If You Were Mine (The Sullivans #5)(9)

“Good boy.”

As she gave him the signal to sit and then held out a treat, Cuddles finally reached the toy, falling onto it and causing a faint squeak. Atlas’s ears went up, but he didn’t move from where he was sitting in front of her.

“Your turn,” she said to Zach, knowing just how badly this was going to go with such a rambunctious puppy and a temporary owner whom she very much doubted was taking any of this seriously. She handed him a tiny doggie treat. “If she comes, give her this.”

He raised his eyebrows at her use of the word if. Without her telling him what to do, he knelt on the grass, held his arms out wide and said in a firm voice, “Cuddles, come!”

The rambunctious puppy looked up from the oversized plastic toy she’d been trying to gnaw on. As if she’d been merely trying to find a way to kill time before Zach needed her to come be with him, she flew across the grass.

“Good girl,” he said as he stroked her fur and fed her the small dog treat. He looked up at Heather. “How was that?”

Grudgingly, she admitted, “Good.”

Really good.

And the worst part of it all was that she knew exactly why the puppy had come running. Zach wasn’t just a magnet for women.

It seemed he was able to exert a near gravitational pull over all living things.

She refused to let herself be charmed, though. Especially when every second around Zach forced her to grab on tighter to her self-control to keep from smiling at one of his lines...or being overly impressed at how good he was with both his puppy and Atlas.

“Walk with me to the other side of the grass and we’ll do it again.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Zach Sullivan demonstrated a surprising affinity for commanding the attention of the puppy. She knew she should be happy about the fact that he was a natural, rather than letting it grate on her. And yet, instead of praising Zach, she gathered up the puppy and kissed its soft nose.

“Great work, Cuddles. Did you have fun in class today?”

The dog licked her, then wriggled until she let her back down to continue tormenting a happily bothered Atlas.

“We’re done already?” Zach sounded disappointed.

“Puppies tire easily.” When he pointedly looked down at Cuddles, who was now trying to dig a hole to China in the grass, she clarified, “What I mean is that they don’t have very long attention spans. Fifteen minutes is long enough for them to learn a little more each day without either of you getting frustrated. In any case, today was a great start. And hopefully, if she does manage to run off again, now you’ll be able to get her to come back on your own.”

“We’re both really glad you were there to find her in the bushes this morning.” He looked down at Heather’s legs and she almost shivered as she remembered the feel of his big, warm hands on her skin. “How are your knees?”

“They’re fine,” she said briskly, wanting to turn his attention back to his dog...not the fact that she was way too aware of how good he smelled, or that even as she worked to keep her gaze from straying to his big, strong hands, she was getting lost in his far-too-mesmerizing eyes. “Tonight is going to be really important. You should set up a small room or section of a room to be hers for the two weeks. Put paper on the floor and her food, water bowls, and bed in one corner. Put her toys throughout the area. And whatever you do, unless she’s sleeping, I don’t recommend leaving her alone outside of the gated area for more than fifteen minutes.”

He frowned. “What if I have plans?”

She could quite easily guess the kind of “plans” he had. “You’ll have to break them, unless you can bring her along and pay close attention to her the entire time.” She smiled at his disconcerted expression. “Would you like to schedule another fifteen-minute training session for tomorrow?”

“When are you free?”

She shook her head. “I only met with you today as a favor to Agnes. Now that I can see you’ll do fine with the proper instruction, you can work with any of my trainers.”

“I don’t want anyone else, Heather.” He made sure she was looking back at him as he said, “I only want you.”

He might as well have pulled her against him and kissed her for the effect his words had on her, and Heather quickly realized that within the few minutes she’d spent with Zach Sullivan, she was already too close to the edge of wanting something she could never make the mistake of letting herself have.

Until she was seventeen, she’d believed in love. She’d thought her parents had the most wonderful marriage, had prayed she’d find a man to love her the way her father so clearly loved her mother. And then she’d found out the truth...that her father had been cheating on her mother for practically their entire marriage. All that time, he’d been lying to her mother. And to her. Because every time he came home from one of his business trips saying how much he loved them, how much he missed them, how they meant everything to him—it had all been a lie.

Heather slipped a finger beneath the sleeve of her long-sleeved shirt and traced over the fine lines of her old scars from cuts she’d put there herself night after night, when she hadn’t known how to deal with her swirling, dark emotions. When all she’d wanted was to feel control over something. Over anything at all.

She hadn’t known at the time just how many teenage girls and boys cut themselves like that. It wasn’t until later, when she went away to college and the nurse at the student medical center had seen the cuts during a gyno exam when Heather was wearing a cloth gown, that she’d been given a pamphlet on cutting. She’d already begun to get past it by then, but knowing she wasn’t the only girl in the world doing it did help some. Still, even though she hadn’t cut herself in nearly ten years, the scars had never quite disappeared, both inside and out.