Page 76 of Cozy Little Christmas

This trip was doing nothing to help her tuck those old feelings for Wes back into the quiet corner of her heart where they couldn’t hurt her. Much.

If she wasn’t careful, getting over him a second time was going to be impossible.

With the city lights painting a soft glow across the room, she finished the water and set the bottle on the small table.

Just as she turned to head back to bed, the main door opened. Kodiak trotted in, sniffing the air, then beelined straight for her and nudged her hand with his cold nose.

“Hi, bud,” she whispered, rubbing his head.

“Sorry,” Wes said, closing the door softly behind him. “Did we wake you?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It might have just been the dry air. I always sleep restlessly in a hotel room.”

He smiled faintly. “Same.”

They had stayed together at a few hotel rooms in the year they had been together. They both slept restlessly then, for entirely different reasons than dry air.

She quickly turned her focus away from those memories. “You two are up late. After your long day of driving, I would have expected you to crash like we all did.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I was sitting on the bed to read and I must have dozed off in my clothes. Next thing I knew, Kodi was nudging me off the mattress, insisting on one last trip outside.”

“He’s a pretty demanding guy, isn’t he?”

Wes glanced down at the dog, and the affection that softened his features touched her. “He can be.”

The tenderness in that simple statement made something inside her go all warm and wobbly.

“I can tell you have a strong bond,” she said quietly. “How does it work? Did you train him from a puppy?”

He shook his head and shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on the hook then grabbing a water bottle from the refrigerator for himself.

“Most of the time, police departments buy dogs that are already partly trained, either from Europe or from specialized breeders here. They go through a basic course with a trainer first, then their handler comes into the picture. After that, it’s constant reinforcement, daily training, trust building.”

He told her about scent work, obedience drills, how they practiced searching buildings and vehicles. She listened, fascinated.

“So you learn to read each other,” she said.

“Exactly. I can tell by the way he moves if he’s picked up something. Sometimes it’s just a twitch of his ear or a shift in his breathing, but I know it. And he knows me. If I’m tense, he feels it, and it feeds back into him. We’re a team. Or we were, before all this.”

His hand drifted unconsciously to his abdomen.

“If he can’t return to the force,” she asked carefully, “will you take on another dog?”

His face grew pensive. “I don’t know. It was hard enough losing my first K9 partner. He died of natural causes about a year after I started working with him. That about broke me. If Kodi is done, I might go in a different direction. My lieutenant wants me to take the detective’s exam. I haven’t done it yet because I’ve been happy working with Kodi.”

She realized, not for the first time, how little she truly knew about police work, beyond what she saw on television.

Real life was messy, gritty and demanding in ways that didn’t show up in scripted dramas. She could picture entirely too clearly the two of them out on the sometimes dangerous streets of Portland, never quite knowing what they might face.

She wanted to ask if he ever thought about those old dreams of med school, if somewhere inside him he still missed that path. But the quiet intimacy of the moment didn’t feel like the right place to drag old ghosts into the room.

“Do you expect you’ll stick around in Portland, now that your mom and sister are in Shelter Springs?” she asked instead.

He shrugged, heading to the kitchenette to fill Kodi’s bowl with fresh water. “I have a life there now. Friends. The apartment I bought a few years ago.”

A sudden, unwelcome thought flashed through her mind. “What about girlfriends? Any of those?”

He glanced at her, expression unreadable, sending heat creeping up the back of her neck.