Page 12 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer

"Where did you learn that?" I freeze at the edge of the aisle.

Jason stops. His hands stay resting against the run door. He turns his head slowly, his eyes catching the orange light from the stove across the deck.

"What?"

"The tune." I step into the light of the runs. "The song you're humming."

"Just something in my head." He looks down at the canvas pad, then back at me, his shoulders set. "Had it since Landstuhl. Don't know where I got it."

The word Landstuhl hangs in the cold air. It's the medical center where every medevac flight I flew handed off its critical casualties. Hearing that melody from his lips—the same tune I hummed over two hundred and fourteen wounded soldiers across the Atlantic—connects us to the same dark sky. I hold my breath, keeping the history locked behind my teeth.

"It's cold." I turn toward the door. "I'm going to finish the checks."

Jason stays silent. The quiet returns to the runs, the hum gone, leaving only the cold air between us.

I walk back to run seven. Juno is still awake. She has ignored the insulated dog house in the corner of her run. Instead, she has curled up right against the wire gate, her spine pressed flush against the latch. Her head rests on her front paws, amber eyes scanning the falling snow in the yard.

She's guarding the exit. Spine to the wall, scanning the dark.

It's how I sleep.

I drop to one knee beside the gate and pull off my glove. I press my fingers through the wire mesh, resting my palm against the side of her neck.

"Easy, girl." My breath fogs in the cold mesh, dropping below the wind. "Easy... we're safe here tonight."

Juno's ears swivel back. For three seconds, her muscle stays tight under my palm. Then, with a shuddering breath, she leans her heavy head against my fingers through the wire, letting her eyes close.

I rise slowly, my gaze shifting down the aisle.

Jason stands by the wood stove, thirty feet away, edged in the orange glow, his gaze steady on me. He caught the moment I softened my posture and let Juno in. Jason stays silent, but the intensity of his gaze makes my skin burn under my coat.

I check the steel pin of the latch, securing it with a quiet click, leaving her to rest.

The drive back to Mabel's is a fifteen-minute whiteout. The silver 4Runner crawls down the lane in first gear, the headlights bouncing off the falling snow. By the time I reach my room, the radiator has begun its nightly rattle: two bangs, then the gravel scrape.

I drop my coat onto the chair, my boots next to it. My hand is on the nightstand drawer, but I leave the manifest notebook where it is, under the Bible. I lie down on the bed with the quilt pulled to my chin, my hand resting on my aching knee in the dark. The throb is steady, but outside the window, the mountain is silent.

When I sleep, the silence doesn't last. My dreams are crowded with Jason. Not the wreckage of the C-17 cabins or the red flatlines on the monitor, but the weight of him. His broad frame fills the narrow feed aisle, the scent of cedar and black coffee wrapping around me as his chest brushes my arm. The phantom press of his body pins me against the cold bin, the heat of his skin burning straight through my coat.

I wake at three in the morning, my skin damp under the heavy quilt, my pulse thudding low in my belly. In the dark, every interaction from the day loops in my mind—the rough scrape of his voice telling me to stop hiding behind my rank, and the way his steady gaze tracked my fingers while we knelt together in the slush.

He's far more than another handler or another soldier with scars. He's an immovable force, a man who looks past the walls I put up to see the raw truth beneath.

His words from the barn echo in the quiet: In my barn, and outside of it, you don't demand respect. You earn the right to have it.

My body hungers for the very thing my discipline fears: his heavy hands on my skin, his chest pressed against mine, and the terrifying temptation to surrender control to a man who earns every breath of trust he takes.

I lie awake for hours, tracking the throb in my knee, unable to cool the fire in my blood or quiet the ache building low in my core.

FOUR

Pressure

JASON

The wind off the peak doesn't ask for permission. It sweeps through the gaps in the training barn rafters, carrying granular snow that rattles against the tin roof like birdshot.

I stoke the tack room stove at seven in the morning, three logs of split birch into the firebox.