LITMIR.BIZ

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latter.

      “Mr. Desmond?”

      So Karl had gotten his name. Smart kid.

      “Mercy doesn’t have a boyfriend, no. She spends all her time at PetQuarters.”

      Will bit back a smile as Karl leaned in and told his tale as if he was spilling the beans to Jason Bourne. All very hush-hush.

      “She’s very tight with Gilly, who works with her, but that’s about it. Word is she’s doing everything she can to get her big bonus so that she can move to a place of her own.”

      “Big bonus?”

      He nodded. “She’s trying to get enough day business so Piper will turn the building next door into a huge pet facility. If Mercy does it, brings in enough revenue, she gets a bonus. I’m not sure how much, but I can probably find out.”

      “No, that’s fine, Karl, thank you.”

      “Sure thing.” The young man smiled and turned to help his other customers.

      Just before he was out of earshot, Will said, “Karl, one more thing.”

      “Sir?”

      “You know anything about that crazy dog collar? It’s a fake, right? It has to be a fake.”

      Karl shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. It’s no fake. Everyone knows about the diamond collar. It was even in the paper. It’s worth, I don’t know, almost a million dollars. At least, that’s what I heard. Can you imagine? Putting that kind of money on a dog?”

      “Well, I’ll be damned. I never would have guessed.”

      “You’d be surprised the kind of crazy stuff that goes on in a hotel like this. I could tell you stories—”

      “I’ll bet you could. Tell you what, though. Let’s refill this glass, first.”

      Karl nodded and headed for the bottle.

      Will got comfortable. He probably wouldn’t learn anything useful from Karl’s tales of hotel life, but it was worth listening nonetheless. It wouldn’t hurt to get an insider’s view, and besides, he’d learned young not to let any opportunity slip by.

      Just the fact that all the employees knew about the collar was something that might come in real handy.

      His smile fell as he thought about Mercy. He’d been right about her. She wasn’t being coy with those blushes. She’d had enough trouble in her life to want to keep it to herself. That should have made him happy. So much easier to get what he wanted from a woman with big issues. But all he felt was tired.

      He wanted to go home. He wanted…

      Shit, he didn’t even know what he wanted.

      4

      THE WALK FROM the bus stop to Mercy’s apartment was always the scariest, if not the worst, part of going home. She lived in an area of New York that had been taken over by drugs and spiraling unemployment. There were hookers and dealers and gangs and a whole bunch of other things to be worried about every time she stepped off the bus.

      But she had the routine down pat. She wore a backpack instead of a purse and kept her money in her shoe. She made herself small, but made sure not to look like a victim. She never ran. Her key was in her hand before she got off the bus, and in her right front pocket she kept a switchblade. Thank goodness she’d never had to use it. At least not while she’d lived here.

      This wasn’t the first time she’d lived in a scary place. In fact, there hadn’t been many nonscary places in her life. Truth be told, she preferred the fear to be on the outside of the house. It was easier to sleep that way.

      She made it the six blocks to her apartment building without incident, even in the four floors up to her door. As usual, it smelled like a pit in the stairwells, and sounded just as bad, but there were no junkies lurking.

      She unbolted the door, stepped inside and tried not to look around. It would just depress her more to see the squalor she lived in.

      She had a minimum of four roommates. Sometimes six, depending on who needed a place to crash and who was desperate for money. The whole place was just over four hundred square feet. One bathroom, a micro-kitchen that had a half fridge, a hot plate and an oven that never worked. There were three couches in the main room, usually doubling as beds.

      Her room, the only slightly serene place to be found, had been a closet. It now held all her earthly possessions, most of them folded in stacked milk crates she’d painted blue.

      Her bed was a single mattress on the floor. The walls of her closet were pale blue, too, and the best thing was she actually had a window. It was small, too high to see out unless she climbed on a chair, but sometimes when she was there in the daytime, the sun hit the end of the bed.

      All this, including the fact that she had to dead-bolt herself inside the closet before she went to sleep, for just under nine hundred per month.

      It all would have been tolerable if she’d been able to share the space with a dog, or even a cat. But there were no pets allowed. For her that meant no joy allowed.

      She’d been spending the night at Hush so often she was afraid someone was going to tell the GM, and they’d tell her to stop. Even though she worked when she was there overnight, she still slept better, felt safer. She’d even thought, briefly, of asking if she could move in to PetQuarters permanently. Well, until she got her bonus.

      That ten thousand dollars was going to free her. She’d find another apartment, with a maximum of one roommate. And she’d have a dog. Maybe a dog and a cat. Wouldn’t that be something?

      She got into her sleep shirt, then waited until she heard whoever the hell was in the bathroom leave. She never even bothered to shower there anymore. There was a great staff shower at PetQuarters, thank goodness. But she did brush her teeth, then scurry back to her room.

      Inside, she turned on the good light, fixed her pillows and went back to her book. It was an old favorite about a veterinary practice in the English countryside. From her backpack she pulled out a PowerBar and a bottle of water, and waited for the magic.

      Books had always been her sacred place. Through years of horrific foster parents and equally horrific state homes, she’d found she could lose herself in two things—books and animals.

      However, tonight she couldn’t get into the rhythm. She’d read a paragraph, then have to go back and read it again because she had no idea what it said.

      Over and over she tried, until she finally surrendered to the thoughts that had plagued her since this afternoon when Will Desmond had come to visit Buster.

      She hadn’t heard him come in. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have noticed him if it hadn’t been for Lightning.

      The cat was around her neck, as usual. Then, in a trick that had made more than one guest shriek, she’d lifted her head and hissed. At Will.

      He’d stepped back, his eyes wide and his body defensive. Mercy had been just as surprised but her defensiveness was for a completely different reason.

      She’d been working with Goober, a little Doberman mix, getting him to settle down so he could go into the pen with his buddies. Naturally, Goober started barking, which scared Lightning, who’d jumped down from Mercy’s back, leaving a few choice claw marks. Mercy focused on Goober, shushing him and calming him as she tried to calm her own heart.

      Will had apologized, but he hadn’t left. He’d stayed until Goober was in the pen. Until she’d gotten Buster from his pen and handed him to his Uncle Will.

      Even then, even when she went to the grooming room to check on Lulu and Chance, Will and Buster had trailed along.

      They’d talked about the facility, about NewYork, about the different grooming techniques. It seemed to Mercy that he had an unending supply of questions. Finally, when she’d mentioned that he wasn’t having much of a vacation, he’d

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