess that’s something I’m not going to find out,” she murmured, more to herself than to the man on the other side of the exam table.

Christopher watched her with deep curiosity in his eyes. “Do you mind if I ask why not?”

“No.”

“No?” he repeated, not really certain what the answer pertained to.

Her mind was really working in slow motion today, Lily thought, upbraiding herself. “I mean no, I don’t mind you asking.”

When there was no further information following that up, he coaxed, “And the answer to my question is—?”

“Oh.”

More blushing accompanied the single-syllable word. She really was behaving like the proverbial village idiot. Lily upbraided herself. What in heaven’s name had come over her? It was like her brain had been dipped in molasses and couldn’t rinse itself off in order to return to its normal speed—or even the bare semblance of going half-speed.

“Because as soon as I leave here with Jonathan, I’m going to make some flyers and post them around town,” she told the vet. She was rather a fair sketch artist when she put her mind to it and planned to create a likeness of this puppy to use on the poster. “Somebody’s got to be out looking for him.”

“If you’re not planning on keeping him, why did you bring him in to be examined?”

She would have thought that he, as a vet, would have thought the reason was self-explanatory. She told him anyway.

“Well, I didn’t want to take a chance that there might be something wrong with him. I wouldn’t want to neglect taking care of something just because I wasn’t keeping it,” she answered.

“So you’re like a drive-by Good Samaritan?”

She shrugged off what might have been construed as a compliment. From her point of view, there was really nothing to compliment. She was only doing what anyone else in her place would do—if they had any kind of a conscience, Lily silently qualified.

Out loud, she merely replied, “Yes, something like that.”

“I guess ‘Jonathan’ here was lucky it was your front step he picked to camp out on.” He crouched down to the dog’s level. “Aren’t you, boy?” he asked with affection, stroking the puppy’s head again.

As before, the dog reacted with enthusiasm, driving the top of his head into the vet’s hand as well as leaning in to rub his head against Christopher’s side.

Watching the puppy, Lily thought that the Labrador was trying to meld with the vet.

“Tell you what,” Christopher proposed after giving the puppy a quick examination and rising back up again, “since he seems healthy enough, why don’t we hold off until after this weekend before continuing with this exam? Then, if no one responds to your ‘found’ flyers, you bring Jonathan here back and I’ll start him out on his series of immunizations.”

“Immunizations?” Lily questioned.

By the sound of her voice, it seemed to Christopher that the shapely young woman hadn’t given that idea any thought at all. But then she’d admitted that she’d never had a pet before, so her lack of knowledge wasn’t really that unusual.

“Dogs need to be immunized, just like kids,” he told her.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a stray fact fell into place. She recalled having heard that once or twice. “Right,” she murmured.

Christopher smiled in response to her tacit agreement. “And,” he continued, “if you don’t get a call from a frantic owner by this weekend, why don’t we make a date to meet at the park on Sunday, say about eleven o’clock?” he further suggested.

“A date,” she echoed.

Given the way her eyes had widened, the word date was not the one he should have used, Christopher realized. It had been carelessly thrown out there on his part.

Very smoothly, Christopher extricated himself from what could potentially be a very sticky situation. “Yes, but I have a feeling that Jonathan might not be comfortable with my advertising the situation, so for simplicity’s sake—and possibly to save Jonathan’s reputation,” he amended with a wink that had her stomach doing an unexpected jackknife dive off the high board—again, “why don’t we just call the meeting a training session?”

Training session.