“Sure, bring it around when you have the chance.” Flick handed the empty water bottle back to Jace. “Thanks for the water. I’m going to get back to my run.”
The men started laughing again so she rolled her eyes as she pulled Rufus across the road.
“You do know that running, by definition, means that you should move faster than an ant?” Jace shouted when she reached the other side.
Haha, so funny. Not.
The sun was high in the sky and perspiration ran down Flick’s temples as she crested the first hill. She hadn’t even made it a mile and she was huffing and puffing and the muscles in her right arm were burning from trying to keep a hundred-and-thirty-pound dog from haring off after rabbits.
Trying to control Rufus was like trying to control a baby rhino on smack, Flick thought as she slowed down to a walk, pushing her fingers into the stitch in her side.
He was more than a handful. She had to do something about him, and soon. Getting rid of him wouldn’t ever be an option, and he didn’t respond to her training methods. Mostly because he knew that she was a soft touch. Yes, have a cookie, sleep on my bed, and chew on my new trainers.
She had one, just one, option, and it wasn’t an easy decision to make. But neutering Rufus would make her life so much easier.
Flick thought that she owed it to Rufus to discuss the procedure with him first, though. She needed to rest anyway, so decided that there was no time like the present. Pulling him over to a log, she sat down and placed her hands on either side of his face. “We need to talk about getting you fixed, sunshine.”
He cocked his head at her, waiting for her to explain. “That means chopping your balls off.” Flick winced when his eyes rolled back in his head in fear.
“Aaarrrrroooooooo!” Rufus howled and Flick winced.
“It doesn’t mean that you’ll be less of a man,” she hastened to assure him.
“Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooooooooo.” Rufus plopped his butt down and dropped his head onto her knee.
“Aw, baby, you’ll be fine,” Flick rubbed his wobbly jowls and kissed his head. “It’ll make you less crazy and far more stable and you’ll settle down and be normal.”
“Nothing normal about getting your ‘nads removed, bud. Trust me on this.”
Flick whirled around so fast that she almost fell off the log. Then she wobbled again when she saw a sweaty Kai Manning standing on the path behind her, his fingers against the pulse point in his neck, his eyes flicking between her and Rufus and his wristwatch. And, dear Lord, he wasn’t wearing a shirt, it was tucked into the back of his shorts, and that broad, slightly hairy chest glistened with perspiration. Muscles rippled and gleamed, and his tattoos, stark and beautiful, made her mouth water.
She’d seen the geometric tattoo covering his forearm the other day but the one that made her breath catch was high up on his chest, an image of dog tags hanging from a nail. She squinted to make out the writing.Jo, June 1990. Mike, September 2009. She knew that Mike was an army buddy of his, and Sawyer’s, who’d been killed on a mission in... Flick frowned, trying to remember the country. Nope, gone. But who was Jo? She wanted to know who was so important to him that he’d keep her memory so close to his heart.
“Don’t let her do it, bud. Run like hell.”
It took Flick a couple of seconds to work out what he was on about but when she did, she quickly responded. “Maybe if I do remove his balls—”
“Aaaarrroooooooooooo.” Rufus howled and they both winced.
“—he’ll stop running.”
“Doubt it,” Kai replied, placing his fists on his hips. “He’s got a lot of border collie in him and they like to exercise. I heard you coming up the hill. You were puffing like a steam train before you ran half a mile.”
“He pulls my arm off!” Flick protested.
Kai stepped closer to her and she caught a whiff of his deodorant and musky sweat and felt her knees liquify. If she could bottle that scent, she’d make a fortune selling it as an aphrodisiac. Flick sucked in her breath when Kai picked up her hand and unwound Rufus’s leash from her hand, which had lost all feeling about fifteen minutes ago.
His fingers were warm on her hand and wrist and she sighed when they drifted over her pulse point. When she thought that she had a good chance of stringing a sentence together, she looked up at him. “What are you doing?”
“Up here or right now?”
“Both.”
“I had a difficult morning so I thought that I would take a break and get in a run.”
“Taking a break is having coffee and eating a cookie, not running a couple of miles.” Flick told him.
Kai ignored her mutter and pulled the leash out of her hand. “You need to get blood back into your hand.” Kai slipped his hand through the opening of the leash and wrapped it around his wrist. Rufus, seeing a bird in a tree, lunged upward but with a jerk, Kai had the massive dog sitting again. “You! Behave!”