Page 11 of Puppy Love

He frowned. He wasn’t sure what Sophie did, except make him feel like a large, ungainly lump. It wasn’t a new feeling for him, but this was the first time hewantedto be more approachable. Scaring pretty, defenseless women wasn’t a thing a man liked to boast of.

“And who can blame her? Have you ever met anyone as bad at this as me?” He rolled onto his stomach and put his head closer to the puppy. The puppy, seeming to agree with him, barked nervously and backed away.

Harrison sighed and propped his chin on his hands. Lolling in the damp grass with a puppy wasn’t how he’d pictured his day when he’d woken up this morning, but the truth was, he was grateful to wake up at all. In all his years as a type 1 diabetic, he’d only slipped into a coma one other time, an incident that had occurred during his sleep and led to his initial diagnosis. Even though he’d only been eight years old at the time, it wasn’t an experience he recommended. Few things were worse than going to bed only to wake up several days later in a hospital room with no recollection of any of it. A demon you couldn’t see coming was a demon you couldn’t face in a fair fight.

And there it was again: that feeling of helplessness, the roiling start of frustration taking over.

As if already trained to read his moods, Bubbles quivered.

“It’s not you I’m upset with,” he said, soothing the puppy. The sight of that tiny body shaking in fear—because of him—plucked at a chord deep in his chest. “She said you were some kind of diabetes wizard, and I have no choice but to believe her. So let’s do this thing. There must be a way for us to fast-track our relationship.”

Struck with sudden inspiration, Harrison reached into his breast pocket and extracted the granola bar he always carried in the event of blood sugar emergencies. Bubbles heard the crinkle of cellophane and immediately perked.

“You greedy little minx.” He laughed. “Is this how it’s going to go? I have to bribe my way into your heart? It’s a good thing I always have snacks.”

Since he doubted the dog’s stomach was much bigger than a golf ball, Harrison crumbled the bar into tiny pieces and began offering them one by one. Wary at first and then gaining interest, Bubbles eventually picked her way over the grass and started accepting the morsels from his fingertips. With each bite of her tiny jaws, her fear seemed to diminish. A quarter of the bar in and she was actually approaching him of her own volition.

“If only it were this easy to gain a person’s affection,” he said. “I doubt I could hand-feed Sophie and get the same response.”

A sharp female voice sounded above his head. “What are you doing?”

He rolled over to find Sophie standing with her hands on her hips and a look of consternation on her face. At first, he was afraid she’d overheard his conversation with the dog. To explain his remarks and admit that he only meant he wanted her to like him—not that he wanted her to sit in his lap and take food from his fingertips—was unthinkable. There was no way he’d get throughthatexplanation without making a bungle of it.

After a moment, however, she set him to rights. “You can’t give a service dog table scraps.” She swooped down to take the granola bar package from him. “She’s not a pet. She’s your companion.”

Bubbles gave a tiny growl and attempted to take the snack back from Sophie with a leap that lifted her an impressive two inches into the air.

“See? You’ve had her for ten minutes, and she’s already acting like a spoiled lapdog.” With a stern lowering of her brow, Sophie turned her attention to the puppy. “No, Bubbles. You don’t get to speak to me like that.”

Bubbles reacted instinctively to the command in Sophie’s voice. She sat and gulped, looking up at her trainer with a remarkable amount of remorse. Harrison was tempted to do the same.

Since he wasn’t an adorable two-pound ball of fur, however, he settled for a gruff, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t know.”

At the sound of his voice, all of the indignation in Sophie’s stance melted away. Her eyes widened and a stricken flush colored her cheeks. He could tell he’d done it again—scared her with his inability to react to situations like a normal human being.

“No,” she said, flustered. “No, of course you didn’t.”

He attempted to heal the breach by drawing to his feet, but all that did was highlight the difference in their sizes. At six feet tall, Harrison was hardly agiant, but he felt every inch like it was mile, each one carrying him farther away from her.

In an effort to regain some of that lost ground, he said, “Okay, so no table scraps. What other rules should I know about?”

Sophie eyed him with misgiving. “Haven’t you ever had a dog before?”

“No. Never.”

“Really? Not even as a kid?”

“We weren’t a cozy, white-picket-fence-and-puppy sort of family. I never even had a goldfish.”

“Well, you can’t feed table scraps to goldfish either,” she said. “In case it ever comes up.”

He was startled into a laugh. She was doing it again—making jokes. About him,withhim. “My ignorance doesn’t extend that far, thankfully. Can I at least pet her and stuff?”

Sophie shifted from one leg to another, watching him with a wariness he couldn’t easily explain. It wasn’t a scared wariness; it was more worry, like she was regretting her promise to train both him and Bubbles.

Like she wasn’t sure he’d be able to make this work.

But he could. And he would too. He might not be a prince charming, but he wasn’t an ogre either. At least, not most of the time.