“It would be best—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Luke said. “You’re welcome to take her and manage her conditioning.”
Finley breezed into the space. “Agatha stays with Luke.”
Awareness prickled over his skin.Don’t look in her direction. It was too hard on him if he had to see her smile, the shape of her body, or the way her earrings swung against her throat a hundred times a day.
“The less change Agatha has to deal with right now,” Finley said, “the better.”
“God rest ye merry gentlemen,” Trish sang to Agatha. She attempted to place the dog on her thighs and scratch her tummy, but Agatha was having none of it.
Maybe nice, normal puppies liked to lie on their backs and have their tummies scratched. Agatha wasn’t nice or normal, which Trish didn’t seem capable of figuring out. Her necklace, which looked like a string of old-fashioned colored Christmas lights, swung forward when she finally set the puppy on the floor.
Agatha ran to Luke like a sprinter toward a finish line and gazed up at him. Lifting his eyebrows in challenge, he gazed back. Sheturned in a tight circle, lay down, and rested her chin on the toe of his boot.
“Aww,” said Finley and Trish in unison.
Could he file a complaint with the city, citing unacceptable work conditions? No employee should be expected to sacrifice his sleep to a puppy, then turn around and keep his foot stationary while on the job so that the same puppy could get quality rest.
Luke spent that evening the way he’d spent all his evenings since they’d forced Agatha on him—going down his building’s elevator and escorting Agatha to a patch of grass, where she mostly failed to go to the bathroom. Going up his building’s elevator, then cleaning up the messes she made on his floor. He was on his hands and knees more than Cinderella.
“Doesn’t this kibble look amazing?” he asked the puppy, his big body once again crammed inside her pen. He placed several pieces of food in the palm of his hand and moved it back and forth in front of her hypnotically.
Hypnosis. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? He’d pay thousands for a dog hypnotist to straighten this animal out.
“You’re getting hungry.” He spoke in a relaxing hypnotist’s voice. “You want to eat kibble, like a regular dog. Yummy. Very, very yummy.”
To his astonishment, she stuck her nose close to the food.
He held perfectly still. “Yummy,” he repeated.
Finally, she took a few pieces, crunching it loudly and eating with her mouth open.
He felt like he’d won an Olympic medal. Grinning, he nodded encouragingly. “Yummy.”
She ate the rest of the food on his hand. He scooted her bowl toward her. “Well, go on. You’ve got a whole bowl there. Go to town.”
She simply stared at him meaningfully, waiting.
The fluff expected him to hand-feed her?
He put more food on his hand. She ate it. He kept trying to interest her in the bowl, and she kept refusing. He got up, grabbed a book, and placed it under her bowl, which brought the food up to the height of her chin.
She gave him another meaningful stare.
For the next ten minutes, he endured a cramp in his leg while he fed her small portions from his hand over and over.
When she’d finally had enough, she lay down on the floor, her expression unmistakable. It said,Gotcha.
How come she hasn’t been adopted yet?” Luke asked Finley the next morning when they were alone in the workroom. As if he didn’t already know the answer. Any person with a brain cell would take one look at the pictures they’d posted of Agatha and recognize that the puppy was crazy.
He was sitting at his desk. Once again, Agatha was napping on his shoe.
Finley stood nearby wearing bell-bottom jeans, a wide leather belt, and a gray V-neck shirt. The stone beads of her long necklace dipped to a big piece of turquoise shaped like a teardrop. She’d placed her assigned puppy in a sling across her chest. Her puppy slept most of the time and never made a sound. “We’re still getting the word out about Agatha,” she said. “She’ll be adopted very soon, I’m sure.”
“She arrived Tuesday and it’s Friday. You said puppies are always adopted in less than a week.”
“I saidalmostalways in less than a week. It’s been three days.”
