Puppy Kisses Read online

  Also by Lucy Gilmore

  Forever Home

  Puppy Love

  Puppy Christmas

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Lucy Gilmore

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Dawn Adams/Sourcebooks

  Cover art by Alan Ayers

  Cover image © Shirley Green Photography

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  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 they had been 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 hands where?”

  “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.”

  Zeke didn’t look over. He was too busy gripping the wheel with both hands, the fields a blur around them. “There aren’t any cliffs around here, but there’s a good chance we’ll end up turned over in a ditch before this is over. Are you wearing your seat belt?”

  “Yep.”

  “Airbag is on?”

  “Check.”

  “You’ve made peace with your maker?”

  “Um.” Dawn was forced into a laugh. “That depends on who you ask. I mean, I’m okay with most of my life choices. If you were to ask my mother, however…”

  “Uh-oh. Hold that thought, D. We’ve got more company.”

  Since both her arms were wrapped around the puppy, there wasn’t much for her to hold on to. Not that it would have been of any use to cling to the dashboard or those weird handles that people used to carry their dry cleaning. Just when the frenetic, wheezing pickup was becoming nothing more than a blip in the rearview mirror, their tail was replaced by a sleek green-and-white car with a whir of colorful lights up top. Unlike the truck, this new car managed to keep pace with them just fine.

  “Oh dear. Is that—?” Dawn began.

  Zeke finished for her. “Sheriff Jenkins? Yes. Fuck. I was going at least ninety. He’s not going to like this. I hate to say it, but I think we’d have been better off with No-Pants Shotgun back there.”

  Dawn disagreed. She’d had enough encounters with the legal system to feel wary where they were concerned, but she’d take her chances with a backwoods officer of the law over an irate man without pants any day.

  “Don’t worry about the sheriff,” Dawn said with a toss of her head. She bit down on her lips to bring the blood to them and gave her T-shirt a not-so-discreet tug. She’d dressed for the day’s heist in functional jean shorts and a ratty shirt, but the top had been worn so many times that it was practically sheer. The deep plunge of the V-neck didn’t hurt matters, either. Her boobs were far and away her best feature—too big for everyday comfort, but ideal when trying to bend people to her will. Whenever she got annoyed with the former, she tried very hard to focus on the latter. “I’m sure I can convince him to let us go with a warning.”

  Zeke snorted as he pulled the car over to the side of the road. “You obviously haven’t met Harold Jenkins. The only thing he hates more than people who speed are women who speed.”

  “But I’m not the one driving,” Dawn pointed out. She dropped a kiss on the golden retriever’s dusty head. “Besides, who would give a ticket to anyone holding such a sweet little love as this?”

  The answer, as it turned out, was Sheriff Harold Jenkins.

  “That makes the third time this month, Mr. Dearborn.” The sheriff—a short, balding man with a swagger in his step and nothing but disdain for Dawn’s cleavage—was every bit as disagreeable as Zeke had promised. He examined the driver’s license in his hand as if inspecting the edges for lines of cocaine. “I told you last time that I’d suspend this if I caught you speeding again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I clocked you at eighty-nine. That’s an eight and a nine. Together. In one number.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Last I checked, we hadn’t made any changes to the speed limit around here.”

  “No, sir.”

  It was almost more than Dawn could take. Meekly accepting one’s fate was a thing she never could and never would understand—especially in a world as flawed as this one. They’d just saved this poor animal’s life, for crying out loud, and her white knight was quaking more in fear over a traffic violation than over the man who’d been chasing them with a gun.

  Since she appeared to be on her own in this fight, she leaned across the driver’s seat and plastered on her brightest smile. “I’m so sorry about this, Officer. But it wasn’t Zeke’s fault—honest, it wasn’t. This one was all me.”

  “Sheriff.”

  She blinked, somewhat taken aback by the gruff note in his voice. She also noted her error at once. “Yes, um. Of course. That’s what I meant, Sheriff.” She batted her eyelashes for good measure. “Zeke was only going so fast because it’s an emergency.”

  The sheriff’s eyes narrowed as they ran over the car’s interior. “Doesn’t look like much of an emergency to me. Is there a reason you have the dog up front like that?”

  “Yes.” Dawn saw her chance and latched onto it. She was nothing if not opportunistic. “This puppy is in desperate need of medical attention. Look how frail and underweight she is—and at these sores on her stomach. She’s in a lot of pain.”

  She thought both she and the puppy sold it pretty well. Not only did the animal give an appropriately pitiful blink of her sleepy brown eyes, but Dawn followed up with one of her own. No man would be able to stand up to the pair of them. She was sure of it.

  At least, she was until the sheriff chuffed out a breath and handed Zeke a ticket. The ID he kept firmly in hand. “Then you’re going in the wrong direction, young lady. Marcia Peterson is the best veterinarian in twelve counties—a thing Zeke Dearborn has known since his cradle. She’s also located a good fifteen miles the other way.”

  Dawn’s heart sank. That had been some of her best
work.

  “I’ll have to see the lady’s license, if you please,” the sheriff added in a clipped tone. “Seeing as how she’ll be the one driving you home. If she’s unable to take the wheel, then I’ll be happy to escort all three of you in the back of my car. This ID is no longer valid.”

  “But, Harold, you can’t—” Zeke began with an agonized glance at Dawn. She knew what that look meant. He spent nine-tenths of his life working on his family’s ranch and the other tenth at his triathlon training sessions. To lose his driver’s license would be to lose his only means of transportation in and out of here—his only escape. He freaking loved those triathlons.

  “We’re not taking her to Marcia’s,” Dawn said, grasping at the only straw she could see. And she meant that literally. They were so far from civilization that not even a Google and Apple Maps baby could save them. “We’re taking her to the ranch.”

  “The ranch?” Sheriff Jenkins echoed doubtfully. He paused, though, which was the most important thing, the driver’s license hanging fatefully in the air. “What for?”

  “Well…you see…the thing is…” Dawn heaved a deep breath to give herself strength. This next part was going to hurt, but she had to do it. “This is Adam’s dog.”

  Despite the pang that filled her at such blasphemous words, she had the benefit of seeing a flicker of hesitation in Sheriff Jenkins’s eyes. Of course, that flicker then moved to the puppy, taking in that hunched, traumatized form with a disbelieving chuff of air.

  “Mr. Dearborn owns this dog?” he asked. “What for?”

  “She’s a service animal.” Zeke was quick to pick up on the train of Dawn’s thoughts. “To help Adam around the ranch and stuff when Phoebe and I can’t be there.”

  The idea that this starving bundle of a puppy could be of service to anyone was ludicrous, but Zeke went on, driven by the silence greeting him on all sides. “Dawn here is a dog trainer,” he said. “Didn’t I mention that? She owns a company—a real business that trains and places puppies for the blind. You have some business cards on you, right, Dawn?”