Three weeks later
“Engaged? Crikey!” Oliver Kelly stroked his short, thick beard. “That’s—”
He glanced at his partner Jackeroo, an Australian shepherd lying on the hotel carpet a few feet away, as if his partner would know what to say.
The dog lifted his head, ears cocked expectantly.
“Congratulations is the word you’re looking for.” Kye McGarren sounded amused as his voice came through the cell phone.
“Yeah. That’s it.” Oliver motioned Jackeroo to him and began stroking the dog as he talked. “Good on ya, mate. But it’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?”
“It’s been a year. Yardley’s been tough to nail down.”
Okay, so Kye and Yardley being in love wasn’t news. They lived together when not on assignment for BARKS. Still. “Marriage. It’ll change you.”
“God, I hope so. It’s time I settled down.”
Oliver grunted. “You might have given a mate a heads-up, is all.”
“You would have told Yardley.”
“Never.”
“Admit it. You gossip like a girl.”
“Say that to my face.”
Kye sighed. “That’s the other reason I’m calling. I can’t leave Yard right now. You’re on your own this weekend.”
“Fair dinkum. I’ll give ’em right bloody hell.” Oliver bit off the next sentence. He only went “all Aussie”—as Kye called it—when he was annoyed. “You know I hate these dos with everyone crawling up everyone’s butt trying to drum up business. That’s your department. You schmooze, I demonstrate. Public speaking gives me hives.”
“Imagine your audience in their underwear.”
“Fuck you very much. Now all I’ll be able to visualize is a bunch of hairy-assed law enforcement alphas in Speedos.”
“You that worried about going solo this weekend?”
Oliver was tempted to tell him the truth. Public speaking terrified him. He could regale a pub full of patrons with wild tales. But put him behind a podium and his throat closed up tighter than a sphincter. Of course that would be admitting vulnerability.
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. It’s this sudden talk of settling down. You’d think—” He sucked in a breath. “Yard’s in a family way.”
Oliver could practically hear the grin that spread across his friend’s face. “We’re betting it’s a boy. I’ll send you the photos as soon as we get the sonogram done.”
Oliver shook his head. “I’ll pray for you, mate. You’ve fallen a long way from the path of the heathen brotherhood.”
Kye laughed. “You’ll tire of it one day. Bye, Uncle Ollie.”
When the call had ended, Oliver looked over at his constant companion. “It’s sad, really. A good man taken out in his prime. By love.”
Jackeroo thumped his tail.
“Oh, you would side with Kye. That’s because Yardley spoils you rotten when I’m not looking. Who gives a working animal T-bone steak?”
Jackeroo barked. One of his favorite words was T-bone.
He was a gorgeous example of the breed. His coat was longish and silky, with a white front that ran from his chin down both forepaws. His back and haunches were glossy black with touches of honey underneath, and he had white back feet. But it was his face that never failed to draw comment. A white blaze swept down from his forehead between high, flopped black ears, and around either side of his muzzle. Honey-brown fur covered his cheeks and circled his eyes, one brown and one blue. Dramatic kohl lines rimmed his eyes and mouth so that when he panted, everyone swore he was really smiling.
Oliver agreed. His K-9 partner was a handsome devil, and he knew it. Those floppy black ears peaked and swiveled like semaphore flags, signaling his moods. Right now Jack was very pleased with his world. He loved the beach.
Oliver shook his head as he pulled on board shorts. Being reminded of why he was in St. Petersburg Beach lowered his own enthusiasm for the beach resort several notches. He could really work up a resentment toward Yardley if she didn’t make his partner so happy. It was fuckin’ weird the way Kye’s face lit up when she appeared. He became a big Day-Glo hunk of burnin’ love. Pitiful.
“Uncle Ollie.” He grinned suddenly as he hunkered down next to his K-9 and kissed him on the nose. “Think I’ll make a good uncle?”
Jackeroo barked and licked his handler’s face.
“Right. When the kid’s old enough, I’ll teach him every bad habit I know. How to drink. Roll his own veggie cigs. How to surf and pull women. A real terror of an uncle, that’ll be me.”
Let Kye do the dutiful heir-apparent Prince William married-bliss thing. He was Prince Harry.
“Dirty Harry. Yeah.” He liked the sound of that.
Oliver worked hard, putting in all the time and sweat his job required, and then some. If he wanted to mess about another ten or twenty years before settling down, then he right well would.
Except that the boast sounded lame. Like he was trying to cover up something. Or maybe he was just more tired than he realized. Burnout was an ever-present danger for people in his line of work.
Bolt Action Rescue K-9 Service was the full name of his and Kye’s company, shortened to BARKS, which trained and supervised professional K-9 Search And Rescue teams worldwide. That often meant bugging out with an hour’s notice to a place in the world where things had gone bad or deeply wrong. Be it a hurricane, an earthquake, a tsunami, mudslides, volcanoes, wildfires, floods, any and every kind of natural and some man-made disasters—BARKS was ready to go, bringing expertise and some of the best scent- and sight-trained K-9 teams on the planet to save lives.
He and Jackeroo, a K-9 team for three years, specialized in difficult search-and-rescue missions. The latest job had been enough to make a man shrivel inside. It was an off-the-books job involving the extraction of medical personnel from a war-torn area. They’d arrived too late. The hospital had been flattened by a bomb. All they extracted were corpses, many of them small children. What they’d left behind still haunted his sleep.
Oliver shook his head, willing the ugly images away. He didn’t always enjoy his job but he knew he or Kye would get it done the best way possible. Many didn’t last long in a business that dealt with horror on a regular basis. Or else they became people you didn’t want to know. Kye and he worked at keeping a sane balance.
That’s why, when he could play, he played harder and faster and looser than most. Women were his recreational drug of choice. Strictly an off-duty short-term pleasure.
This weekend wasn’t going to be any different. Here at St. Petersburg Beach, leggy women lounging on chairs in tiny bikinis would be as common as flowers in a florist’s window, all stretched out before him like a personalized buffet for fun in the sun.
Oliver looked down at his K-9 partner. “Time to get out and search out some fun.”
Jackeroo sprang up from his lying position and barked twice, his tail making wide sweeps of approval.
Oliver slipped his feet into beach runners and grabbed his sweatshirt from the back of a chair before heading for the door.
The other reason he was in town, the International Professional Search and Rescue conference, could wait until later. Much later.
Oliver shook himself like a wet dog to try to throw off the public-speaking willies.
* * *
An amazing swimmer, Jackeroo loved the beach. It didn’t matter whether it was the pounding surf of the Hawaiian Islands, the clear waves of Bondi Beach, or this new experience of the American Gulf. He bounded along beside his owner as Oliver jogged along the water’s edge, only to occasionally swerve suddenly and leap into the curl of an incoming wave. Oliver let him play, knowing his dog would eventually catch up as he ran his daily four miles. Jackeroo had learned the hard way as a puppy not to drink salt water. After lapping up the sandy surf a few times and heaving it back up on his first seaside visit, he’d learned to just swim in the surf.
After a minute or two, Jackeroo came sprinting up beside his handler and fell into stride for a serious run on the beach.
“Good on ya,” Oliver pronounced and received several bright barks of joy from his sodden dog. He’d have to bathe him to get the sand and salt out of Jackeroo’s thick tricolored coat.
Oliver scanned the still-empty beach as they returned the way they’d come. Right now it was still too early for beach babes. He was just about to turn his attention back to the shoreline when he caught sight of a shabbily dressed woman on her knees in the sand beside one of the dumpsters in the shadow of a beachside hotel.
Even so, he jogged on a few yards until his mind replayed exactly what he’d witnessed.
A woman.
Scrounging for food in a dumpster.
Not in some hellhole on earth. In a first-world tourist Mecca.
It was that last thought that brought him up short. It made him backtrack and tie Jackeroo to a palm before he went to investigate.