horror novel. It’s a weakness, and then I sleep with the light on. I’ve never figured out how leaving the light on saves you from the vampires or ghosts or demons. There.” She stepped back to examine the flowers. “They’re so pretty. Should we go?”
“Yeah, I guess we’d better.” So he’d stop thinking of her bed upstairs, no kids in the house.
“That’s not your truck,” she said when they walked outside.
“No. Mom refused to let me take you out, at least this time, in a pickup, so she handed me the keys. Felt like high school.”
“When’s your curfew?”
“I know all the ways to sneak into the house.”
She pondered that while he slid behind the wheel. “Did you really? Sneak into the house as a kid?”
“Sure. I didn’t always get away with it, none of us did, but you had to try.” He glanced at her as he drove. “No?”
“No, I didn’t, and now I feel deprived.”
“If you want, when we get back, I’ll help you climb in through a window.”
“Tempting, but just not the same when I have the key. What did you do that you had to sneak in?”
He took a long pause. “Stuff.”
“Hmmm. Now I have to worry if one day the boys will decide to do stuff, then sneak into the house. But not tonight. My biggest problem with them at the moment is Murphy’s decided his life is unfulfilled unless he has a puppy, and they’ve joined forces against me.”
“You don’t like dogs?”
“I like dogs, and they should have a dog. Eventually.”
“Is that like Mom for we’ll see?
“It’s in the neighborhood,” she admitted. “I think about it because they ought to have a dog. They adore my parents’ pug, Lucy, and Fido the cat.”
“Your parents have a cat named Fido? Why didn’t I know that?”
“He thinks he’s a dog, so we don’t spread it around. Anyway, I think they should have one, feel guilty they don’t. Then I think, oh God, who’s going to housebreak it, train it, haul it to the vet, feed it and walk it and all the rest? I tried to talk them into a kitten, but they’re not having it. Kittens, Liam informed me, with no little disgust, are for girls. I don’t know where they get that.”
She arched her eyebrows at his profile. “You agree with him?”
“Kittens are for girls. Cats now, they can go either way.”
“You know that’s ridiculous.”
“I don’t make the rules. What kind of dog do they want?”
“They don’t know.” She sighed because the boys were wearing her down on the subject. “It’s the idea of a dog they’re in love with. I’m also told a dog would protect me from the bad guys when they’re not around.” She shrugged. “I’d go to the pound and adopt one, save a life, but how can you be sure the puppy you save won’t turn into a big, mean dog that barks at the mail carrier and terrorizes the neighbors? I need to research family-friendly breeds.”
He pulled into the restaurant parking lot. “You know Ry’s dog.”
“Everybody knows D.A.” She shifted to study his profile. “Ryder takes him everywhere. He’s a sweetheart.”
“Hell of a good dog. You know how Ry got him?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
They got out of either side of the car, then he walked around to take her hand.
“He was a stray, six or seven months old, the vet figured. Ryder’s out at his place one night after work, putting some time into the house he built. It’s getting on dark, he’s knocking off, and this dog comes crawling in. Bone thin, his paws bleeding, shivering. It’s pretty clear he’d been out in the woods awhile. More than likely, somebody dumped him.”
Instantly her affection for D.A. doubled. “Poor thing.”
“Ryder figures he can’t just leave him there, so he’ll take him back home—he stayed with Mom a lot until he had the house closed in. So, he’d feed him, clean him up a little, give him a place to flop for the night. He’d take him to the pound in the morning.
“That was six years ago.”
Sweet, she thought—not the usual adjective applied to Ryder Montgomery. “I guess it was love at first sight.”
“I know we asked around, in case he’d run away, gotten lost. No collar, no tag, and nobody claimed him. By the morning, I can tell you, Ry would’ve been brokenhearted if someone had.”
“And yet, he named him Dumbass.”
“Affectionately, and all too often accurately. Montgomery, seven thirty reservation,” he told the hostess when they went inside.