tires spun, screeched and hit the curb with a bounce, startling the daylights out of a jogger huffing up the sidewalk.
Jamming the car into Park, she leapt out with her heart in her throat, eyes focused on the one who had been such a huge part of her life for so very, very long.
He hadn’t changed, was just as she remembered. So handsome, so regal, so deliciously wicked.
A young girl was talking to him, smiling, laughing, hugging him with the same affection C.J. herself had once lavished on him. As always, he reveled in the attention, dark eyes intensely focused, riveted on his giggling companion without sparing so much as a glance at the winded jogger.
The panting man bent over, propped his hands on his knees, gaping in astonishment as C.J. joyously rushed forward with open arms to call her beloved’s name.
Perky ears twitched, a furry head swiveled, dark eyes blinked bright and gleaming.
“Rags! Come here, boy, c’mon!”
With a gleeful yelp, thirty pounds of quivering canine excitement sprinted down the sidewalk and bounded into her waiting arms.
Laughing and crying at the same time, C.J. hugged the warm, wriggling body of the animal she had raised from a pup and adored beyond measure. “Oh, Rags—” She sputtered under a frantic assault of wet doggy kisses. “Wait...stop...silly boy!”
When the affectionate assault eased, she felt the lump rise back in her throat, softening her voice to a smoky whisper. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
Rags barked in her face, licked off her eye makeup. C.J. felt as if her heart would explode from sheer happiness.
Then their joyful reunion was interrupted by a distressed wail. “Da-addy!” The abandoned girl stamped her feet. “That lady is stealing my dog! Make her stop, Daddy, make her stop!”
Rags responded by leaping down and dashing back to comfort the tearful youngster, who clamped a proprietary hand on the animal’s collar and fixed C.J. with an eat-dirt-and-die look.
C.J.’s lungs deflated like a pricked balloon. She forced a smile, and since the child was kneeling beside her bright-eyed pet, she squatted down to their level. “My name is C.J. Actually it’s Cecelia Jane, but that’s quite a mouthful, so my friends call me C.J.” The child continued to glare silently. C.J. sucked a breath, tried to keep her smile from flattening. “So, now you know my name. Perhaps you’d like to tell me yours?”
The girl, a brown-haired, pigtailed nymph who appeared to be nine or ten, narrowed her eyes, clamped her lips together and continued to glower at C.J. as if wishing her dead.
“Her name is Lissa Matthews, and she’s not usually so rude.” The jogger, having recovered his breath, stepped forward, waited until C.J. stood before extending his hand. “I apologize for my daughter’s lack of courtesy, Ms.—?”
“Moray.” His grip was warm, firm. Damp tendrils of dark hair the same shade as his daughter’s clung to a face attractively average, yet more appealing than most. She smiled through her scrutiny. “Please call me C.J.”
A pleasant light gleamed in eyes that were neither gray nor green, but a hazy combination that reminded her of heather sage. “Richard Matthews. Please call me Richard.” His hand lingered, withdrew slowly. “Well.” Clearing his throat, he shifted uncomfortably, rubbed his knuckles across a strong, slightly clefted chin. “May I assume you and my daughter’s pet share more than a passing acquaintance?”
C.J. confirmed that with a nod. “Rags and I were together for nearly six years.” Stupidly, tears stung her eyes at the sight of her shaggy-faced best friend firmly ensconced in the arms of another. “He disappeared a couple of months ago, while my roommate was moving our things to a new apartment.”
Richard Matthews didn’t seem unsympathetic, but was clearly concerned about the effect C.J.’s sudden appearance was having upon his daughter. His eyes narrowed just a touch, an expression of contemplation, or perhaps puzzlement. “We adopted the animal from the shelter. It’s quite legal.” Skimming a worried glance at the tearful child, he clasped his hands behind his back, facing C.J. with stiffened resolve. “Except for the collar engraved with his name, the animal had no identifying tags.”
“I know—”
“Nor was there a proper dog license from which the owners could be located.” The man tightened his jaw, angled a reproachful glance. “Not the behavior of a responsible pet owner, I’d say.”
“You’re right, of course, it’s just that—” C.J. licked her lips, nervously flexed her fingers. “Both tags were on a collar ring. My roommate had removed it to replace the old address tag with the new one when the movers broke a vase or something, and Rags bolted out the front door. She put up flyers all over the neighborhood—”
“And you were where when all this happened?”
“I was, er, unavailable.” She slipped a glance at the prancing pup, and her heart melted. God, she’d missed him so much. “I still have the tags. I can show them to you, if you wish.”
Richard’s chin wobbled. “That won’t be necessary. I believe you. Still, this is a most unfortunate situation.” He heaved a sigh, rubbed his face, peered over his fingertips. “Clearly, we have a legitimate conflict of ownership. The question is, what shall we do about it?”
Direct, straightforward, cut right to the chase. C.J. liked that.
Apparently Lissa didn’t. She let out a howl that sent shivers down C.J.’s spine. “Ragsy is my dog,” she screeched. “Mine! Daddy, you promised, you promised—” Her face reddened as she sucked a wheezing breath. “You can‘t—” gasp “—let her take him—” gasp “—you can’t—”
Richard sprang to his daughter’s side. “Shh, punkin, no one is going to take your dog away. Deep breaths, sweetheart, take slow, deep breaths.” He dug through the pocket of his sweatpants to retrieve a white plastic inhaler.
The child pushed it away, continued to wheeze until her face was suitably purple and her father’s concern escalated into full-fledged fear. Only when Rags pawed her arm, whining with alarm, did the girl accept the inhaler. The attack subsided as quickly as it had begun.
Lissa hugged the tousled fur of Rags’s neck, scraped C.J. with a look and made no attempt to soften a gloating grin. “Rags loves me,” she purred. “He won’t ever go away, ’cause he knows how sick I get when I’m sad.”
C.J.’s heart sank to her toes. A manipulating child, a protective father, a shadowy specter from the past. Pain. Loneliness. Sad memories.
“Perhaps,” Richard said, pocketing the inhaler and extracting a slim leather wallet, “we can come to an equitable—”
He was drowned out by Lissa’s horrified shriek. “Rags, no! Come back!”
But the gleeful animal was three houses away, hot on the trail of an orange-striped cat streaking toward a neighbor’s yard.
Richard dropped the wallet. “Oh, Lord. Waldo.”
“Waldo?”
C.J.’s question died in chaos as the screaming child bolted after her wayward pet, ignoring shouts from her harried father. “Lissa, stop! Don’t exert yourself!” He spun, stared at C.J., his face puckered with baffled annoyance that under other circumstances would have been amusing. “In six years, you couldn’t have taught your dog some manners?”
With that, Richard sprinted forth to join the fray.
The orange cat, presumably the infamous Waldo, dived beneath a raised stoop. Rags followed, wriggling through the small opening and barking madly. A yowl, a hiss, a flurry of joyful woofs. An orange blur shot out from under the stoop. A shaggy mass of brown-and-white fur squeezed out, dodged Richard’s grasping hands, used the stunned man’s head as a springboard before dashing after the cat without so much as a backward glance at the frustrated