“I bring comfort,” Sally called from the front door. Sally to the rescue. As usual. That woman should wear a red cross.

Lulah worked on subtleties and would back off when asked, but Sally? She was the rat terrier. If you told her you wanted time alone, she stormed right in and made you hold hands and dance with the big thing you would’ve preferred to leave haunting you from a gloomy corner. No avoiding the scary stuff when Sally marched through your door.

Marlo pushed herself upright on the daybed. She’d been settled back with her laptop, watching some video made by a trainer in Australia who’d been working with a dingo. The unfettered body language and signaling from the semi-wild dog had kept her distracted. She closed her laptop and placed it on the table. “I’m out on the patio.”

Sally appeared in front of her. “Oh, look at you, girlfriend. I’m here just in time. You lose any more weight, and you’ll need stuffing for those push-up bras we bought you.” She started unloading bags onto the table. “Never fear, for I bring pizza with extra olives, fat salty anchovies, some shredded basil to keep it balanced, and mozzarella flowing like a lahar. I have a specific homeopathic remedy that fixes what we like to call, ‘heart stubbornness’ … that’s ‘unable to love’ to the layperson. Here, I also bring cheap red wine.” She turned the bottle and stared at the label. “Sorry, can’t pronounce the name but I think it translates to Generic Red Plonk.” With a flourish she raised a small cooler bag. “One tub of Ben and Jerry’s best for when we get all maudlin and start man-hating. Cherry Garcia—I believe it is your chosen frozen poison.”

She laid it out on the small table, while Marlo put the ice cream in the freezer and grabbed plates and glasses.

“Sally, this is fantastic. You’re a hero.”

With the wine poured, they each took a glass and raised them for a toast.

“To a quick resolution for tonight’s two problems.” Sally grinned.

Marlo grimaced. “Two problems?”

“Yes, only two.” They touched glasses, tasted the wine, and groaned in unison. “A headache in every glass—perfect,” Sally announced.

Marlo shuddered as she placed her glass back on the table. “Christ, Sally, promise me you didn’t part with money for this.”

“No. It came from an ungrateful client. It probably needs to breathe.”

“Breathe?” She laughed. “It needs resuscitating.”

Sally shoved her nose into the glass, took a deep sniff and grimaced. “You’re right. It’s dead. It’s a shame, but it’s not the end of the world. Now eat, girl. Get some flesh on those bones. Once you’ve had three slices of pizza I’ll let you tell me about Justice. We’ll get him sorted first. Then we’ll sort out Adam.”

Marlo knew that apart from the wine mishap, for Sally, this was shaping up to be a perfect evening.

She managed two slices of pizza and picked at the olives on the topping of the third before pushing her plate away. “I’m done. If I’m going to fit in ice cream, I can’t do any more pizza.”

“Okay, tell me about Justice.”

Marlo filled her in on the details. When she finished she reached for her wine, inhaled the sour fumes and coughed. “Sorry, Sal, I can’t drink any more of that. I’m making tea. Do you want a cup?”

“Tea and sympathy. Bring it on.”

Marlo set the tea tray on the small table then started preparing to pour. She loved the delay her ritual of tea-making gave her, that way it worked like a pause button for life. “Lemon or milk?”

“Adam,” Sally replied.

“Adam?”

“Yes, stop using delaying tactics. You can tell me about Adam while you’re pouring the tea.”

She replaced the teapot and paused. When had she become this open book? Adam seemed to read her mind. Well, he used to. Now Sally was doing it.

Sally reached for her tea and sniffed. “Lemon, nice. How’s Adam?”

“I don’t know.” Marlo shrugged. “He’s gone.”

Sally pitched forward to the edge of her seat. “So, one moment you two are knocking boots like a couple of old lovebirds, and now he’s gone.”

Marlo poked at the slice of lemon in her tea. “Yes, well that sums it up.”

“Why? Why has he gone?”

Fair question. She had teased her lemon slice so much that the pulp was starting to break free of the membrane. “We, ah, we disagreed.” She gave Sally a watered-down smile.

Sally lifted her brows, signaling she was open for more information.

Marlo hauled in some air. What the heck. “Can girls be jerks?”

Sally nodded. “Sure.”

“Well, I’m a jerk. I asked him…told him to go, to leave me alone. I blamed him for everything that had gone wrong with Justice. He was so easy to blame. I wanted him to feel the hurt I was feeling, because I cared about him. How stupid is that?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”

“It looks as though I’m going to spend my life killing relationships. I don’t know how to do them.”

“I bet Adam would love to teach you.”

“He’s going back to New Zealand.”

“Ah, yes, that little issue.”

“You know, the night before I asked him to go, he made love to me, and it was so beautiful. He was so …well, completely better than anything I could have imagined. I woke in the morning and looked over at him. The sun was streaming in the window, across the pillows, right over his head, and honestly, he looked like some sort of god. It left me in awe that someone so amazing had taken such care with me. Then I had this bam moment. I realized how much this was going to cost me, and that previous night I’d made the down payment. My heart was no longer utterly mine, and this little piece of relationship I’d experienced was only temporary.”

“Geez, Marlo, Soap-Opera-Diva much? It doesn’t have to be temporary. It’s not as if he’s going to live on Mars.”

“New Zealand. Might as well be Mars. When I made that phone call to Animal Control, I was already in turmoil so that when I found out about Justice, that made it easy to make Adam go. That decision was intuitive, but the drive was real. The drive came from a desire to protect the rest of my heart. When he goes, he can’t take all of it with him. I had to hold on to some of it for me…and for the dogs.”

“So you’re going to be content cuddling a dog for the rest of your life?”

Marlo winced. “Ouch, that’s a low blow.”

“No, it’s not. That, my friend, is the future you’re setting up for yourself. You need something else in your life beyond the dogs. It’s great, the work you do with them, but they don’t complete you. Let someone else in.”

The dogs were enough. Well, they had been until Adam came along and gave her a peep show into other bits of life. The bits that normal people took for granted. He’d helped her wrench open her boxes-of-bad, and the contents hadn’t scared him off.

That had surprised her. In fact, that had blown her mind.

Nine years of being too afraid, too ashamed to let someone else look at that shit. Nine years of second-guessing what effect it would have if she shared it with someone she cared about so that she never actually allowed herself to care about anyone. And boy, she’d second-guessed that one completely wrong, because the only effect it had on Adam was that it made him want to protect her.

Yet each time he tried to lay his coat over a puddle for her, she kicked it aside and got her shoes soaked through instead.

Now the puddle was a bottomless lake, and she didn’t know how to swim.

Adam did.

Calling Cherry Garcia to the table, now, please.

* * *

Butch dived into the bottom drawer of his desk to bring out his hidden stash of chocolate cookies. “Sit down and make your miserable life happy, Kiwi.”

Margaret had just left the office after delivering them coffee with customary contempt. Adam raised the mug to his lips and flinched as he tried to take a sip, swearing as he replaced the mug on the desk. “You’ve got to start being nice to that woman, Butch, because the coffee gets more lethal with every making. That,” he pointed to the mug, “is thermonuclear.”

“I was nice to her once and she left me, said it creeped her out. Anyway, drink up. It’ll warm your cold little heart.”

“Gee, thanks. That’s done me no end of good.”

“We have progress, young man.” Butch pushed a photo across the desk. “Meet the rogue CRAR driver, Simon Weller.”

Adam picked up the photo. The image was poor-quality, from a security camera, but he had little doubt in his mind. “Ah, I believe I’ve met Mr. Weller, except on that day he was Jarrod Carter, intern at Dog Haven Sanctuary.”

“Or as his mom knows him, Michael Forge, Private Investigator. He’s a man of many names, but only the one shitty personality and even less talent.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Right now, he’s at his home recuperating from dog bites. It would appear Justice is one pooch you don’t want to screw with. He has a penchant for taking out the bad guys.”

The glorious rush of a problem solved streaked through Adam. “And Justice?”

Butch shook his head. “Still missing.”

Well, almost solved.