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“You want to name him? That’s trouble.”
She pulled onto the moonlit highway. Not a single car had passed by that entire time. What if they hadn’t gone to Carly’s for dinner? What if she hadn’t spotted movement in the woods? Poor little thing.
“How about “Lucky”? It fits but it’s a little on-the-nose.”
“He’s not going to care if his name is on the nose.” Dry as a martini, that tone of his. “You should probably name him “Trouble” if you want something that fits.
“Why Trouble?” She turned the name over her in mind.
“Because he’s going to cause you all kinds of trouble if you name him. You’ll get attached. Then what? Didn’t we say no pets? This one ain’t imaginary.”
She ignored that perfectly valid point. “I don’t want to name him Trouble, it might give him the wrong idea about himself. Like my name. Bliss is a lot to live up to. I used to feel like I wasn’t allowed to have worries or problems because of my name.”
“That’s ridiculous. If names were literal, I’d have a manor in England.”
“Earl, right?” She was so used to calling him Granger that she’d forgotten about his first name. He probably preferred it that way. “Why did your parents choose that name?”
“My mother thought it was fancy. My half-sister’s named Marqui. No S, because my mom didn’t want anyone getting confused about the pronunciation. I barely missed being called ‘Duke,’ but she liked Earl better because it’s also a tea, so to her that made it even better. That much more fucking British.”
Bliss laughed softly. “So you’re named after Earl Grey tea?”
“No,” he said severely. “Not named after tea. Let’s get back to your name. I assume your mother picked it?”
“Oh yes. She called me Bliss because she claimed that’s how she felt about becoming a mother. Do you know my father never called me Bliss? He just called me B. I loved that. It made me feel like a different person, a normal person with a regular name. Not the living embodiment of an ayahuasca trip.”
“A what?”
She sighed. “It’s a hallucinogenic plant my mother swears by. Anyway, back to our little pupster.”
“Wait, I’m not ready to change the subject yet. Your mother picked “Bliss” because of howshefelt, is that right? Not because it fit you somehow?”
Bliss considered that, and realized that Granger was right. She’d never thought about it that way, but it was true. “You’re very sharp, aren’t you? Is that part of your FBI training? What’s your specialty, anyway? Are you a profiler?”
“Trying to change the subject again?”
She caught amusement in his voice. “It doesn’t take a genius observer to see that.”
“You’re right. But I’ll go along because this isn’t an interrogation. I’m just your basic field agent, but I do happen to be good at psych analysis. I figure it’s because I grew up with a rogue’s gallery of dysfunctional types so I learned all the ins and outs.”
He looked down at the puppy, who was twitching in his sleep, and stroked a feather-light touch across his head. “How about Moses?”
“Moses?”
“He was found in a basket floating down a river, according to the Old Testament.”
She hadn’t been raised with any kind of religion other than chakras and mantras. But the name Moses rang a bell. A song from an old movie drifted through her mind. “Moses…supposes…erroneously…Singing—”
“—in the Rain.” He completed her sentence with a grin. “Classic scene.”
More and more, she got the feeling that Granger was never going to stop surprising her. This was the second movie they both loved. “Okay. But he can’t be the Old Testament Moses because that’s too much to live up to. He’s the Moses from Singing in the Rain. But you have to teach him how to tap dance like Gene Kelly.”
“How did I get roped into this? I don’t think he should have any name other than Vet Patient Number Eighty-nine,” he grumbled.
But she was sure she caught him murmuring, “Sleep, little Moses. Sleep while you can.”
Adorable. Both of them.
Eight
