“So Waterford looks different to you?” he asked, catching up easily with Jessie and the dog.
“Everything looks different.” She glanced up at him, drinking in the sight of Garrett’s “black Irish” looks, all dark hair and achingly blue eyes. He was no longer a lanky teenager, but a well-built man who filled out a white T-shirt and jeans to perfection. “Well, the house looks the same,” she said, realizing she was staring at him. “Do you live there?”
“Oh, no. I have a house closer to town, but my Gramma Finnie moved back in after my mom died,” he said, his gaze drifting to the main house that sat on a rise overlooking the hills and beyond to the crests of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “And Darcy lives there when she’s not scratching her travel itch. So Dad’s not alone, which is good.”
She studied the butter yellow clapboard farmhouse with dark green shutters and multiple rooflines from years of Mrs. Kilcannon building additions and remodeling the historic home. With a wraparound porch, giant shade trees, and three chimneys that were invariably puffing smoke in the winter, Waterford still had the ability to dig into her heart and twist.
It wasn’t the house, which was North Carolina picture-perfect. Anyone could build a pretty house. It was the essence of warmth, family, love, and joy that permeated every corner of this place. Waterford was a home, and the Kilcannons were special.
Longing as real as it had been when she was a young girl curled up from her chest and squeezed her throat.
“It’s still so beautiful,” she managed to say.
“Sure is. It was so easy to come back and build this business.”
Which led right to the heart of her first question as an interviewer: Why did he and half his siblings leave one of the most well-known, successful companies in the world and come back to Bitter Bark and start a dog rescue and training facility?
But if she asked that, had the interview started? Didn’t she owe him the truth first?#p#分页标题#e#
“It was all my dad’s brilliant idea,” he said without any prompting. Because he thought she was an old friend.
“Really?”
“The day after my mother died, we were all out back with some of the fosters when my dad came out and blew our minds.”
“How?” She tried to imagine the scene, but could think only of how much this massive brood must have hurt when they lost Annie, a strong, beautiful, joyous woman who’d never seemed to get thrown by the chaos that reigned in her house.
“He started…walking.”
She frowned, not following. “Alone?”
“Nope. He walked over here where there was nothing but grass”—he gestured to the long, large building they’d just left—“and told us this would be the new main kennel. Then he took us over there.” This time, he pointed to another, two-story clapboard structure with long wings off both sides. “That would be classroom training and student apartments. Then, the rubble pile behind it.”
“Rubble pile?”
“It is now. Then it was a field. Now it’s specially designed to train detection dogs. And past that is a huge training field with a section where therapy dogs are trained, and over there, on the other side? That’s Molly’s vet business and Darcy’s grooming shop. All of it built around this training pen.” He indicated the large, fenced-in space that felt like a heart in the center of it all.
“Dad described it all and asked if we wanted to make that happen. And if so, he’d give us the land right then and there.” He grinned. “It didn’t take too much thinking to say yes.”
So that’s why he left his old life. None of that was in Forbes. But Mac was right—Garrett Kilcannon had a story tailor-made for ITAL. “The whole thing is so brilliant, and so…Kilcannon.”
He laughed. “You know they call my dad the Dogfather for a reason. And that day, as he likes to tell the story, he made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. All six of us each got an equal part of the property with the stipulation that we turn Waterford Farm into a world-class canine facility.”
Jessie ached to take out a notebook or her phone to start recording the family-based history, which she knew would be an emotional underpinning for her story. The story he didn’t know she wanted to write yet.
Guilt slithered up her spine.
“There’s more than what you see here, too,” he continued, pride in every syllable. “We have walking trails specially designed for dogs and a law enforcement K-9 training park where those guys”—he pointed to a pack of German shepherds in a smaller pen-within-a-pen a few hundred feet away—“are headed in a few minutes. The K-9 law enforcement division is run by Liam. Do you remember my oldest brother?”