Page 38

“What happened?”

I didn’t want to get into my story, didn’t want to think about my life at the moment. “Uh-uh, we already got off track once. Back to Beau. To begin with I thought he was a flake. Bernie would set-up a FaceTime meeting and he wouldn’t show. It wasn’t until the third meeting that we met.”

Kai started to frown but I shook my head before he could get upset. “No, don’t get a bad opinion of him. He’s active duty. The guy here in Jasper Creek who normally handles the renting of the house wasn’t available.”

Kai relaxed and sat back. “Good. I can’t imagine him blowing you off on purpose.” He gave me the kind of smile that made me lose track of what we were even talking about.

My plate was still mostly full, but I couldn’t eat another bite. It might have had something to do with the way my heart kept fluttering. “You’re in luck. You don’t have to order chicken and waffles to go. There is no way I can finish this. Wanna trade plates?” It was something I saw Mom and Dad do all the time.

His eyes lit up. “Sure.” He switched the plates and I had an empty plate in front of me, and he had a mound of chicken and a good deal of waffles in front of him. “If you see Lettie, flag her down. I’m definitely going to need more syrup.”

“Can your body handle sugar?” I teased. He was made of pure muscle.

“Only when I’m on a date, then my body demands sugar.”

The way he was looking at me, there was no way I could miss his meaning.

Gah! I felt myself blushing again.

“Beau was actually a good guy once I had a chance to talk to him. He wanted to know about my dog.”

“Chaos?”

“Yeah. I’d put her down on the application. A lot of the places I’d looked at here in Jasper Creek wouldn’t rent to someone with a pet. Beau would, but he still wanted to know about her. I got the feeling it was more curiosity than worry.”

“Why did you think that?”

I thought back to our conversation. “He had a lot of questions about her like her breed, her age, what kind of personality she had, how long I’d had her. Things like that. Did you guys have a dog?”

Kai squeezed the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, and I regretted opening up another hidden wound. Then he looked at me. “Not that I can remember. But I remember as a kid always wanting one. Ronald wasn’t having it. Two of the kids I hung out with had dogs, it was great playing with them. Nobody enforced a leash law in Dillingham. We were constantly running wild with the dogs.”

Talk about a man who needed a dog.

“So, what did Beau think when you told him you had a Bernese Mountain dog?”

My heart stuttered. He’d met Chaos, but only a real dog lover would know her breed. “How’d you know what kind of breed Chaos was?”

He shrugged. “Just picked it up, here and there.”

I lifted my glass of tea. “Here’s to the college of ‘Here and There’.”

I grinned when he laughed. He had a great laugh.

“I enjoyed talking to your brother, but here’s the moment I liked your brother. It was after I had moved in and we FaceTimed for the last time. I was bemoaning the fact that I was probably going to need to use my school lunchbreaks to come back home to let Chaos out. I told Beau how at my old house in West Virginia, the property was big enough and off the beaten track, that having a big doggy door wasn’t a security issue.”

“Let me guess. Beau came up with a way for you to have a doggy door in his house that Chaos could use.”

“How’d you know?”

“Just a wild guess.”

Talk about bullshit.

“Well Mr. Smartypants, he figured out a way that only Chaos could go in or out of the door, if we put a chip in her collar. He even told me who I should talk to, to have the door installed. And he insisted on paying half of the installation, because it was an upgrade for the house.”

Kai hit me with another of those killer smiles that put me back in danger of melting into a puddle right there. “He did that part because you’re beautiful.”

My face felt like it turned to flames. “He’s just a nice guy. There was no flirting going on.”