Rogue's Passion(21)

“My mom gave it to me so that I would never get lost.” She gave a little shrug of one shoulder. “She worries about me a lot.”
He was touched that she would lend it to him. A piece of her hair tickled his cheek, but he didn’t want to brush it away. What he really wanted to do was to run his fingers over her jaw to see if her skin was as velvety smooth as it looked. He would kiss her there, then on that little hollow below her ear.
When she finished, she tucked the chain into the neck of his shirt, taking care not to jar him too much. As if he would’ve cared if she had.
She lightly patted his chest where the pendant lay against his heart. “There. That should do it.” Then she sat back in her seat as if she did this sort of thing every day.
He had the urge to ignore his pain, pull her onto his lap, and kiss the hell out of her. But she wasn’t like the women he usually surrounded himself with—women who would expect him to do something like that.
He cleared his throat, his voice tight and raspy. “And does it work?”
“Yeah, you’d be surprised. I’ll be at my wits end, looking for something, then after praying for Saint Anthony’s help, I suddenly find it.”
“Thanks. For everything.” He turned away, staring silently into the darkness through the open windows. He hoped she was right. 
“If the situation were reversed, I would like to think someone would help me, too.”
She shifted in her seat and reached for her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Just for the heck of it, I’m going to call the Animal Control hotline again. See if the message has been updated yet.” She hit redial and held the cell phone up to her ear. “Oh. Oh,” she said, sitting up straighter. “The recorded message was updated twenty minutes ago. A dude is reading off all the dogs that have been picked up recently. Get me a piece of paper.”
He opened the glove box but didn’t see anything to write on.
“Ahhhh. Hurry.” She snapped her fingers. “I’ve got a notepad in my bag.”
He grabbed the messenger bag from the backseat, found the pad of paper and shoved it at her. With the phone in the crook of her neck, she listened. A minute or two passed, but it felt like an eternity. He prayed to the Fates that there was news of Conry. Good news.
She let out a gasp and started scribbling. “I think they have him.”
“Are you sure?” His heart pounded in his chest.
She referred to her notes. “A long-haired male greyhound was picked up in the 700 block of downtown a half hour after the blast. Ash, that’s less than a mile away from the site.”
He slumped into the seat and felt every ache and pain again. “Conry isn’t a greyhound. He’s a deerhound.”
“Greyhound. Deerhound. They’ve got a similar body shape, right? How many dogs like that do you think they picked up near explosion?”
He still wasn’t convinced. “Yes, but—”
She reached over, wrapped her cool hand around his wrist, and gave a little squeeze. “They’re just guessing at what kind of dog he is. Some of the people at the shelter are just volunteers and accurately pinpointing the breed of a stray dog can be a crapshoot. They could easily have it wrong.”
“But—”
She threaded her fingers through his. He was suddenly grateful that his right shoulder was the injured one, not his left. Her thumb stroked his hand as she talked. She was probably unaware that she was doing it, but he wasn’t.
“When I was a kid, our German shepherd got picked up by Animal Control. They had her listed as being a Husky mix. We almost missed going down there because we didn’t think it could be her. Come on. A Husky and a German shepherd?” She rolled her eyes. “They’re completely different dogs, but thank God we did. It turned out to be her.”
“So what does this mean?”
“It means they have Conry. And first thing in the morning when they open, we’ll be there to pick him up.”
As she angled the car onto the road, it occurred to him that she’d used the word we.
    







 
    Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance by Jennifer Ashley, Alyssa Day, Felicity Heaton, Erin Kellison, Laurie London, Erin Quinn, Bonnie Vanak and Caris Roane
    
 


 
CHAPTER 6
Reckless Motor Sports was located about an hour outside of the city, surrounded by a huge off-road park with dirt trails and jumps, not far from one of the main roads leading into the mountains. If Olivia were into dirt bikes, loud engines, extreme sports, and didn’t mind a few broken bones now and then, this place would be heaven. Maybe in the daytime the perspective would be different, but illuminated by only a flash of the Mustang’s headlights, some of the jumps looked freaking treacherous.