Wulfe Untamed (Feral Warriors #8)(11)

As she pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven, she heard the low bark of a big dog at her back door. Her mind flashed immediately to her canine buddy and she found a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth at the thought that he’d come to see her again.

Laying the cookie sheet on the stove, she pulled off her oven mitt and hurried to the sliding door to look out. Sure enough, he was sitting in the rain, looking up at her with a hopefulness she could practically feel through the glass. Poor guy. He was soaking wet.

She hesitated to let him in—surely he belonged to someone in the neighborhood. But why would anyone who loved him let him out to roam in weather like this? He shouldn’t be off a leash at all, especially not looking like a monster-sized wolf.

“Hold on, boy,” she called through the door, then ran back to her laundry room, where she kept a stack of old towels. Grabbing two fraying bath towels, she laid one on the carpet, then opened the door just enough to let the massive animal in, braced for the invariable dash and shake.

To her surprise, he didn’t bound inside, nor did he shake at all. Instead, he walked forward calmly onto the towel, and stopped, watching her expectantly.

“You’re amazing.” She closed the door behind him, then opened the second towel and rubbed him down. “Someone’s trained you well.”

The dog looked up, meeting her gaze with a look in his eyes that she could swear was amusement. “You’re way too smart for your own good, aren’t you, boy?” She knelt in front of him, rubbing down his head and neck, watching the pleasure fill those beautiful eyes. Oddly, he didn’t even try to lick her face, which most dogs did given the opportunity. “You’re quite the gentleman.” She dried his legs and his belly, then finished with a quick rub of his tail.

“There you go. I’m afraid I don’t have any dog food, but I have leftovers from dinner. How about chicken and green beans? That shouldn’t be too terrible for you. I’ve also got cookies. Do you have a sweet tooth, boy?”

To her surprise, he shook his head . . . or appeared to. She laughed. “You’re really something.”

She pulled a wide, shallow plastic food storage container out of the cupboard, then cut up the leftover chicken and green beans and heated them in the microwave just enough to take off the chill. After pouring the mixture into the plastic container, she set it on the floor in the corner.

The big animal looked up at her with an unmistakable gleam of thanks in his eyes, then turned to the food and wolfed it down while she filled another container with water.

She picked up the cake recipe she’d thought to make tonight, but no longer felt driven to continue her baking and set it down again. The animal’s presence had calmed her, pulling her back from that edge of desperation that always drove her to bake.

Maybe, instead, she’d try to get some work done. While the dog ate, Natalie grabbed her laptop off the counter and settled on the floral-patterned sofa in her small family room. As she pulled up the file of the first patient she saw on Friday, and the results of the vision tests she’d run on the girl, the tension began to ease out of her shoulders. For the first time all day, she felt like she could breathe freely again. This was what she’d been born to do. It was no wonder, considering she had two younger brothers whose lives had been handicapped by their eyes’ inability to function optimally, if at all. Her youngest brother, Xavier, had been born blind, but it was James, only two years her junior, who’d actually had the hardest time thanks to a pair of undiagnosed vision problems that had made it next to impossible for him to learn to read.

By the time James was seen by a developmental optometrist, a specialist who could actually help him, he’d been a freshman in high school, and it had been too late. When she thought back on it, she wanted to shake their family eye doctor who’d seen him every couple of years throughout his childhood, who’d assured her mom that there was nothing wrong with James’s eyes, that James could read if he wanted to. And while, technically, he was right—there wasn’t anything wrong with his eyes—his brain could never make sense of what he saw because he wasn’t able to track smoothly across the page or keep from seeing everything slightly double.

Finally, one of his teachers talked her mom into taking him to a vision specialist, but by then James was convinced he was a dull-witted loser and refused the recommended therapy that could have corrected both problems. Though they didn’t know it at the time, he’d already found drugs and alcohol. A year later, he dropped out of school and took off. The last time they’d heard from him, he was living in Florida and had been in and out of rehab repeatedly.

While she’d love to find a way to open, quite literally, the eyes of the eye-care establishment as a whole to the benefits of vision therapy, she’d settle for helping the kids she could. No child should be made to feel stupid because of an undiagnosed vision problem.

James had been lost to them for years and now Xavier was gone, too. The ache in her heart was sometimes so sharp, she thought it might rupture that critical organ. She couldn’t imagine how much harder this all was on her mom.

The dog trotted through the kitchen, his nails clicking on the linoleum, then padded silently across the carpeted family room to join her.

Natalie smiled. “All through?”

He sat at her feet, then leaned forward to rest his chin on the cushion, pressing against her thigh, as if thanking her. Her heart swelled with adoration. As he looked up at her with soft, liquid eyes, she knew she was in trouble.