I extend my hand, palm down, knuckles forward.Let him scent.Let him decide.
Koda stretches his neck and touches his nose to my fingers through the fence.
One breath.Two.His tail moves.A single, tentative wag.
"That's him choosing to engage," I say quietly."Not because he has to.Because he wants to.That's the foundation everything else gets built on."
I stand slowly.Koda watches me rise but doesn't retreat.Progress.Thirty seconds of letting a dog make a choice, and I've gotten more genuine engagement than five weeks of pressure training produced.
I turn around and nearly walk into Stephen's chest.
He's closer than I realized.Much closer.Close enough that when I look up, I can see the individual flecks of blue and gray in his eyes, the faint white scars along his jaw from reef cuts, the way his pulse is beating in the hollow of his throat.Close enough that the heat of his body reaches me through the thin fabric of my tank top, and my breath catches before I can control it.
He doesn't step back.
Neither do I.
For three seconds that feel like three hours, we stand there.His eyes drop to my mouth.I watch them do it.I watch him catch himself, watch the control slam back into place like a steel door closing, and I feel the loss of that unguarded moment in my stomach.
"You do that with every dog?"His voice has gone rough.Lower than before.The question is about the method.The tone is about something else entirely.
"Every one."
"Must take a lot of patience."
"It takes the willingness to be still when everything in you wants to push."I hold his gaze."Most people can't do it.They're too afraid of the silence."
Something shifts in his expression.A crack in the wall.A flash of recognition so raw that I have to look away before I do something stupid like reach for him.
I step back.Create distance.Pretend my heartbeat isn't trying to escape through my ribs.
"I'm staying at the Mountain Haven Inn in town," I say, pulling my professional voice back on like a coat."I'm here for three weeks initially.Ryan thought that was enough time for a preliminary assessment and a basic protocol integration."I pull a worn paperback from my canvas bag and hold it out."My book.In case you want to know what you're dealing with before tomorrow."
He takes it.His fingers brush mine during the exchange, and the contact sends a jolt up my arm that I absolutely cannot acknowledge.He looks at the cover.Healing the Handler: Trauma-Informed Approaches to Working Dog Recovery.My name in small print across the bottom.
"Tomorrow," he repeats.
"Unless you're planning to tell Sawyer McKenna no."
The corner of his mouth twitches.Not a smile.Not quite.But the closest thing to one I've seen on his face since I arrived."Nobody tells Sawyer no."
"Then I'll be here at seven."
I turn and walk back to my car.Scout falls into step without a cue.My legs are steady.My stride is even.From the outside, I look like a woman who just finished a professional assessment and is heading back to her hotel for the evening.
From the inside, I'm shaking.
Not because of the dogs.Not because of the work.Because of the way Stephen Nelson looked at my mouth for those three seconds and the way my entire body responded like he'd put his hands on me.
I don't do this.I don't get distracted by men with broad shoulders and wounded eyes and control issues that mirror my own in ways I'm not ready to examine.I came to Grizzly Ridge because Ryan Cole's wife told me this K9 program needed help, and because I needed to be somewhere far away from New Hampshire while the federal investigation into my parents' operation reaches its conclusion.
I need to focus.I need to be professional.
I climb into my car and sit for a moment with my hands on the wheel.Scout jumps into the passenger seat, circles twice, and lies down with her chin on my thigh.I scratch behind her ear.
"We're here to work," I tell her."That's it."
Scout's dark eyes look up at me with an expression that manages to be both sympathetic and skeptical.A Malinois who judges you with her eyebrows.I love this dog more than I've loved any human being, and that says something about my life that I don't want to look at too closely right now.
