Chapter Six #3
“Really?” She swallowed, torn between whether she should pull at that thread because he wanted to talk about his dad or change the subject in case this one was too painful.
But he wouldn’t have brought it up if he hoped she’d ignore the comment, would he?
“Which part, about helping you become the best dog you can be?”
Hunter laughed, as she’d hoped he would. “No, silly. He said he was helping me become the best boy.”
“Oh, I see. My mistake.”
He grew quiet, stepping back toward one of the empty stalls as he got the lay of the land, likely trying to assure himself the dogs wouldn’t barrel into the main thoroughfare in a tangle of fur and bared teeth.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “The dogs are all in their rooms, patiently waiting their turn. We’re not going to have a pack of badly behaved degenerates roaming the ranch anymore, doing whatever they please. We have nothing but civilized dogs here now.”
As he puzzled through that, his little face screwed up. “You already got them trained?”
“Oh, no, not completely,” she threw in hastily in the world’s worst backtrack. “We’re still working on things. I just don’t want you to be worried about the dogs bothering you or getting too close when you’re not expecting it.”
“They scare me sometimes,” he admitted quietly, and she could tell it pained him to do so. “I didn’t use to be. Before.”
He didn’t have to tell her before what. “Oh, Buddy, I’m sorry. They don’t mean to scare you. Is there something in particular that they’re doing different now than they did before?”
There was so much more she wished she could say, more she should say, given that she had a unique understanding of losing a parent, having an emotionally unavailable surviving parent, and dogs as a whole.
But she wasn’t being paid to act as Hunter Bassett’s therapist. There was no upside in this situation, and she couldn’t fathom which would be worse—being good at it and then leaving or being bad at it and then leaving.
“I guess maybe I’m different,” he said, impressing the pants off of her with his insight. “Not the dogs.”
Maybe he already saw a therapist. It wouldn’t be unusual. “Did someone tell you that?”
He shrugged. “No, I just feel different inside. Nothing works right, and it’s like there’s a giant hole that used to be full of my dad.”
Geez. Her heart twisted so hard it nearly brought tears to her eyes. There was no way she could ignore his obvious suffering. “That’s because you need a dog.”
This was a bad road to be going down, not when she had so much work to do already, but she couldn’t stop herself from veering off on this fork, whatever it looked like.
“You mean like you said before? That Elizabeth Swann could be my friend?”
“You got it. She can be that and a whole lot more.” The glint in his eyes pushed her words out faster, words she shouldn’t be saying but couldn’t stop herself from spitting out.
“She can make it so you’re different. Maybe not the same as you were before, but maybe that’s okay.
She can help you be the someone you’re going to be now. ”
In other words, Hunter needed much more than a friend. He needed an emotional support dog, plain as day. And she’d never trained one before.
How hard could it be, though?
As Hunter absorbed what she’d told him, she started to as well, and the resulting realizations put a pit in her stomach.
She wasn’t supposed to be training emotional support dogs. Getting Hunter used to Elizabeth Swann and calling her his friend was one thing. This was something else.
Going down this path meant doing something entirely different than what she’d been hired to do.
It was one thing to tell Zero she had experience with basic obedience training—which wasn’t exactly a lie, just a slight omission of the fact all of her experience lay in watching other people do it.
But it was another thing entirely to willfully abandon the training path laid out before her by the man who signed her paychecks.
Surely that man, the same one who’d so fiercely hugged his nephew yesterday, would be on board with getting the boy some desperately needed love to fill the hole he so readily admitted his father’s death had left inside him.
It was just one dog. Not all of them. The rest could still herd cows and watch for predators.
The bold plan marched through her head, refusing to be dismissed. Especially not when Hunter slipped his hand into hers and glanced up at her.
“I would like it if Elizabeth Swann could be my friend and sleep with me and make it so I’m not afraid anymore,” he told her.
That sealed it. One emotional support dog coming up.
But given Zero’s mercurial personality, she couldn’t risk telling him her plan right off the bat.
What if he fired her on the spot? She couldn’t risk that, not until her loan came through.
And honestly, she wouldn’t deal well with not being able to finish working with Elizabeth Swann on Hunter’s behalf, either.
Or never seeing Zero again, for that matter.
He intrigued her, maybe more than he should, but she’d hate to give up her new hobby of trying to rattle him.
Better to keep her mouth shut.