Geri Krotow - Navy Rules

The relief in her expression was almost comical.

“I love the business I started. It’s not really new anymore—heck, it’s been almost four years and I’ve been turning a decent profit for the past eighteen months. Great considering the economy, you know?”

Her eyes widened as she regarded him and he couldn’t keep his mouth from twitching.

“What, Max?”

“Winnie, we’ve known each other for how long—ten, twelve years?”

“Fifteen.” Her answer was soft and swift.

“Okay, fifteen. I’ve seen you through your best days and your not-so-good days.” He wouldn’t say “worst,” since they’d just agreed to keep Tom’s death out of it. “The Winnie I used to know says ‘hell’ and doesn’t make bullshit small-talk with her friends.”

Her eyes narrowed and she bit her lower lip. A sensual memory of how he’d licked and sucked on that lip punched him in the gut.

“I—” she began, then shook her head. “I’m a mom now, Max. I don’t swear in front of my girls.”

There it was again. Girls. Plural. When had she become involved enough with anyone to have a child? Unless she’d been lying to him the last time he saw her, or had lied this morning, dating wasn’t part of her life.

Maybe she has a friend with benefits.

He couldn’t think about that, not now. Not when the woman he’d thought of all through the war sat there in front of him… He’d ask her who Maeve’s father was some other time. Besides, she’d intimated that the man was no longer in her life.

“Fair enough. So how did you get started with canine therapy?”

Her eyes lit up and her face instantly looked ten years younger. The passionate Winnie he’d met when Tom brought her to the Navy Birthday Ball during their first tour on Whidbey Island was sitting in his kitchen. She tilted her head slightly to the left, eager to share her news with him.

“You remember my family and all their dogs? I grew up with dogs and always loved them.”

“And Tom didn’t. Not so much.”

She hesitated, her mug halfway to her mouth. Damn it, he couldn’t seem to stop talking about Tom. As though mentioning him would help keep Winnie at arm’s length, safely out of his reach.

That didn’t work the night of the Air Show.

He took a swig of his tea and waited.

“No, you’re right. Not small dogs, anyway. Our first dog, well, my dog, Daisy, was that little Jack Russell, remember? She annoyed the hell out of Tom because she’d ignore him unless I was out of the picture. Then she’d pee in his flight boots.”

“I remember more than one sortie,” Max said, referring to the Navy term for an operational or training flight, “where Tom bitched the whole way through about his wet boots. He knew that dog had got to them again, and it didn’t matter where he hid them.”

Winnie laughed and slapped her hand on the counter. “I forgot about that! One time he even put the boots on top of the bookcase—”

“But neglected to remove the smaller bookcase next to it. Daisy climbed up there like a cat and knocked the boots onto the floor.”

“Where she—”

“Peed in them!” They spoke simultaneously and the unselfconsciousness of their shared laughter sideswiped Max.

Until their eyes met and he saw the depths of Winnie’s pain and struggle of the past five years. There was joy, too, and something else he hadn’t seen before. Something harder, older than he’d ever associated with Winnie.

Resignation? Bitterness?

“Well, back to my point.” Winnie cupped her half-full mug and stared into it. “We had Daisy until two years after Tom died. Krista needed a pet. It was gut-wrenching to say goodbye to Daisy, in some ways harder than it’d been to say goodbye to her father.” Winnie’s hands stilled and she looked up at him.

“That sounds sacrilegious, doesn’t it? But she was only seven when Tom died. Two years later she was so much more aware and so attached to that dog. Daisy was a living link to Tom. It killed both of us to put her down.”

She sighed and shifted her gaze to the view outside his huge kitchen window. Her irises reflected the blue of Puget Sound and the shadows of the Cascades.

“My vet suggested getting a new dog right away. She’d been with us—with me—through everything, and she understood more than we did how a puppy would heal us. I thought I was off my rocker, and so did my family, but a couple of weeks after Daisy’s death, Krista and I went to the animal shelter in Coupeville. We looked at all those dogs that needed a home and while we could have been happy with any of them, only one made an effort to get our attention and to keep licking our hands and faces.”

She smiled down at the quiet German shepherd mix who lay beside Max’s feet.

“I told you about him at the Air Show—” Her voice trailed off, and she must have assumed he didn’t remember.

“I recall that you mentioned a new dog, but you didn’t say anything about canine therapy.”

“I’d just started to look into it. It’s not something I would’ve been talking about at that point.”

She didn’t say it but he thought it—after they’d caught up on their three years apart they’d spent their time in his hotel room, and it hadn’t been talking.

“I can’t believe you got this purebred German shepherd from a pound. I know people who’ve paid thousands for purebreds.”

Winnie laughed. The sound delighted him, like an unexpected gift. God, he’d missed her.

“Sam’s no purebred. He’s mostly German shepherd, sure, but his momma was a mixed-breed from Seattle.”

“I didn’t know you could find out lineage when you got a dog from a pound.”

“You can get a DNA test done. But Sam was dropped off with a litter of pups that’d been brought to the shelter by a young woman who had a farm. She said the mother had been killed in a freak gun accident. This woman couldn’t tend to the pups properly and manage her farm, so she brought them here, minus one pup she kept for herself. The mother had been her companion for six years and was a mixed breed. There was a purebred German shepherd guard dog from a local quarry who got out one night…”

“And they had love puppies,” he said, grinning at his own joke.

“Pretty much, yeah. You’d think a farmer would know enough to fix her animals, but in this case, I’m glad she didn’t. Sam is the best pet ever, and his talent for therapy work has made me wonder what happened to his littermates.”

“Did they all get adopted out?”

“Yes, every last one of them, all on Whidbey. Whether they’re still here or not, who knows?”

“So how did you find out he’d be good at this, uh, therapy?” He still had to fight a grimace as he said the word. As though not saying it would make him not need it.

As though the bombing had never happened and he was sitting across from Winnie whole and in control of his future. A future of Navy assignments and leadership instead of rehabilitation and retirement from the Navy, a lot sooner than he’d planned.

“Ever since he was tiny he seemed especially intuitive to my moods and Krista’s. I’ve known a lot of dogs over my lifetime and I never met one that had such a knack for knowing whether you need a lick or a little nudge when you come through the door.”

She smiled at him and he wished the smile was for him and not her dog. Still, he’d take what he could get.

“At first I took him to obedience classes with Krista. It was a family bonding time and it helped her with her self-esteem, which was shaky at best. That might have been due to my grieving and inability to bounce back from Tom’s death as quickly as some people thought I should.”

“Who thought you should have bounced back more quickly?” Maybe she’d never healed. Like him, maybe Winnie was forever affected by her loss.