A New Leash On Love

“Can’t you adopt her?” he asked.

“I always want to adopt every dog I foster, but that’s not my calling here,” she explained. “Fostering is about preparing dogs for adoption so they can find homes. If I adopted every dog I fostered, I’d have over twenty at this point. Plus, every time a dog I work with finds a home, I can foster a new pooch.”

“Must be hard to let them go,” he said. “Don’t you get attached?”

“Definitely,” she said. “But because we do such a good job of matching furbabies and adoptive parents, I know they’re going to a great home. I do worry about how attached I am to Dempsey, though. I can’t explain it, but we definitely have a special bond.” She gave the boxer mix another scratch on the head, and the dog looked up at her with such trust in her eyes, even Matt’s battered heart was touched. “Oftentimes, that bond is there right away.”

“I had no idea about any of this,” he said. “There’s more involved in choosing a dog than I realized. Can you help me find the right puppy for Ellie?”

“Of course,” she said. “There are a few other puppies here that Ellie might like, but they all need some training. Maybe you can bring Ellie back with you and we can see who she bonds with. Furever Paws is in the process of finding a new director, so I’m helping with just about everything, from meet and greets to training to fostering to cleaning out kennels.”

He glanced around the kennel area of the shelter, which had a warm, welcoming vibe to it. “It’s great of you to give your time,” he said. “When should I bring my niece in tomorrow?”

“I’m done teaching at the middle school at three, so I usually arrive at three thirty.”

So she had become a teacher. That had always been her dream. But back in high school she’d wanted to leave Spring Forest and see the world, teaching her way through it. Maybe she had, for all he knew. “Works for Ellie too,” he said. “See you tomorrow, then.”

For a second they just looked at each other, neither making a move to leave. He wished he could pull her into his arms and hug her, hold her tight, tell her how good it was to see her, to hear her voice, to talk to her. He’d missed her so much and hadn’t even known it. Which was probably a good thing. He had nothing to offer her.

As he gave Dempsey a pat and turned to walk away, he couldn’t quite figure out how he could be so relieved to be leaving and so looking forward to coming back.

He paused in front of Hank’s kennel. Life is complicated, huh, boy?

Hank tilted his head, and Matt took that as a nod.

To catch her breath and decompress, Claire took Dempsey into the fenced yard, which was thankfully empty of other volunteers. She let Dempsey off leash and for a few moments watched the dog run around the grass, sniffing and wagging her tail.

Matt Fielding. Everyone always said you never forgot your first love, and that had been very true for Claire. She’d truly believed he would be the man she’d marry and spend the rest of her life with. And then boom—a few days after a magical prom night, he’d broken up with her.

Her first boyfriend in college had proposed, and maybe the promised security had had something to do with why she’d said yes when she hadn’t loved him the way she’d loved Matt. To this day, she didn’t know if that had contributed to her divorce, but five years into her marriage, she’d found out that her ex-husband was cheating and in love with someone else. Now, she was living in the house they’d built out in the Kingdom Creek development, without the husband or the kids they’d talked about or the dogs they were going to adopt.

The craziest thing was that, just last week, her sister had said that Claire’s problem was that she’d never gotten over Matt, and to do so she’d need to find a guy who looked like him. Tall and muscular, with those blue eyes, Matt was so good-looking and so...hot that few men in town even came close to resembling him. But apparently her sister had found someone who fit the bill, and had arranged a double date for tonight.

Half of her wanted to cancel. The other half thought she’d better protect herself against Matt’s being back by going out on this date, even if her heart wouldn’t be in it. Claire wanted a relationship—she wanted love and to find the man she’d spend forever with. She wanted a child—children, hopefully—and at thirty-five, she wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.

“How did everything get so topsy-turvy, Demps?” she asked the dog, who’d come over with a half-eaten tennis ball. “I know you know all about that,” she added, throwing the ball. Dempsey, in all her fast, muscular glory, chased after it, leaping through the air like a deer.

There was nothing like watching dogs at play to make Claire feel better and forget about her love life—the old, the nonexistent and the upcoming. She smiled as Dempsey dropped the ball at her feet. She threw it a few more times, then left the dog in the yard to play while she went to help clean the kennels that were now empty due to the lucky pups that had been adopted today.

As she reentered the shelter, she saw Birdie and Bunny Whitaker in their waterproof aprons, hard at work with the disinfectant and hose. Claire adored the sixtysomething sisters—no-nonsense Birdie and dreamer Bunny—who lived together in the lovely farmhouse on Whitaker Acres, the same property the shelter was on. Opening Furever Paws had been a longtime dream of the Whitaker sisters ever since people had begun abandoning animals on Whitaker land, a pocket of rural country in what had become urban sprawl. At first they’d started an animal refuge, but when it became too much for them to handle financially, they filed for nonprofit status and started the Furever Paws Animal Rescue almost twenty years ago. Aside from the shelter with dogs and cats, the sisters kept goats, pigs, geese and even a pair of llamas on the property. They opened up Whitaker Acres to the public a few times a year so that visitors could enjoy the land and animals. Kids loved the place.

As Claire cleaned Snowball’s kennel—the white shepherd-Lab mix had been adopted this morning and immediately renamed Hermione—she was glad the shelter could take in more strays and drop-offs. Furever Paws had room for about a dozen each of dogs and cats, and twice that many were cared for in foster homes, like Dempsey.

“I’ll miss that adorable Snowball,” Birdie said, hosing down the kennel across the way. “For twenty years I’ve been telling myself not to get attached to our animals.” She shook her head. “Old fool.” Tall and strong, her short silver hair gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, Birdie grabbed the mop, dunked it in the cleaning solution and went at the floor of the kennel until it met her satisfaction.

“I already miss Annie Jo,” Bunny said, taking out the bed, blanket and toys in the next kennel and stuffing them in the huge laundry bin. Bunny looked a lot like Birdie but was shorter and plumper, her silver curls soft against her sweet face. “I love what her family renamed her—Peaches. Back in the day, a beau called me that,” she added, wiggling her hips.

Claire smiled. The shelter always named the strays and those left on the doorstep. Every now and then, adopters kept the shelter names—most recently a cat named Princess Leia, who’d been there for months. Birdie and Bunny loved naming the incoming animals, and whenever they couldn’t come up with a name, they held a meeting with the staff—the full-time employees, such as the shelter director, foster director and vet technician—and the volunteers, like Claire.

“Who was that very handsome man here a little while ago?” Bunny asked with a sly smile as she started sweeping out the kennel, reaching over for a stray piece of kibble that Annie Jo—Peaches—had missed. “My, he was nice to look at.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t rush over to ask how you could help him,” Birdie said to her starry-eyed sister, wringing out the mop in the big bucket.

“Well, I would have,” Bunny said, “but I saw Claire come back in with Dempsey and decided to leave him for her. Trust me, if I were even ten years younger...”

Claire laughed as Birdie shook her head again, her trademark move. Neither Whitaker sister had ever married, though Claire did know that Bunny had been engaged in her early twenties until her fiancé had tragically died. Birdie never talked about her love life, and though Claire had tried a time or two to get Bunny to spill about Birdie’s romantic life, the sisters were clearly loyal to each other’s secrets. As they should be.

But no matter how much or how little experience the Whitaker sisters had in the romance department, they were both wise—Birdie in common sense and Bunny in keeping an open mind and heart. Talking to the two always set Claire straight, or at least made her feel better.

Which was why she was going to be honest right now.

“That was the guy who broke my heart into a million pieces after high school graduation,” she said. “Matt Fielding. I cried for six months straight.”

“And then married the first guy who asked you out,” Birdie said with an uh-huh look on her face.

“Yup,” Claire said, spraying disinfectant on the bars of the last kennel and wiping them down with a clean rag. “But there’s hope for me. Guess who has a blind date tonight? My sister and her husband set me up.”

“Ooh,” Bunny said, her blue eyes twinkling. “How exciting. To me, blind dates are synonymous with ‘you never know.’ Could be the man of your dreams.”

Birdie wrinkled up her face. “Blind dates are usually the pits.” She glanced at Claire, instantly contrite, then threw her arms up in the air. “Oh, come on. They are.”

Claire laughed. “Well, if the date takes my mind off the fact that my first love is back in town? Mission accomplished.”

“Oh boy,” Birdie said, pausing the mop. “Someone is still very hung up on her first love.”

“Oh dear,” Bunny agreed.

And before Claire could say that of course she was—you did see him, after all—that cute little springer spaniel she’d shown Matt started howling up a storm.

“Someone wants her dinner now,” Bunny said with a laugh.

“I’m on feeding duty for the dogs,” Claire said, putting the disinfectant back on the supplies shelf and the rag in Bunny’s laundry basket. “If I don’t see you two before I leave for the day, congrats on a great Sunday. Five adult dogs adopted plus the puppies and cats.”

“It was a good day,” Bunny said. “Good luck on that date tonight.”

Claire smiled. “Who knows? Maybe he will be the man of my dreams.”

She was putting on a brave front for the sisters—not that she needed to, since she could always be honest with them. But sometimes Claire reverted to that old need to save face, to not seem like she cared quite so much that she was single, when she wanted to be partnered, to find that special someone to share her life with, to build a life with. She loved Dempsey to pieces, but most nights, unless she had book club or a social event like someone else’s engagement party or birthday, it was her and the boxer mix snuggled on the sofa in her living room, watching Dancing with the Stars or a Netflix movie, a rawhide chew for Dempsey and a single-serve bag of microwave popcorn for her.

There was room on that couch for a man.

But in any case, Matt Fielding was not the man of her dreams, whether she was “hung up or him” or not. Seventeen-year-old Claire had been madly in love. Now, she was a thirty-five-year-old divorced woman staring down her biological clock. “Man of her dreams” was silly nonsense. Hadn’t the supposed man of her dreams dumped her almost two decades ago as if she’d meant nothing? Ha, like that was part of the dream?

Matt Fielding was not the man of her dreams.

If she said it enough, she might believe it.

And if there was no such thing, then what was she looking for in a partner?