She looked as if she was going to need a hanky instead. “I’m going to be fired,” she worried out loud.

Hank shook his head. “Not if they’re smart.”

Ally gave him one last glance, then swallowed and went to the desk. She switched on her laptop computer and brought up her email. Waited impatiently, her hands trembling slightly all the while. Finally, she drew a long bolstering breath, typed in a command, then another. And promptly burst into tears.

Hank swore silently to himself and reached for the tissue box.

“Porter lost his job,” Ally sobbed. She accepted the tissues he handed her and wiped her face. “I kept mine.”

Hank was ambivalent, to the say the least, since this meant she would be leaving Laramie-and him. His need to be a decent and chivalrous human being demanded that he once again put his own concerns aside, and congratulate and wholeheartedly support Ally on her career success. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” he countered enthusiastically.

Ally’s face crumpled. She slumped back in her chair and wearily ran a hand over her damp eyes. “It means I have to be back in Houston for an 8:00 a.m. managers meeting on December 26.”

Which meant she would be leaving Christmas Day, if not sooner, just as she had initially planned. Not so good. Still, Hank didn’t want to be a jerk. “Congratulations,” he said, meaning it with every fiber of his being.

“Thank you.” Ally closed her eyes and exhaled slowly, looking even more distressed. Finally, she straightened. “I have to call Porter.”

“I’ll manage things here,” Hank promised as another round of puppies stood, wobbled and fell into a wiggling pile.

Ally stepped outside on the wraparound porch to speak in private.

Just as she finished, Talia Brannamore arrived. Ally greeted her, then brought her inside.

Hank had been prepared to loathe the breeder who’d managed to put Duchess in the care of someone so obviously incompetent. Who could lose such a precious dog who was about to give birth? But it was clear Talia Brannamore had been through a little bit of hell herself. Her face was haggard with fatigue, her middle-aged body drooping.

Duchess thumped her tail in recognition and panted happily when she saw her owner, but didn’t rise to greet her, as Hank would have expected her to do after such a prolonged absence.

Talia shook her head at the puppies tumbling over each other in an effort to get to their feet and stay there. She knelt and picked them up one by one, examining each in turn. “The nose is a little short on this one,” she noted with a discerning frown. “I don’t like the look of these ears. Now this one…this one is darn near perfect. And what happened here?” Talia stopped when she saw Gracie, who weighed in at only two and a half pounds, instead of the three sported by all her littermates. “What a little runt she is!”

Ally’s jaw dropped. She squared off with the woman unhappily. “I don’t know how you can say that! I mean… she’s on the small side, but she’s absolutely beautiful!”

Talia sighed. “Only because you know nothing about show dogs. This one would not win Westminster. Now this one…” she picked up a particularly robust male puppy “…would.” The breeder set the puppy down with barely a pat of affection. She rocked back on her heels. “Fortunately, most of my customers aren’t interested in showing their dogs. They just want their pet to look like he or she could be competitive enough to win first place.” That said, Talia Brannamore looked back at Gracie and shook her head in obvious disappointment.

“If you don’t want her, I’ll take Gracie!” Ally blurted.

Again, Talia shook her head. “I can’t do that. These dogs have all been presold for months now. And even though they won’t be able to go ‘home’ for another seven weeks, I’ve promised their new owners they’ll be able to come and visit their puppy on Christmas Day. So I’ve got to talk compensation with you, and then load them up and get going.”

Saying goodbye to all of them was tough, even for Hank, but saying goodbye to Gracie was heart-wrenching. Ally’s lower lip trembled and tears rolled down her face as she kissed the smallest puppy on the head and then gently put her in the flannel lined warming box with her littermates. The box was plugged into the power outlet in Talia Brannamore’s station wagon.

The breeder patted the blanketed cargo area. “Come on, Duchess, let’s go.”

The retriever looked at Talia and then Hank, and went to stand next to him. Taking his hand in her mouth, she tugged him toward the back of the station wagon.

She seemed to be urging him to get in with the puppies.

Then Duchess went to Ally and gently mouthed her hand, doing the same.

Ally cried all the harder.

The lump in Hank’s throat got even bigger. “Well, I’ll be darned. She wants us to go with them,” he muttered in awe.

“Honestly,” Talia said, exasperated. She patted the cargo bed vigorously and commanded, “Duchess! Inside! Now!”

Duchess gave another last long look at Hank and Ally, then did as ordered. She settled next to her puppies, as if knowing this was where she had to be. The breeder shut the back, then turned to them. “Thanks again. Y’ll have a merry Christmas now!” She got in and drove off.

As the station wagon went down the lane, they could see Duchess press her head against the window, looking back at them.

Hank had grown up around animals. He knew that there was a cycle to things, and this cycle had ended-at least for him and Ally. It still hurt almost more than he could bear. He turned to her and could tell at a glance that it was all she could do not to run after the station wagon and beg Talia Brannamore to let all the dogs stay.

He felt the same way.

On top of that, he was about to lose Ally, too! Talk about yuletide misery. She apparently felt it, too, for she pivoted, saw his eyes gleaming with moisture, and promptly lost it.


THERE WERE TIMES, Ally knew, when a person needed to be held. And right now she needed not just to be held, but for Hank to hold her. And he knew it, too. She thrust herself into his arms. He caught her to him and buried his face in her hair, offering low, consoling words and the sweetest solace she had ever felt. Then the tears came, in an outpouring of grief she could not seem to stop.

Ally cried because they’d lost the dogs they both loved so much. She cried because she had kept her job, and that meant she had to leave. She cried because she wasn’t quite sure where she stood with Hank. And most of all, she cried because for the first time in her life she felt like she just might belong somewhere, with someone. And she wasn’t sure that was going to last, either. All she knew for sure was that she was drenching his shirt, and that he made her feel so safe and cared for. And that he probably thought she was an utter fool, for reacting so emotionally around him…again.

Sniffing, Ally forced herself to pull herself together and draw back. She dabbed at her eyes. “They’re going to be fine,” Hank told Ally firmly as they walked back into the ranch house together.

“Of course they are,” Ally agreed.

Hank laced a protective arm about her waist. “Duchess wasn’t our dog to begin with.”

Ally shrugged out of her jacket. “We knew that from the outset.”

Hank went to tend the fire in the grate. “Looking out the window that way was just Duchess’s way of saying goodbye to us.”

Ally battled a new flood of tears.

Hank paused, abruptly looking as utterly bereft as Ally was feeling. Ally drew a bolstering breath, aware her hands were shaking. She wrung them together. “I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do in a situation like this.”

Hank replaced the screen on the fireplace. “I know what we do in the military when we lose a comrade-and in this case,” the corner of his lips crooked ruefully “-we just lost ‘twelve’ of ’em. We raise a glass in our lost friends’ honor.” He rubbed his chin with the flat of his hand. “The only problem is I think I drank the last beer several days ago, and since it’s only eight in the morning, I doubt any of the bars in town are going to be open. Although I guess we could hit the grocery store…”

Ally didn’t even want to think what the talk would be if she and Hank showed up together, looking for even “medicinal alcohol” at that time of morning.

And while she was soon leaving, to go back to her job in Houston, Hank would have to stay and face-not just the gossip-but the million and one questions from his parents.

“I think I might know where there’s a bottle.” She dragged a chair over to the cabinets and stepped from that onto the countertop. Sidling carefully, she opened the very uppermost storage cabinet, above the sink. Inside, wedged in the very back, was the bottle-just where her mother had put it, the day the gift from a grateful client had arrived.

Ally removed it and blew off the thin layer of dust. “Voila! Peppermint Schnapps!”

Hank wrinkled his nose.

Happy to have something that would ease the sorrow in her aching heart, if only temporarily, Ally waved off his disdain. “Buck up, cowboy! Beggars can’t be choosers.”

She turned to hand off the bottle and found Hank’s hands anchored securely around her waist. He lifted her down, as easily as if she weighed a feather. “You’re right,” he acknowledged, looking like a marine, ready for action. “In this case, a drink’s a drink.”

Her heart racing, for a completely different reason this time, Ally handed the pint to Hank. He ripped off the seal, took off the cap. Sniffed. His expression perplexed, he offered the bottle to her. “Is it supposed to smell like this?”

Ally dutifully inhaled the mixture of peppermint-scented vodka. “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve never had it.”