I smiled and took her vacated seat.
She pressed her hand to my cheek and took off, leaving the clinic mostly empty.
That “mostly” came around the corner looking mad. “We’re missing a puppy.”
I held up my hand to show Holly. “I have him.”
“You shouldn’t take the puppy away from his mother. It’s too young to regulate its body temperature yet.”
“I have a hot water bottle here.” I gestured toward it. It was in my pocket, and the tiny puppy was nestled against it in my hand.
I was holding the runt.
Boone said that it probably wouldn’t live.
The Pomeranian had six pups, and of those six pups, most of them were healthy sizes. The small runt was the exception, and it appeared that the mom dog had decided that six was one too many for her and had taken to leaving this one on his own.
Though, she was feeding it, that was all she was doing.
I’d walked by the kennel she was in earlier to find this poor thing kicked off in the corner looking pathetic.
And since Boone was in surgery with a horse, I had taken it upon myself to get some lovings.
I hadn’t been aware that Holly wasn’t leaving with the rest of them, though.
“I wasn’t aware that Boone was seeing anyone.”
I snorted. “Boone hasn’t been single since he was sixteen.”
Her frown was fierce. “I’ve been working here for almost six months, and you have yet to be mentioned by anybody. Nor were you here at all. Then you just show up like you’ve always been here?”
I didn’t get mad.
Her tone of voice wasn’t angry or anything, just curious. As if she truly didn’t understand.
And she wouldn’t.
Not if she didn’t live here.
Though, our star-crossed lovers’ story didn’t have Boone and Nettie in it. It had Bartholomew and Antoinette. If she had heard anything, it would be those two names.
“Did you live here before you went to school?”
She shook her head. “Not Sawtooth. Bear Pass.”
I smiled. “Ever heard of the Bartholomew and Antoinette saga?”
Her eyes narrowed for a second in concentration, then lit with recognition. “That’s you two?”
I nodded.
There were downsides of being famous—at least in the sports world.
One being everyone knew everyone’s business, and didn’t care about deep diving into your life.
When I’d turned down the professional soccer world to go to college and play D1—something that Eddy and I had spoken about extensively before she’d been hit by a car and her college dreams had been ruined—we’d decided that we would always have a backup of a college degree if anything went wrong.
How right we’d been when that car had hit Eddy and torn her knee to shreds.
