Navy Seal's Match. Amber Leigh Williams

Mavis shouted, stumbling forward. “Get off of him! Get...” Her steps faltered at the sound of more yelps. They weren’t distressed. They were yipping. Happy. Walking sideways, tilting her head, she reevaluated the scene.

      Gavin’s arms were up, the cords of his neck drawn into sharp contrast as he torqued his face away from the dog’s mouth. It was the dog’s tongue that was attacking him without mercy. The strained sound of high-pitched laughter fought through Gavin’s teeth.

      Harmony had one leg over Prometheus’s back and was jerking on his silver-studded collar with all her might. “Oh my God! It’s like moving a planet!”

      Prometheus got lucky with a tongue-lap across Gavin’s mouth. “Ah!” he grimaced. “Come on!”

      “Prometheus,” Mavis said again, finding her feet. She joined the fray, grabbing the dog’s collar, too. She grunted, yanked. “Would you move your butt?”

      Together, she and Harmony managed to tug Prometheus off the soldier. “Sit!” Mavis instructed, keeping hold of her dog as Harmony doubled over. Mavis crouched to Prometheus’s level, drawing his attention to her. “What were you thinking? You can’t just go knocking people over.” Shifting to her heels, she reached out to offer Gavin a hand, but he was already on his knees. She frowned at the Oakley sunglasses in his hand. “He broke them.”

      “They fell off my head,” Gavin insisted. “I should’ve grabbed hold of ’em when I heard him coming.”

      Harmony nodded agreement. “Those paws. They sound like a mammoth stampede.”

      “I’m sorry,” Mavis said. “He usually doesn’t jump people like that.”

      “You’re right,” Gavin said simply in return. “He definitely is a Prometheus.”

      At his name, Prometheus strained forward, sniffing for Gavin’s hand. To Mavis’s surprise, Gavin obliged him, pressing his palm warmly against his flat-topped cranium and feeling his way to the dog’s ear. Prometheus’s lapping jowls closed quickly as he leaned into the caress and groaned, loudly, bending his head low. Mavis’s lips pressed together. She stared at Gavin over the length of Prometheus’s back.

      Was that a smile? The scars stamped across his face didn’t interfere with the lines of his mouth, but it was a mouth that had grown far too accustomed to not smiling. Vague and hesitant, his eyes were more than just the epic clash of bottle green and unfinished copper. Tapered at the corners, they held the same sad glint as an abandoned pet.

      Her heart misfired. She frowned at him. The wounded Gavin. He held himself together, as always. However, the bruising was on the surface. She could see the stitching. She could see the steel cables and the double coat of duct tape holding him together. Yet still the damage was close.

      She hated that she could read him. It was easy for her to read people. Exceptions were rare. With his cool exterior and easy charm, Gavin Savitt had nearly always been the exception. He’d split his time annoying her and—unintentionally perhaps—compelling her. However, for all his past, there weren’t too many people who had ever found Gavin uninteresting.

      He’d always been far too good-looking and she knew he’d used it to his advantage. Not with her. Others. His fighting edge had started young. He’d been in enough scrapes in high school to get him kicked out for a time. People vouched that he never started the fights, but he did finish them, and not always with an assist from Kyle.

      The fighting edge was still there, but it had turned inward. As a result, his guardedness was down, the coolness had dropped, and Mavis could read him like a book she shouldn’t want to finish. She tried to look away in front of Harmony, at least. Things were strange enough since Harmony and Kyle had happily announced their march into coupledom.

      Gavin couldn’t see her clearly. She knew that. So why did it feel so intimate to hold his steady gaze? Maybe because even after they couldn’t see, the eyes were still the door to the soul?

      Mavis locked herself down. Whatever it was that she was feeling, she felt it too much in too many places and she had to lock it down because, per her directions, Gavin had come here to live with Miss Zelda at the end of the road.

      Prometheus showed his appreciation by pressing his head against Gavin’s thigh. “Hey, hey,” Gavin said, easing back. “Easy there, Cujo.” He was wearing a smile. It might no longer look natural, but it wove into his hard-angled features until Mavis had to look away.

      Prometheus nuzzled against Gavin’s shoulder, earning more ear-scratching. Mavis’s spine snapped straight at the touch of envy. “Okay, enough,” she said, wrapping her arms around Prometheus’s middle.

      “He’s fine,” Gavin said. “He seems like a good egg. He’s Lab, right?”

      Harmony belted a laugh. “Try rottweiler.”

      “Nah,” Gavin said doubtfully. He hooked his arm around Prometheus’s neck and glanced at Mavis.

      “One hundred percent,” she confirmed. “Dad picked him up at the shelter for me when he was twelve weeks old. He said if I was going to live alone, I had to have a guard dog.”

      Harmony shook her head, watching the display between man and dog. “If that’s a guard dog, I’m a canary.”

      “Breeds like rottweiler can be seriously misunderstood in terms of behavior.” Mavis gestured to the lovey canine licking the seam of Gavin’s jeans near the knee in a slow savory manner. “Exhibit A.”

      “So you’re a righteous beast, eh?” Gavin lowered his crown to Prometheus’s bowed one. “That makes two of us.”

      The gesture from man to dog did something. Mavis’s palms dampened. Her lips parted as a rush of warmth flooded her. It started in her belly and curled like a wave before she sucked it back. Feelings, she reminded herself. No.

      She studiously rolled her eyes as Prometheus continued to vie for Gavin’s affections. Trying not to follow the path of Gavin’s stroking hands on Prometheus’s ruff, she looked to the smoking truck. “What happened?”

      Harmony groaned. “Overheated. Liv’s going to kill me.” She shivered as though contemplating the response of her cousin, Olivia Leighton, to having her beloved Ford maligned in such a way. Squinting from beneath the brim of the baseball cap that advertised the cropdusting and flight instruction business she shared with Mavis’s father, Harmony frowned at the steam. “We’ll have to call James for a tow.”

      Gavin gained his feet. “It wouldn’t have blown its top if you didn’t drive like a heretic.”

      “I drive just fine,” Harmony said dismissively.

      “You drive like somebody trained in low-level aerobatics,” Gavin argued. “Which you are.”

      “You like my driving,” she pointed out. “It puts you back in action, which you miss.”

      Mavis watched his mouth fold and she quickly changed the subject. “At least you made it to Miss Zelda’s.”

      “Everybody calls this woman Miss Zelda,” Gavin pointed out.

      “So?” Mavis asked.

      “So, normally that would mean she’s a person of importance or she’s older than...you know... Betty White.”

      “Betty rocks,” Harmony declared.

      “Actually, nobody knows how old Zelda is,” Mavis informed them. “I’m pretty sure anybody who does is dead.”

      “So, great. She’s like biblical,” he muttered. His arms crossed over his big chest. “You set me up with an old lady?”

      His smile was on the verge of creeping back into play. She sighed a little. A little, she told herself when the noise made her cringe. “You know what they say,” she said with a shrug. “Age is only a state of mind.”