Page 1 of Puppy Kisses

Chapter 1

Stealing a dog turned out to be much easier than Dawn had expected.

“Wait. So that’s it?” She glanced down at the animal in her arms. The shaking, shivering golden retriever puppy whimpered and tucked her head into the crook of Dawn’s elbow. “We walk out that gate, and the deed is done?”

“Well, we could climb over that section of fence with the razor wire if you really want to,” her coconspirator said. He didn’t even whisper, which went to show how anticlimactic this whole ordeal was. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not. I like my fingernails where they are.”

“It seems a little tame, is all I’m saying.” Dawn ran a soothing hand over the back of the puppy’s neck and contemplated their two exits out of the dusty backyard. Even if theyhadbeen forced to take the more perilous route, they could easily have tossed a piece of canvas over the top of the razor wire and come out unscathed. There was a whole stack of it sitting on the ground. “I always assumed that theft came with higher stakes. Geez. If I’d have known it was this easy, I’d have started a life of crime years ago. Here…grab the keys out of my front pocket, will you? You’ll have to be our getaway driver. I don’t want to let this poor honey go. I can feel every last one of her ribs.”

Only a flicker of a frown for the dog’s thin, scabbed body crossed Zeke’s face before being replaced by a more pronounced expression of horror. “You want me to put my handswhere?”

“Oh, don’t look so worried,” she said, laughing. She also jutted out her hip to give him better access. “I promise not to like it.”

“You owe me for this,” he grumbled, but he did as she asked. And was none too pleased about it, if the way he tentatively poked one finger in the tight fit of her jean-shorts pocket and fished around for the key ring was any indication. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into these things.”

Dawn did. “Because you love me and I’m the only reason you have a semblance of a social life. Now, come on. The sooner we get this girl to a veterinarian, the better. People who treat animals like this deserve to be in prison.”

It was a subject on which Dawn would have gladly expounded—and at considerable length—had the situation allowed for it. She’d driven by this house at least half a dozen times in the past week. Each time, regardless of the hour of day or the fact that the summer temperatures were soaring well into the hundreds, the undersized puppy had been hooked onto a short, heavy chain in the backyard.

One time was unfortunate, but six was nothing short of animal cruelty—especially since it looked as though the chain weighed more than the animal did. The poor thing couldn’t reach either shade or water and had done her feeble best to dig a hole in the dirt to cool herself off. But she clearly hadn’t been fed in some time, and she barely had the strength to stand, let alone carve out a space where she could be comfortable. Just thinking about it started Dawn’s blood running hot again. It always tended to be on the warm side, quick to boil over and liable to scald, but this went beyond anything.

Dawn drew a deep breath and adjusted the puppy until she was more comfortably encased in her arms. As much as she would have loved to get up on a soapbox and shout at the house until someone came out to face her, this was neither the time nor the place for such a tirade.

Especially since a light in the upper story of the A-frame house flickered on before she could take as much as a single step toward freedom.

“Oh crap!” Dawn clutched the quivering bundle tighter. She cast an anxious—and slightly accusatory—look at her friend. “I thought you said you rang the doorbell and no one answered.”

“I did.” Zeke finally managed to get hold of her keys and yank them out of her pocket. “Twice. Maybe the guy was taking a nap.”

“Hey!” A window was thrown open and a head appeared. From her vantage point, Dawn could make out a gray, scruffy beard and the top of a filthy white T-shirt. “This is private property. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Running,” Dawn said and did just that.

She didn’t wait to see if Zeke followed. As a full-time ranch worker and competitive triathlete, he was in far better shape than she could ever hope to be. In fact, he took a nimble leap over a pile of broken-down lawn furniture and passed her within the first ten seconds of their flight. Since he also paused to make sure she got through the gate and then opened the car door for her, she wasn’t too insulted.

“Step on it,” she urged as she swung the car door shut and slammed her palm on the lock. She caught sight of the man struggling into a pair of brown sweatpants at the front door of the house. He seemed to be having some trouble getting his second leg into the proper hole—most likely because of the shotgun clutched fervently in his right hand. “And step on it hard. I think he’s going to start shooting at us.”

It said a lot about her friendship with Zeke that he only sighed and muttered something about his inevitable death at her hands before following orders.

“It’s moments like these that I wish you’d bought that Tesla,” Zeke muttered as he shifted the car into drive and hit the gas. Her little Jetta was cute but not very powerful. A crunch of gravel kicked up behind them, followed by a slow, almost painful whip of the tail end of the car before they started moving forward. “I could use some zero-to-sixty action right now.”

Dawn cast a look in the rearview mirror. “We both could. He’s given up on the sweatpants and is going straight for the truck in his underwear. It’s not an attractive sight.Move.”

Zeke didn’t have to be told twice. He hit the gas with a heavy foot and pulled them out of the drive.

It wasn’t an ideal location for a getaway. The house where the puppy had been tied up was in the middle of a semirural area north of Spokane, where pockets of houses were broken up by long, empty stretches of highway. It took them all of thirty seconds to pull out of the neighborhood and find themselves surrounded by the vast nothingness of eastern Washington. Unless they barreled the car into a field of corn or one of the many haystacks dotting the landscape, there weren’t many hiding places.

Dawn suggested one of the latter, but Zeke just started to drive faster.

Since the pickup truck was already starting to smoke in the distance, and Zeke knew this area better than if Google and Apple Maps had a baby, Dawn settled back and turned her attention to the puppy in her lap. She’d never been one to worry about the things she couldn’t control—mostly because her life had been one long series of things she couldn’t control. If she took it into her head to get into a pucker every time someone tried to chase after her, she’d never leave the house.

“You poor honey,” she murmured as she settled the animal more comfortably across her bare thighs. “Let me take a good look at you.”

The golden retriever had stopped shaking by this time, opting instead to balance her head on Dawn’s knee. As if sensing a kindred spirit, the animal showed no tendency to fight back against Dawn’s gentle pokes and prods. This, in and of itself, was a good sign. Dawn wasn’t the family expert when it came to dog behaviors—her older sister, Lila, was the one with the master’s degree and an incredibly analytical mind—but she hadn’t spent the last six years training service puppies for nothing. Abuse and neglect often caused animals to show their teeth and stop at nothing to protect themselves. And rightly so, if you asked her.

This puppy, however, only offered a feeble tongue and sighed contentedly, even when Dawn’s hand moved over the silken fur on her stomach to find numerous neglected sores.

“I hope you run that bastard off the road,” she said as she poked gently around the edges of the wounds, all of which must have been there for quite some time. One in particular seemed to have become infected sometime in the past few days. “I hope you aim for a cliff and propel him right off the end of it.”