there’d been had seemed to shine right on her, like a beacon from above.
Not a wrinkle around her hazel eyes. Her skin was still redhead pale and smooth. Her only freckles dotted places no one could see. He remembered tasting them, tasting her.
Owen took a deep breath, but that only served to reveal another thing that hadn’t changed. She still smelled like lemons and sunshine. He hadn’t drunk a glass of lemonade since he’d left.
Lemonade had always tasted like her.
He stumbled, badly. Lost his grip on the shovel, which fell into her, and she stumbled too. He reached out and snatched her arm—just because he was lame didn’t mean he was … lame. His hands were still quick, even if the rest of him wasn’t.
The snarl that rumbled from the darkness had his skin prickling. His free hand went to his empty hip again as a huge, black wolf loomed from the night.
Becca stepped in front of Owen. He still had a grip on her arm and pulled her back, which only made the wolf snap, jaws clicking shut centimeters away from Owen’s free hand. Again, quickness was everything. He’d learned that the hard way in Afghanistan.
“He isn’t hurting me,” Becca said.
The wolf crouched, still grumbling but no longer snarling and snapping, its freakishly light green gaze fixed on Owen.
“You have a pet wolf?”
She stared at the beast as if it were the first time she’d seen it, and considering the animal’s behavior that couldn’t be the case. “Wolves aren’t pets.”
“Got that right.”
The beast showed Owen her teeth. If he’d been confused before, he wasn’t now. Definitely not a pet.
Frantic barking commenced. A bolt of brown fur vaulted through one of the now glassless windows of the house and hit the ground running.
Owen had time to shout, “Reggie, nein!” an instant before the two animals slammed into each other and rolled. Snarls filled the air. Spittle flew; teeth snapped.
“Call her off,” he ordered.
“She isn’t a pet. Call him off.”
Reggie wasn’t a pet either, but he had been trained by the best.
“Nein!” Owen ordered. “Aus!”
Reggie released the wolf’s leg, as ordered. The black beast circled the brown one.
“Hier!”
The dog hesitated, his eyes flicking to Owen, then back to the wolf. Owen couldn’t blame him, but he also couldn’t let Reggie disobey.
“Lass das sein! Hier!”
This time Reggie followed the commands of “don’t do that” and “come.” Though his neck craned so that he could keep the wolf in his sight, he trotted to Owen’s side and sat without being told to sitz!
“What was that?” Becca asked.
“German.”
She cast him an exasperated glance. “I got that much, but why?”
“Reggie’s a military working dog. Er gehorcht auf Kommando. He obeys German commands.”
Most K-9 working dogs were purchased from Germany. There they not only nurtured the bloodlines necessary for K-9 work, but they had the best training programs for the same. Even dogs purchased young and trained in the States still learned commands in German to match their initial training—sit, come, stay—as well as to align them with all the other dogs.
“That’s a Belgian Malinois.”
Most people thought Reggie was an oddly unmarked and slightly small German shepherd. Not Becca. She knew her dog breeds. Always had.
“He is,” Owen agreed. “A lot of Belgians are bred in Germany.”
Becca offered her hand to Reggie, palm down, nonthreatening. He glanced at Owen. Military working dogs—MWDs for short—were not pets. They accepted admiration as their due, but only if it was allowed by their handler. Anyone who knew anything about MWDs would never touch one without asking first. That was a good way to lose a finger.
Reggie was better than most, he didn’t need a muzzle in crowds, but he still wasn’t cuddly and probably never would be.
“In ordnung,” Owen said. Okay.
The dog sniffed her fingers. The wolf growled, and Reggie pulled back, with a low woof.
“Hush,” Becca murmured, to one or both of them, Owen wasn’t sure, but they both hushed. The wolf paced back and forth a dozen yards away. There was something odd about the animal that went beyond its far too human eyes.
“What kind of military work does he do?”
Owen didn’t want to say, but from Becca’s expression she already knew or at least suspected. It wasn’t rocket science to figure it out, and for a veterinarian even less so.
“Explosive detection,” he answered.
“Then why is he here?”
The world shimmied, as if something had exploded nearby, though Owen knew nothing had. He was still hoping that remnant would fade along with the constant urge to hit the