One Intimate Night

Georgia, whose heart was just as tender as Mrs Latham’s, had sighed.

‘It’s a shame, because he’s such a lovely dog.’

‘Try telling yourself that after you’ve taken a class with him in it,’ Helen had advised her.

‘I already have,’ Georgia had told her, ‘and I know just what you mean, but there’s no malice in him; he’s just—’

‘He’s just not the dog for a woman with Mrs Latham’s lifestyle,’ Helen had interrupted her.

It was true. Mrs Latham lived virtually in the centre of their small market town which, although quiet by modern-day standards, and surrounded by the farmland whose needs it serviced, was still no place for a dog who needed long, long country walks and a physically energetic owner.

Predictably, perhaps, Ben’s original owner had proved impossible to trace—a ‘visitor’ unknown at the surgery. They had no record of either her or Ben.

They had all tried to suggest to Mrs Latham that a new owner ought to be found for Ben, but still she’d refused to be swayed.

‘He’s already been abandoned once,’ she had told Helen firmly. ‘So traumatic for him, poor boy. Why, when he first came to me he was so frightened of being left that he insisted on sitting on my sofa right up next to me. So sweet…’

Helen had rolled her eyes at the others as she’d related this piece of canine emotional manipulation.

‘So sweet,’ she had scoffed. ‘That dog knows when he’s on to a good thing. Talk about spoiled…’

Smiling to herself now, Georgia picked up her post. A small, pretty girl with dark red curls and huge violet-blue eyes wide-spaced in a creamy-skinned, delicately small-boned face, she had wanted to be a vet ever since she could remember.

Getting this job in such a busy, prestigious practice and within a two-hour drive of her parents’ home had been ideal, and she had soon settled down in the small flat she’d bought and begun to make new friends amongst her colleagues.

There was no man in her life: the years she had spent studying to qualify as a vet had meant that there had been neither the time nor the space for a permanent relationship. She had good friends, though—of both sexes—and enjoyed socialising. Ultimately she wanted to meet a special ‘someone’, fall in love, commit herself to their relationship and raise a family, but she was not in any hurry. Her warm personality and sensual good looks meant that she was never short of admirers. But right now her career was her main priority. Her elder brother often teased her that it was just as well that he was married with a young family because, otherwise, their parents would have had to wait a long time for their grandchildren.

Much as she loved her work, and the animals who featured in it, Georgia had no pet of her own, mainly because of the long hours she worked.

Quickly she checked her watch. Ten minutes to go before the owners and their dogs arrived for the week’s training class.

This was an extra service the practice provided along with access, should their owners wish it, to a pet psychologist—every vet who took the class had to go on a special course themselves to make sure their own training skills were up to the mark. They ran two courses, one for adult dogs and one for younger puppies, and it was Georgia who normally took the puppy classes, which was a duty she loved.

The practice was very fortunate in that, having been established for many years, and initially having been set up by the present senior partner’s grandfather, it owned the large garden to the rear of the Edwardian house which had been converted into its offices, operating theatre and surgeries. In addition to the cattery and kennels, the practice also had a large indoor training area, which was where the morning’s class was to be held. Picking up her box of rewards, and making sure she had everything else she would need, Georgia opened the door and walked into the passageway which led to the training room.

Piers Hathersage grimaced as he surveyed the back seat of his once immaculate car, now covered in dog hairs and the papier mâché mess which had originally been a magazine he had inadvertently left there.

‘Bad dog,’ he told the culprit sternly.

Ben responded by barking sharply and rearing up on his hind legs. He was a powerful dog, and Piers wondered for the umpteenth time what on earth his godmother had been thinking of when she had decided to give him a home.

It was true that he was a very handsome dog—his coat shone and his eyes sparkled with humour, intelligence and mischief, whilst he bounded impatiently on his lead, trying to pull away in the opposite direction from which Piers intended to lead him.

Piers had arrived at his godmother’s last night intending only to pay her a fleeting visit on his way back from his parents’, but on finding that she had sprained her ankle whilst falling over her wretched dog, and that her main concern about her incapacity was the fact that she would be unable to take him to his weekly training class, he had felt obliged to offer to perform this chore for her.

‘Oh, Piers, would you?’ she had breathed with such evident relief. ‘Do you hear that, Ben?’ she had cooed at the miscreant.

‘Uncle Piers is going to take you to your training class.’

Uncle Piers! Piers had gritted his teeth and manfully resisted the temptation to say what he was thinking.

Five months earlier, when his godmother had first got Ben, his parents had told him how concerned they were about the wisdom of her acquiring such a large, unruly dog.

‘Why on earth has she got him?’ Piers had asked them frowningly.

‘Well, she was a bit vague on the subject,’ his father had told him. ‘However, it seems that he came to her via the veterinary practice where she takes that dreadful cat she’s adopted.’

Piers’s parents were both slightly younger than Emily Latham, who had befriended them as a young couple when they had first married.

Ten years ago, just after Piers had returned from a stint of working abroad, her husband had died and, remembering all the small kindnesses she had done for him as a boy and her generosity as a godmother, both with her time and her love as well, Piers had made sure that he continued to visit her just as often as he could.

She and her late husband had had no children, and Piers suspected it was because of this that she was inclined to have such a rose-coloured and sentimental view of children and animals.

Listening to his parents, Piers had well been able to imagine how easily she had been prevailed upon to take in someone else’s abandoned dog, and he had further gathered from a chance remark of his godmother’s that some young woman at the practice had been responsible for ‘introducing’ her to Ben. To encourage an elderly widow to take on a dog that was plainly quite unsuitable for her was, in his opinion, a highly irresponsible thing for anyone to do, much less someone who was supposed to be professionally involved with animals. But despite all his carefully logical arguments his godmother had remained obdurate: Ben was one of life’s victims, a poor, misunderstood canine who, far from needing the strong hand of a firm disciplinarian, rather needed to have his psychoses treated with tenderness, love and indulgence.

Surveying the carnage Ben had wrought in his godmother’s once immaculate garden, Piers had been unconvinced. However, his visit to Emily Latham had a dual purpose. Thanks to the increasing demand for the complex software programs produced by the business Piers ran, he was having to look for larger premises, and that had prompted him to consider moving away from the city, where he currently lived and worked, back to the town where he had grown up and where he knew that property was much less expensive.

He was, he reflected now, at the dangerous age of thirty-seven, not so very far off the landmark birthday of forty, and ready to eschew the fast-paced city life he had lived for the last decade for something a little gentler. He was also ready to trade the single life he had enjoyed, for something more companionable and cosy. A wife? Children? He wasn’t against marriage as such, but perhaps he was too choosy because, as yet, he had not met ‘the right woman’, nor even come close to doing so.

Now, thanks to Ben and his godmother’s painful ankle, he had had to put back the appointments he had made to view several properties in the area in order instead to take Ben to his training class.

‘How many has he been to?’ he had asked his godmother as she had tussled with Ben and the dog’s reluctance to wear his collar, tenderly loosening it a notch.

‘Oh, I’m not sure. I think this is his third. Of course, we did miss some of the classes in the first set I took him to. He got dreadfully upset because there was a dog there he didn’t like, and the teacher suggested that it might be as well if he didn’t attend for a few weeks. He was so disappointed, poor dog, and I really felt for him when all the other dogs graduated with good marks. He looked so downcast.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ Piers had agreed dryly, surveying the troublemaker with dispassionate eyes.

‘He’s a very sensitive animal,’ his godmother had persisted gently. ‘And so clever. He always knows when the telephone’s going to ring and he comes to find me to tell me.’

Piers, who had heard the sorry tale of how the dog had chewed through the handset cord, had forborne to comment on this remarkable display of canine intelligence. His godmother always had been a soft touch.

Now, as he crisply commanded Ben to sit, he turned to investigate the mess of chewed paper on the rear seat and floor of the car, cursing under his breath as he realised the dog had munched on a magazine he had been keeping because of an article that contained some information he had wanted to reread.

Judging from the diverse array of cars in the practice’s car park, its dog owners must span the full spectrum of human personalities, Piers acknowledged as his glance moved from a gleaming brand-new top-of-the-range Mercedes to a battered Land Rover and on to a pretty red and cream Citroën.

His own Jaguar was, he had to admit, a small piece of pure self-indulgence, a sleek dark maroon sports model which he had bought in a moment of uncharacteristic impulsiveness.

‘What happened to the eco-friendly estate car you said you were intending to buy?’ Jason Sawyer, his partner, had asked him wryly when he had seen it. Jason, with a wife and four children, often bemoaned the fact that the only really suitable car for his lifestyle was the large people-carrier which his wife drove, leaving him to use the family’s second car.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ Piers had admitted.

‘Enjoy it whilst you can,’ Jason had told him. ‘Belinda is making noises about us buying a camper van. She says it will be ideal for touring holidays with the kids!’

As Piers approached the entrance to the practice he saw a large notice pinned to the door with an arrow on it, stating ‘Training Classes—this way.’

Following the direction of the arrow round the side of the building, he could see a long, low range of out-houses in front of him which had obviously been converted for a variety of uses. It was plain which one was his destination from the small crowd of owners and dogs milling around outside it, all of them surrounding a small red-headed girl dressed in a white tee shirt that lovingly moulded itself to her softly rounded breasts and a pair of jeans which moulded themselves equally tenderly to a femininely curved bottom.

Very sexy, was Piers’s first thought—his second was that it was no wonder the majority of dog owners surrounding her were male.