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Chapter Seven
When she ran into Chance and Ariel in town, Britt found herself smiling before she realized it. Seeing Chance out and about in itself was beyond rare. Elena, Sean Highwater’s wife, was walking them out of Valencia’s restaurant near where Britt had parked. They were all chatting in a lighthearted way that Britt would never have expected from Chance a mere three months ago. He deserved that kind of happy, and so did Ariel. And Elena, for that matter, who had surprisingly found it with Cody the Coder’s best friend, Sean Highwater. The elegant woman and the quirky detective—funny how Sean was quirky, but Cody was just annoying—had made an unusual but obviously very successful match.
It hit her then that these three had something deep and painful to bond over—they had all lost someone in the military; Chance his father, Ariel and Elena a husband—and yet they were all smiling. Had found happiness again. Quite a tribute to the human spirit, she supposed. And she stifled the odd sort of longing she’d been struck with on occasion recently.
Stop. You’ve been lucky. You’ve never lost anyone you’re really close to.
“He’s doing great,” Ariel was saying to Elena as Britt approached to say hello.
Chance nodded. “I was worried about that dog. Thought he might be the first failure. He wasn’t adjusting to amputee status well at all. Not like Tri.” Britt knew Tri was their own dog, a huge part of their amazing story.
“Those geniuses are most helpful sometimes,” Elena said with a broad smile.
Chance grinned back at the woman. Britt realized that since he’d come home for good, she’d never seen the man grin like that. “They do have their moments.”
And then, as if he’d known all along she was there, Chance looked past Elena to her. They all turned to greet her warmly.
“Was that about the Doberman you had for a while? The one who’d lost a foot?” she asked when the hellos had been said all around.
“Yep,” Chance said. “He couldn’t handle the standard prosthetic, kept gnawing it off. But Cody came up with a new kind and he really took to it.”
Britt frowned. Cody? She’d thought Elena had been talking about Sean. “I didn’t realize he was…that involved.”
Prosthetics for amputee military K9 heroes? One more thing to add to the list of good things she hadn’t known he did. She had been blinder than she ever realized.
“I’ve learned,” Ariel said with her sweet smile, “that if you have a problem, asking Cody if he has any ideas usually ends up with your problem solved.”
“Unless it’s a people problem,” Chance said, grinning again. “Don’t ask him about those. Although I have to admit, he’s scarily good at the perfect payback.”
“I know,” Britt said, unable to stop herself. “Like the one where he arranged for my term paper to get waterlogged after I waterlogged his phone.”
The women laughed, while Chance nodded. “Like I said, perfect payback.”
“It was…fitting.” Despite the fact that the years-ago memory still irritated her, she smiled. Not for anything would she inject her problems with Chance Rafferty’s brother into this pleasant encounter.
She was still smiling as they said their goodbyes, at least until Elena, turning to go back into the restaurant, said gaily, “See you at the party!”
The party. Maggie Rafferty’s birthday party.
To which her family was, as always, invited. Would attend. And would expect her to attend.
She sighed. She would attend. Not only for Maggie, but also out of respect and liking for all the Raffertys and their recent significant others. All but one, anyway. And while her respect for Cody might have undergone a bit of a tweak now that she knew about some of the things he was doing, her dislike hadn’t changed a bit. He was still an insufferable pain.
Determinedly she shoved her annoying neighbor out of her mind as she drove back to the ranch. She carried the bags of groceries she’d picked up into the kitchen, where her mother was already working away on tonight’s meal, her delicious meat loaf. Since she herself was, except for some basics her mother had forced her to learn, hopeless in the kitchen, this had been good news, and she’d quickly invited herself to dinner.
And the sight of the meat loaf always made her smile, not only because she knew it would be a great dinner, but because it reminded her of the day as a teenager when she’d awkwardly asked her mother if she’d teach her how to make it.
“You actually want to learn how to cook?” her mother had asked in astonishment.
“No, I just want to know how to make that,” she’d said, with a nod at the minuscule remainder of what had been a platter almost full of the beef concoction.
“I’m not sure,” her mother said thoughtfully. “Seems it might be a guarantee that you’ll always come home.”
That had caught her off guard. “I’m not going anywhere until college,” she pointed out.
Her mother had let out a sigh and given her a look she couldn’t quite describe. “Yes. And that’s only a couple of years from now.”
To her sixteen-year-old mind, a couple of years seemed like an eternity. And all her father’s warnings, that there would come a time when two years would seem like a blink, made sense intellectually, but nowhere else. So she filed it away in that “worry about it when you’re older” part of her brain that contained things like buying a car, choosing a college major, and planning a future. And settled her focus on more urgent things to her at sixteen, like cutting a second off her barrel time, finishing a term paper, and thinking up the next prank to play on Cody Rafferty.
