Page 31 of Trusting a Warrior

When she passed him the cutter, her cool fingers came to rest briefly on his. “Just so you know, asking about him, about the person he was, is always the right thing to say.” She let him go with a squeeze.

For the next several minutes, they didn’t speak, except for Lani’s quiet directions. The pieces of dough first went into the baking soda bath, and then Geo arranged them tightly together in a parchment-lined pan and stuck it in the oven.

“C’mon.” She grabbed him another beer and a bottle of water for herself, and then led him into the living room. “I wanna hear the Bosch story.” Plopping down on one end of the worn leather couch, she patted the cushion next to her eagerly, and after he’d seated himself, pointed at his right arm. “Can I see the scar?”

He canted his body and extended his arm, enjoying her awed, “Oooh,” at the sight of it.

“Can I touch it?”

When he nodded, she traced her fingertips lightly over and around the puckered skin. “That must’ve hurt.”

The memory of that particular agony crashed over him, chasing away the tingles left by her touch. “Hands down the worst pain I’ve ever felt,” he said, “kind of what I imagine being run over by an eighteen-wheeler is like.”

Lani winced. “Wow. So does Bosch jump out of planes with you?”

“He does, and he loves it.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Are you sure about that?”

“Totally sure. He told me so himself.”

They snickered together, and Geo said, “Actually, special operations dogs start their training as puppies. He’s been acclimated to water, air, gunfire, explosions, you name it, since he was a baby. Nothing fazes him.”

Her fingers slid away from his arm, and she picked up her water. “If that’s the case, why don’t you let him sleep with you? Why can’t he live with you if he’s that well-trained?”

“Well, let me put it this way. This—” Geo pointed to his scar “—is me and Bosch in a nutshell.”

“What, him biting you?”

“Yep,” he said, infusing that one word with as much pride as he could muster.

She studied him, her brow wrinkling. “I don’t get it. Explain why that’s a good thing.”

Her adorable confusion made him grin, even as he said, “Because that night, I was stupid, and Bosch let me know it. He reminded me that this isn’t a game.”

Pulling one knee up on the couch, Lani turned to face him. “This I gotta hear.”

“Okay. So it was early in our partnership, and we’d been training in the mountains east of San Diego, balls to the wall, lots of detection and bite work. Bosch had performed well, and I was feeling bulletproof, as if our success was all because of me instead of the fantastic decoys we’d been working with.”

She held up a hand to stop him. “Decoys are the ones who wear the bite suits?”

“Yeah, or just a bite sleeve.” He pantomimed sliding something over his forearm. “A good decoy is the difference between making or breaking a military working dog, and that night we’d had some of the best. They got Bosch in the zone.”

She nodded, and Geo sucked in a deep breath. “So after the evolution, Bosch and I were still really hyped. I decided to take him on an off-leash run along the fence line in the team compound before bedding him down for the night. Great idea, right?”

“Sure.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Until he caught a scent—the guy who’d been our decoy.”

She gasped. “Oh, shit!”

“Right. Dude’d had the same idea as me, a short run to bleed off some adrenaline. Of course, Bosch didn’t know we weren’t still training, that the guy wasn’t wearing a bite suit and wasn’t ready for him. All he knew was that he smelled the same ‘enemy’ he’d been ordered all night to attack, and boom, time to get it on.”

“Fuck, what happened?”

“I managed to yell out a warning, and you should’ve seen that guy scale the fence. He was like a goddamned lizard running up a wall.”

“So Bosch didn’t get him?”