“Hey, Cash.” He flashed me a smile as he showed a lady with a cat carrier out to pay.
“Hey,” I whispered, too soft for even myself to hear, but Mason’s smile widened.
I pushed the sponge mop toward reception, keeping one ear open in case Lucille caused an incident. Not that there would be anything I could do to help, but I knew Chase and the guys would want all the details later. Lucille was a Goose Run legend.
But I didn’t hear Lucille.
I heard the front door open and close as the lady and the cat left. I heard Mason say something to Kayla about calling someone to see if they could come in a half hour early for their appointment tomorrow. And then I heard one of the guys say, “Are you the vet? We’re here to get our dog back.”
And the whole carefully constructed fantasy I’d manufactured over the past week where I’d eventually work upthe courage to ask Mason if I could keep the dog, and he said yes, collapsed right there in front of me.
CHAPTER 7
MASON
“Are you the vet?” the skinny guy asked me. “We’re here to get our dog back.”
Shit.
I didn’t look at Kayla. I absolutely didn’t look down the hallway at Cash.
“The dog?” I asked, even though it was a stupid question. It wasn’t as though I had an entire stash of them out back. Just the one who, when I poked him at night to stop him snoring, only snored louder to make a point. The one Cash was supposed to be finding a home for—a fact we’d both been carefully ignoring.
The one I’d started thinking of as mine.
The guy pulled his phone out of his pocket and squinted at the cracked screen. He scrolled down with a dirty thumb and showed me the practice’s Facebook post. “This is our dog. Name’s Stupid. Some asshole stole him from our place last week.”
“He was brought in as a stray,” I said.
“He ain’t a stray,” Skinny Guy said. “He was stolen. He was chained up good and proper, and someone took his collar off him.”
“Yeah?” I said. This guy was painting a pretty good picture of what had happened to bring the dog to my doorstep, and it all made sense given the state the dog had been in when he arrived. I fought not to let the disgust show on my face. “Chained up, hmm?”
“Yup,” said Skinny Guy, who clearly wasn’t smart enough to read my tone or my expression.
I glanced at Kayla, and from the look on her face she was thinking exactly the same as I was. Over in the corner, Bobby Merritt was watching our exchange curiously. Lucille was eating a pamphlet. And, somewhere in the corridor behind me, I was aware that Cash was listening.
“Judging by his condition when he came in,” I said, “I would have sworn nobody was looking after him. I had to do surgery on his ear.”
Skinny Guy scuffed his feet uncomfortably. “We were gonna bring him if it didn’t get better. But it’s just adog.”
And there it was. The typical response of every neglectful and abusive asshole I’d ever had the misfortune to meet.
“So can we have him back or not?” his friend asked.
I wanted to tell them that no, they didn’t deserve the dog, but unfortunately I couldn’t make that call. Being accused of trying to steal someone’s pet was every vet’s nightmare. I’d had it happen once and it wasn’t an experience I wanted to repeat. If I wanted to keep the dog from being returned—and meeting these guys had solidified the fact that I really did—I was going to have to be smart about it.
“Sure,” I said and heard Cash’s sharp, horrified intake of breath. I glanced behind me and saw that he’d crept out into the doorway to reception. He looked paler than usual, and his eyes were shining with unshed tears. I turned back to the guys, scratching at my beard. “Well, he doesn’t have a microchip,so I’m just going to need to see some proof of ownership. Registration, vaccination certificates, that sort of thing.”
There weren’t too many things you could bet on in life, but I’d seen enough shitty animal owners to know that these guys wouldn’t have either of those things.
The guys looked appropriately confused, and then the skinny one said, “I got photos of him, probably.” He started to scroll through his phone again.
And the thing with that was that photos could be used to establish ownership, especially as nobody was disputing it. So when the guy finally scrolled back far enough to produce a photograph of the dog, it was clear I didn’t have much of a choice.
Skinny Guy did, though. He just didn’t know it yet.
“Great,” I said with a smile I didn’t feel. I heard movement behind me and glanced around to see Cash hurrying his way down the hallway toward the kennel room. I prayed he wasn’t going to do anything dumb. “Okay, if you’d just like to settle up the bill, I’ll go grab him for you.”
