Page 18 of Things We Hide from the Light
“Nash?”
“What?” I bit out the word.
“You think you could let me go? I’m starting to get ideas that might make our new friend here blush.”
Swearing under my breath, I took my hands—and groin—off her, then slipped the leash around the dog’s skinny neck. It was indeed wearing a dirty pink collar with no tags. Both the collar and the dog looked as if they’d been through a ten-mile mud race.
I didn’t know whether to pick up the woman or the dog and decided it was safer to go for the dog. She shivered pathetically in my arms, even as her tattered tail tapped out a nervous beat against my gut. Lina climbed to her feet.
“Congratulations, Daddy. It’s a girl,” Lina said. She slid her phone out of its sleeve and snapped a picture of me.
“Stop,” I ordered gruffly.
“Don’t worry. I cropped it at the waist so no one will see what kind of weaponry you’re packing,” she teased, coming to stand before me and taking a selfie of the three of us. I scowled for it and she laughed.
The dog scrambled higher up my chest, shivering in my arms. “Lina, I swear to God…”
She brought a hand to my chest and the turmoil inside me quieted. “Relax, Nash.” Her tone was soft, as if she were talking to the bedraggled disaster of a dog again. “I’m just teasing you. You’re fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
“It’s inappropriate. I was inappropriate,” I insisted.
“Determined to beat yourself up, aren’t you?”
The dog buried her head under my chin as if I was somehow going to protect her.
“How about this?” Lina said, giving the dog a soothing stroke with her other hand. “I’ll stop teasing you—temporarily. If you concede that there are worse things than making me feel physically attractive even when I’m sweaty and covered in mud. Deal?”
The smelly mongrel chose that moment to lick my face from jaw to eyeball.
“I think she likes you,” Lina observed.
“She smells like a sewage plant,” I complained. But the little dog’s eyes locked on to me, and I felt something. Not the licking of flames that attacked every time Lina was within touching distance, but something else. Something sweeter, sadder.
“So what’s the plan, Chief?” Lina asked.
“Plan?” I repeated, still staring into those pathetic brown eyes.
FOUR
DOWNRIGHT FILTHY
Lina
With our scruffy prize fed, watered, and wrapped in a fresh T-shirt, I climbed into the passenger seat wearing the chief of police’s Knockemout PD sweatshirt. Not exactly the way I’d seen my morning going. I thought a long run would clear my head, not end up “doggy style” with Nash Morgan.
The man with the impressive self-control closed my door, rounded the hood, and slid behind the wheel. He sat for a beat. Exhaustion and tension pumped off him as he stared through the windshield.
“Is this where it happened?” I asked. I’d read the news articles, the reports, about the traffic stop turned trap.
“Where what happened?” he hedged, feigning innocence as he fastened his seat belt.
“Oh, so we’re going to play it like that? Okay. You just happened to be driving by the spot where you were shot and then used your X-ray vision to determine there was a dog trapped in a storm pipe.”
“Nope,” he said, then started the engine and cranked the heat. “It was my super hearing, not my X-ray vision.”
I bit my lip and then went for it. “Is it true you don’t remember it?”
He grunted, swinging the vehicle across both lanes in a U-turn and heading for town.
