Read an Excerpt
Guys & Dogs
Chapter One
The kiss was bad.
His tongue was everywhere — across her lips, on her chin, her cheeks . . . but he looked something like Brad Pitt so she went with it.
It didn't improve.
Plus, he smelled bad. She turned her head away and noticed a crick in her neck. Then she realized she was not on a Caribbean island but in her own bed, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Finally, she opened her eyes.
Jerking awake, she gasped into the hot breath of a hairy, grinning face.
Megan was on her feet in the center of her bed before she realized that she'd moved.
Beside the bed, with its dirty front paws on her pillow, stood a young golden retriever, wagging a long feathered tail and grinning with the friendly self — confidence only a golden retriever could exude while being gaped at in shock.
Trouble was, Megan didn't own a golden retriever.
Nor had she ever seen this dog before. Which might have been unusual considering she was the vet who ran the local animal hospital, but she was new to the job. And the town.
As her heart rate slowly edged back toward normal, Megan knelt down on the bed and reached out a hand to the dog, who licked it twice, then recommenced smiling and wagging at her.
Megan wasn't fooled. This dog had broken into her house. It was not bent on pleasing people for anything other than its own purposes. She raised a skeptical brow at it.
"Well, hello, uh . . ." She leaned on one elbow and craned her neck to look under the dog's hind end. "Hello, girl. Where'd you come from?"
Edging to the side of the bed, shescratched the dog behind an ear and did a cursory examination, mostly out of habit. The dog — a mere adolescent, six or seven months by the look and build of her — stretched luxuriantly under her touch. Since it put up with that so magnanimously, Megan went for the collar.
True to form — and in the spirit of most dogs' favorite game, "catch me if you can" — the pup twisted sharply the moment it realized what she was up to and writhed expertly out of her grasp, taking off down the stairs.
Megan sighed. Teenagers.
Getting out of bed and pulling on some sweatpants under her tee shirt, she listened for any sounds of destruction. From what she heard downstairs, she surmised the puppy had found her own dog, Peyton — a big, tricolored bear of a Bernese mountain dog — in her crate next to the stairs. The sounds of toenails on hardwood mixed with frantic tail thumps on the side of the crate and throaty whines of longing were clear giveaways.
How the pup had missed Peyton on the way up was a mystery, but after a bit of scratching and whining the interloper resorted to a short, high bark. Then another. By the time Megan reached the stairs the golden was down on its elbows, butt in the air — play bowing — as if Peyton weren't actually closed up in the crate but for some reason just playing hard to get.
"Come here, puppydog," she called, walking past the golden on the way to the kitchen, thereby short — circuiting the dog's play instinct to run away. A Milk Bone would convince it that having its collar and tags examined was not tantamount to torture. "Come on! Come let me find out who you belong to."
She entered the kitchen and found her father, hair mashed and spiky from sleep, threadbare bathrobe hanging from hunched shoulders, seated at the table, nursing a cup of coffee.
"Oh. Hey, Dad," she said, looking for signs of vitality in his sagging face. He hadn't been home when she'd gone to bed last night, and she was fairly certain he was the reason she'd woken up at three this morning. He never seemed to learn that those late, hard — drinking nights resulted in these less — than — idyllic mornings. Either that or there was so much brain damage from years of this that he forgot by the time night fell again that it was a bad idea.
He looked at her with watery eyes. "Hey, doll."
Despite the fact that Megan had grown up thinking it was just his nickname for her, she'd come to learn that her father called all women "doll." The mistake was understandable — she'd only spoken to him about once a year after the age of nine, when her parents had split up — but she still felt a pinprick of disappointment whenever he called her that now.
A few months ago, in a fit of missing her mother, who'd died of cancer several years before, Megan had decided to leave the animal hospital in Connecticut where she'd worked since graduating from vet school and move to Virginia to get to know her father better. In the week since she'd moved into his home here to take over his veterinary practice, she'd not only learned that women were "dolls" but that men were "sports." Unless they were "assholes." And the later in the evening it was, which meant the more he drank, the more dolls and assholes there seemed to be.
Now he mustered a wry smile and said, "What's with all the barking? I thought that dog of yours was supposed to be quiet."
"She is." Megan looked at the back door, noted that the dog hatch was not locked as it should be, and concluded that this was how the extra dog had made it onto her bed. "Didn't you notice someone strange coming through the dog door just now?"
He straightened. "Huh?"
Grabbing the box of dog bones and shaking it, she whistled sharply. The apparently delicious sound of meat treats in cardboard had the desired effect on both dogs. The puppy came running, while Peyton whined pitifully in her crate. "Who the hell is that?" her father queried.
She held a bone out and the puppy nabbed it like a Zen master capturing a fly. She inhaled it just as fast and looked expectantly back up at Megan.
Guys & Dogs. Copyright © by Elaine Fox. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
