LITMIR.BIZ

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Standing here with her, her hand on him, it was as if they’d never broken up. Claire and Matt, high school sweethearts, married with four kids, four dogs, four cats—that was how many Claire had said she wanted of each. Plus a parrot and lovebirds. And a box turtle. He could go on.

      Sometimes, over the years, late at night, Matt would berate himself for breaking up with Claire after graduation. He’d told her he needed to be focused on being the best soldier he could be, leaving it at that, and the pain on Claire’s face had almost made him tell her the truth. That he wasn’t and had never been and never would be good enough for her, that he’d hold her back, keep studious, bookish, intelligent Claire from fulfilling her big dreams of leaving Spring Forest for the big city. Matt wasn’t a big city guy, and he’d planned to be career-army. Now, he didn’t know what he was. Too many rough tours of duty, first as a soldier, then as a mechanic on dangerous missions, had left him...broken.

      And here in Spring Forest, he didn’t recognize himself or belong.

      Focus on the mission, not yourself, he ordered himself. “I think my sister wants a temperament like Dempsey’s,” Matt said, gesturing at Claire’s foster dog. The pooch was sitting, hadn’t made a peep and didn’t react in the slightest to the commotion around her.

      “Dempsey is the best,” Claire said. “A couple months ago, she was found chained outside an abandoned house. I don’t think she ever had a home before I took her in, so I’ve worked hard at acclimating her to the good life—which means passing muster on housetraining, manners, obedience, the whole thing. Now she’s ready for a home, but she keeps getting passed over.”

      She knelt down beside the boxer and gave her a double scratch on the sides of her neck, then a kiss on her brown snout. Claire shook her head and stood up, her gaze on the dog.

      He might not know Claire anymore, but a stranger could tell how much she loved that dog.

      “Can’t you adopt her?” he asked.

      “I always want to adopt every dog I foster, but that’s not my calling here,” she explained. “Fostering is about preparing dogs for adoption so they can find homes. If I adopted every dog I fostered, I’d have over twenty at this point. Plus, every time a dog I work with finds a home, I can foster a new pooch.”

      “Must be hard to let them go,” he said. “Don’t you get attached?”

      “Definitely,” she said. “But because we do such a good job of matching furbabies and adoptive parents, I know they’re going to a great home. I do worry about how attached I am to Dempsey, though. I can’t explain it, but we definitely have a special bond.” She gave the boxer mix another scratch on the head, and the dog looked up at her with such trust in her eyes, even Matt’s battered heart was touched. “Oftentimes, that bond is there right away.”

      “I had no idea about any of this,” he said. “There’s more involved in choosing a dog than I realized. Can you help me find the right puppy for Ellie?”

      “Of course,” she said. “There are a few other puppies here that Ellie might like, but they all need some training. Maybe you can bring Ellie back with you and we can see who she bonds with. Furever Paws is in the process of finding a new director, so I’m helping with just about everything, from meet and greets to training to fostering to cleaning out kennels.”

      He glanced around the kennel area of the shelter, which had a warm, welcoming vibe to it. “It’s great of you to give your time,” he said. “When should I bring my niece in tomorrow?”

      “I’m done teaching at the middle school at three, so I usually arrive at three thirty.”

      So she had become a teacher. That had always been her dream. But back in high school she’d wanted to leave Spring Forest and see the world, teaching her way through it. Maybe she had, for all he knew. “Works for Ellie too,” he said. “See you tomorrow, then.”

      For a second they just looked at each other, neither making a move to leave. He wished he could pull her into his arms and hug her, hold her tight, tell her how good it was to see her, to hear her voice, to talk to her. He’d missed her so much and hadn’t even known it. Which was probably a good thing. He had nothing to offer her.

      As he gave Dempsey a pat and turned to walk away, he couldn’t quite figure out how he could be so relieved to be leaving and so looking forward to coming back.

      He paused in front of Hank’s kennel. Life is complicated, huh, boy?

      Hank tilted his head, and Matt took that as a nod.

      To catch her breath and decompress, Claire took Dempsey into the fenced yard, which was thankfully empty of other volunteers. She let Dempsey off leash and for a few moments watched the dog run around the grass, sniffing and wagging her tail.

      Matt Fielding. Everyone always said you never forgot your first love, and that had been very true for Claire. She’d truly believed he would be the man she’d marry and spend the rest of her life with. And then boom—a few days after a magical prom night, he’d broken up with her.

      Her first boyfriend in college had proposed, and maybe the promised security had had something to do with why she’d said yes when she hadn’t loved him the way she’d loved Matt. To this day, she didn’t know if that had contributed to her divorce, but five years into her marriage, she’d found out that her ex-husband was cheating and in love with someone else. Now, she was living in the house they’d built out in the Kingdom Creek development, without the husband or the kids they’d talked about or the dogs they were going to adopt.

      The craziest thing was that, just last week, her sister had said that Claire’s problem was that she’d never gotten over Matt, and to do so she’d need to find a guy who looked like him. Tall and muscular, with those blue eyes, Matt was so good-looking and so...hot that few men in town even came close to resembling him. But apparently her sister had found someone who fit the bill, and had arranged a double date for tonight.

      Half of her wanted to cancel. The other half thought she’d better protect herself against Matt’s being back by going out on this date, even if her heart wouldn’t be in it. Claire wanted a relationship—she wanted love and to find the man she’d spend forever with. She wanted a child—children, hopefully—and at thirty-five, she wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.

      “How did everything get so topsy-turvy, Demps?” she asked the dog, who’d come over with a half-eaten tennis ball. “I know you know all about that,” she added, throwing the ball. Dempsey, in all her fast, muscular glory, chased after it, leaping through the air like a deer.

      There was nothing like watching dogs at play to make Claire feel better and forget about her love life—the old, the nonexistent and the upcoming. She smiled as Dempsey dropped the ball at her feet. She threw it a few more times, then left the dog in the yard to play while she went to help clean the kennels that were now empty due to the lucky pups that had been adopted today.

      As she reentered the shelter, she saw Birdie and Bunny Whitaker in their waterproof aprons, hard at work with the disinfectant and hose. Claire adored the sixtysomething sisters—no-nonsense Birdie and dreamer Bunny—who lived together in the lovely farmhouse on Whitaker Acres, the same property the shelter was on. Opening Furever Paws had been a longtime dream of the Whitaker sisters ever since people had begun abandoning animals on Whitaker land, a pocket of rural country in what had become urban sprawl. At first they’d started an animal refuge, but when it became too much for them to handle financially, they filed for nonprofit status and started the Furever Paws Animal Rescue almost twenty years ago. Aside from the shelter with dogs and cats, the sisters kept goats, pigs, geese and even a pair of llamas on the property. They opened up Whitaker Acres to the public a few times a year so that visitors could enjoy the land and animals. Kids loved the place.

      As Claire cleaned Snowball’s kennel—the white shepherd-Lab mix had been adopted this morning and immediately renamed Hermione—she was glad the shelter could take in more strays and drop-offs. Furever Paws had room for about a dozen each of dogs and cats, and twice that many were cared

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