"You should probably wring out your shirt."
"Probably."
She watches as I peel the soaked henley over my head—because she suggested it, and also because it's genuinely uncomfortable, and maybe just slightly because I catch the way her eyes track the movement. The way they linger for half a second before snapping back to my face.
I'm not above using a lake disaster to my advantage.
"Better?" she asks, voice slightly higher than usual.
"Much." I wring out the shirt, water splashing onto the rocks. "Though I think my pride might be permanently waterlogged."
"Your pride will recover."
"Will it though? This is going to haunt me. Javi's going to find out somehow—he always finds out—and I'll never hear the end of it."
"Dragged into a lake by your own dog while trying to impress a woman." Callie tilts her head. "Yeah, that's going to follow you."
"Who said I was trying to impress you?"
"Weren't you?"
The directness catches me off guard. She's looking at me with those green eyes, late afternoon light turning them almost gold, and there's no armor left. No ice. Just curiosity and warmth and something that looks like the beginning of trust.
"Yeah," I admit. "I was."
"How's that working out for you?"
I gesture at my soaked jeans, my bare chest, my dog who's now rolling happily in the grass like he didn't just destroy my dignity. "About as well as you'd expect."
She laughs again, softer this time. "For what it's worth, I'm not unimpressed."
"No?"
"Horrified, maybe. Entertained, definitely." She steps closer, reaching out to brush a strand of lake weed off my shoulder. Her fingers are warm against my skin. "But not unimpressed."
The touch lasts maybe two seconds. It feels longer.
We end up sitting on the dock as the sun sinks lower, my shirt spread out on the boards beside me, drying in what's left of the daylight. Callie sits close enough that our shoulders almost touch, and we talk about nothing important—favorite movies, worst meals, the time Ranger ate an entire pizza off the counter and showed no remorse.
"An entire pizza?" she repeats, incredulous.
"The whole thing. Box and all. Well, most of the box. He left a few cardboard pieces as evidence."
"How is he not dead?"
"Belgian Malinois have iron stomachs and no sense of self-preservation." I lean back on my hands. "What about Biscuit? Any crimes against food?"
"Once he ate an entire stick of butter. Wrapper included." She shakes her head at the memory. "The vet—and yes, the irony of a vet taking her own dog to another vet is not lost on me—said he'd be fine. He was. Didn't even have the decency to feel sick afterward."
"Dogs are chaos agents."
"Adorable chaos agents."
"The worst kind."
She tells me more about Biscuit, the rescue mutt who hates thunderstorms and loves cheese, who sleeps on her bed and steals her socks and somehow became the best thing in her life after Denver. I tell her about growing up at Iron Creek, about the dogs who raised me as much as my parents did—the German Shepherd who taught me patience, the stubborn Malinois who taught me that not everything can be controlled.
"Is that why you didn't go into the family business?" she asks. "Too much time around dogs as a kid?"
