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“I…what?”
His mother went on as if he hadn’t spoken.
“She’s got Ghost, of course, and her dam, but she’s shopping for a good stud. She’s been saving almost all of her prize money for that and some other mares. And given her winnings the last couple of years with Ghost, she’ll probably pull it all off.”
Cody simply stood there, not knowing what to say. He’d had no idea. And his usually agile brain was having trouble wrapping around this one. Britt Roth, businesswoman? With a long-term dream and plans to make it come true? He wasn’t sure he could adjust to that.
Wasn’t sure that to him, she wouldn’t forever and always be Britt Roth, irritating, bothersome, and occasionally infuriating brat-next-door.
Chapter Four
“Dad!”
Her yell echoed around the house. Made it sound empty, as she guessed it was at the moment. Her mother was over in Fredericksburg visiting a friend, which might be just as well. She and her mother were very close, but Dad would appreciate this more.
She wasn’t sure what her father had on tap for today. Work was always a safe bet—the man never stopped—but specifically what she didn’t know. But obviously, and expectedly, whatever it was wasn’t here inside the house. So she resorted to her new locating method.
She stepped out the front door and whistled as loudly as she could. In less than half a minute a German shepherd appeared at a run, coming around the side of the large barn. The big dog loped toward her, head and tail up, looking amazingly normal, given everything.
“Answers that question,” she said aloud, with a grin as the dog, tail wagging now, trotted up to her. “Hey, Dodger,” she said, bending to pet the dog and then scratch his ears.
They’d gotten the dog from Cody’s brother’s military dog rehab months ago. Chance had done a wonderful job with the initially traumatized dog, who had turned out to indeed be a shepherd, and wonderful at moving herds. They’d borrowed him as a test last year, and the dog had done so well and bonded with her father so strongly they’d decided to keep him. And after observing them together for a few days, Chance had agreed and signed off.
Britt and her parents had been delighted. Britt had always thought what Chance was doing was a wonderful thing, and when she’d started finishing high in the money since starting to run Ghost, she’d made donations to his nonprofit.
With Dodger, she had even written what Chance called the update, short statements on what had happened and how the dogs once given up for lost had found new lives. The updates were then posted on the website and sent back to the processing center for the dogs coming home. No doubt in the hopes it would encourage them to give Chance a shot before they wrote off any animal as unsafe or unsalvageable, dooming them.
Doing that statement, she remembered with a grimace, had been when she’d found out Cody had both designed and maintained the They Also Serve website, because she’d had to send the statement to him. She’d stewed over that for a while. In the end she’d figured if he saw an email from her, he’d just junk it, so she’d used her father’s address instead. She’d gotten no answer to the email, but the statement had been posted later that same day. Probably because he’d assumed it had been her father who had written it, not her.
Dodger backed up a couple of feet, tail still wagging slightly as he stood looking up at her expectantly.
“He’s in the shop?” The dog whuffed softly. “Okay, Dodger my boy, let’s go find him.”
The dog trotted back the way he’d come, clearly understanding at least the “find him” part. She followed, trotting herself to keep up. The dog rounded the corner of the barn and darted quickly through the open door of the smaller building on the far side, which her father had set up years ago as a workshop for his various skills.
He was at his workbench, working on repairing what looked like a large gate hinge. He looked up when she and the dog came in.
“Figured that was your whistle.”
She smiled and patted the dog once more before the animal trotted over to his chosen master, who gave him a scratch behind the ears that made the dog look blissful. And a million miles from the battlefield he’d survived.
“Just got back,” she said. “Is that from the main corral gate? Want me to help you put it back on when you’re done?”
“That’d be nice. You want to explain that shotgun round I heard go off a while ago?”
She should have known. “Target acquired and taken out,” she said with a grin. “All that practice paid off.”
“You bring back a carcass?”
“No, it went home wrapped in a shirt.”
Her father stopped, put down his small hammer and turned around to face her. His eyes, so like her own dark blue, narrowed. “What?”
“With Cody the Coder,” she said with a laugh. “Took that stupid drone of his out with one shot.”
He stared at her. “You shot down one of his drones?”
“Anybody else around here fly the darned things? You should have seen his face.”
