Series: Rescue
Me, #2
Pub Date: April
3, 2018
Genre: Contemporary
These dogs aren’t the only
ones in need of rescue
For
devoted no-kill shelter worker Kelsey Sutton, rehabbing a group of rescue dogs
is a welcome challenge. Working with a sexy ex-military dog handler who needs
some TLC himself? That’s a different story.
Kurt
Crawford keeps his heart locked away from everyone. Well, everyone except the
dogs who need his help…and always have his back. But as Kurt gets to know the
compassionate, beautiful woman he's been assigned to work with, he can't help
but feel a little puppy love…
EXCERPT
Kurt’s skin was
crawling, and the tightness in his jaw had migrated to his temples. His
shoulders and spine tensed as he scanned the parameters of the long, open
warehouse like he was on patrol. The rear of the building was blocked off by
accordion-style dividers. It bothered him that he couldn’t see past them.
It was the smell
setting him on edge, he finally realized. Not the obvious smell—the smell of
hot, unbathed dog multiplied by 150. That smacked you in the face when you
stepped through the doors. Unnerving him was the underlying scent of fear
radiating from the expansive rows of crates that were dwarfed by the
thirty-foot ceiling and five-thousand-square-foot floor.
Dogs didn’t have sweat
glands, so it wasn’t as if the smell was coming out of their pores. But he’d
been in the service long enough to know fear when he smelled it—his own,
another human’s, a dog’s. Metallic and salty—like blood, only subtler.
The gushy blond
accompanying him on the tour wasn’t setting him at ease either as she squatted
down and talked to every crated dog. The bumper sticker on the back of her
Corolla—the bright-yellow car he’d parked by had to be hers; he’d seen her
keys—was a telltale enough sign she wasn’t right for this job. I BRAKE FOR TURTLES. He
didn’t know what Rob was thinking, sending a bunch of trained fighters off to
be in this girl’s care.
The bumper sticker
wasn’t the only thing he noticed. She was tall and strikingly pretty in an
understated, natural way, and she had an hourglass figure.
Not that her looks mattered.
What mattered was that dogs
treated the way most of these had likely been treated—stuck in crates or tied
to chains and freed only to fight—needed much more than soft words and treats
passed through the bars of their crates.
“She seems sweet enough,”
she said of the mastiff mix displaying submission along with a good deal of
stress while being stared down through the door. Her voice was easy and calm
like the slow pour of honey.
Kurt gritted his teeth
as she pulled free a yellow sticky and pressed it on top of the crate. Yellow. Seriously? Her and her stickies. He’d stifled a laugh earlier when he
figured out her system. Pink for definitely, yellow for maybe, blue for pass.
She’d only used one blue sticky so far, and the way that Rott had attacked the
cage door, Kurt wouldn’t have been surprised if he was rabid.
The next dog they came
to was a giant. Rather than being crammed into one of the crates, he was in an
oversized kennel. He stood when they approached, making it easier to inspect
him. The long hair around his neck and along his upper back pricked straight
up, declaring the animal’s unease. And unlike most of the gigantic dogs Kurt
had come across at one time or another, this one seemed anything but easygoing.
With his tail stuck
straight out, the massive animal looked at each one in the group alternately,
fixing them with a striking stare that in Kurt’s mind was akin to a dare.
Kurt forced back a
protest as the blond pressed a pink sticky on the front of the giant dog’s
kennel. So, she’d be throwing a man-sized dog with a heavily alpha demeanor
into the mix, wherever she was taking them.
Kurt nodded to the
partitions blocking off the back of the warehouse. “What’s behind door number
three?”
Rob’s lips pursed
almost imperceptibly. “Long shots and TLCs. Nothing she needs to see. For the
long shots, it’ll be a bit before we have a sense of whether or not they can be
rehabbed into traditional homes. The others will stay until they need less
intensive care.”
Maybe the dogs in those
cages would shake some sense into the girl. “She should know what she’s getting
into. Know how bad it can be.” The blond’s eyebrows furrowed as she listened.
She closed one arm over her stomach, wrapping her hand around her other elbow,
drawing his attention to her chest, though he knew not intentionally. She
reminded him of one of those ancient hand-carved fertility statues. No makeup
that he could see, light-brown eyes with flecks of gold, and hips in perfect
proportion to her chest. And he had the distinct feeling she had no idea of the
heads she turned every day.
She was dressed for a
day on the job in faded jeans and a V-neck tee that was the color of orange
sherbet. It read “ADOPT,” except that there was an impression of a dog paw in
the middle instead of an “O”.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing
everything,” she said, watching two young guys Rob had introduced at the start
of the tour roll a crate behind the blocked-from-view partition after bringing
it in through a side door. “You’re getting more dogs this morning?”
One side of Rob’s mouth
pulled up into a half smile, half grimace. “No new animals are coming in until
this evening. The pit my guys are rolling back was in surgery yesterday. A
couple local vets have volunteered their services. And right now, it’s triage.”
He tapped his fingers against his temple and gave a light shake of his head.
“Come on, if you want. I’ll let you see.”
Debbie Burns lives in St. Louis with her family, two phenomenal rescue dogs, and a somewhat tetchy Maine coon cat who everyone loves anyway. Her hobbies include hiking, gardening, and daydreaming, which, of course, always leads to new story ideas.
Find Debbie
Online:
Website: http://www.authordebbieburns.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_debbieburns
Rafflecopter Giveaway
Enter to win one of
five copies of A New Leash on Love by
Debbie Burns!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
No comments:
Post a Comment