Alarmed, knowing what was about to happen, Bo called, “Tricks! Here!”
Ignoring Bo, Tricks turned and went after him, swimming as hard as she could. She even dropped the tennis ball and left it floating in the water.
“Crap,” Bo said sharply to herself. She knew exactly what Tricks was doing, but a dog couldn’t swim as fast as a human who was fairly good, and Morgan was more than fairly good. He wasn’t going for speed, but his strokes and kicks were powerful and smooth, eating up distance.
She began jerking off her shoes and jeans, steeling herself to go into that cold lake, because her in the water was the only thing that would pull Tricks away from Morgan in the water. Trying again, she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Tricks!” as loud as she could.
Morgan was already over a hundred yards away, maybe two hundred, but he must have heard her because abruptly he stopped and turned in the water to face her. She doubted he paid any attention to her, though, because Tricks was coming right at him, swimming so hard she was leaving a wake.
Tricks reached Morgan, and though Bo didn’t have binoculars, she didn’t need them to know what happened because she knew her dog. She gripped her head with both hands as Tricks latched on to Morgan’s arm and began towing him toward the bank. She was “saving” him. She’d done the same thing to Bo the first time Bo had gone swimming with her, and it had taken several trips to the lake before she relaxed her vigil.
“Oh, good Lord,” Bo muttered. She could only imagine what Morgan was thinking.
After living with Tricks for two and a half years Bo was seldom surprised anymore by anything that the dog did, but there was still the occasional mind-boggling moment. In retrospect, she could follow Tricks’s reasoning: when Morgan had arrived, he’d been weak and unable to take care of himself. Therefore, he was someone Tricks needed to watch over. Seeing him in the water, without realizing how much he had recovered, had triggered her protective instinct and she had gone after him thinking he was literally in over his head.
Bo waited anxiously for them to reach the bank. That was a long way for Tricks to swim without a rest; she could retrieve her tennis ball thrown in the water for hours, but that was with her feet touching ground at the end of every retrieve. As they got closer, she could see that Morgan was helping her, stroking with his free arm and keeping an eye on her. If Tricks got too tired, he’d make sure she didn’t get in trouble and made it safely back.
Finally they reached shallow water and he stood, but he kept Tricks close until she was touching the bottom too. Tricks kept pulling on his arm, insisting that he get out of the water. When they waded out onto the flattened weeds, Tricks finally released his arm so he could straighten. He wiped the water out of his face with his free hand, then Tricks showered him again as she vigorously shook and slung water everywhere.
His chest was rising and falling with deep breaths as he looked at Bo. She shrugged and willed herself not to get teary-eyed, but really, Tricks’s valor made her feel misty. “Such a good girl,” she crooned, bending to pet Tricks and praise her.
Morgan petted her too, telling her thank you, then he shook his head as he met Bo’s eyes. “I’ve been saved,” he said wryly. “Reckon she’ll let me go back in?”
CHAPTER 20
BEFORE BO COULD ANSWER, TRICKS REALIZED SHE’D left her ball in the water and went charging back into the lake. Bo started after her, taking two steps into the water-damn, it was cold!-but Morgan put his hand on her arm. “She looks okay. If she gets tired, I’ll go get her.”
Bo stepped back out of the water but kept her gaze on Tricks. Morgan stood beside her, keeping watch too. He said, “Has she done that before?”
She nodded. “The first time I swam with her. She got such a look of horror on her face when she saw me in the water. She was only about four or five months old, but she swam like a champ. Thank goodness I wasn’t very far out, because she was still just a puppy. I don’t know if her strength would have held out.”
“Don’t you know she was thinking, ‘Oh shit, Mom’s in the water and if she sinks I’m screwed.’”
Startled, Bo laughed out loud. “She doesn’t know swear words.”
“Betcha.”
The idea of puppy Tricks swearing to herself was priceless. Bo was still chuckling as together they watched Tricks retrieve her ball and turn, swimming for the bank. She wasn’t going as fast as she normally did, but neither did she seem to be in any distress. Now that she had Morgan safely on land, she wore her normal jaunty, happy expression. It was amazing how a dog could smile with a ball in its mouth.
“The guys would rag my ass forever if this got out,” Morgan observed.
“Oh, good, I have something I can blackmail you with.” Tricks was touching the bottom now and bounding out, sending water flying everywhere, so Bo backed up out of the spray area. Morgan stayed where he was because he couldn’t get any wetter. Tricks gave him a quick look of disdain-evidently for being so foolish as to go swimming-and took the ball to Bo.
Morgan scratched his jaw. “I think I’ve been dissed.”
“Most definitely.” Bo didn’t take the offered ball, instead saying, “You need to rest a few minutes, princess, that was a long swim. Just a few minutes, okay? Nose around and see what you can smell.” After a few seconds Tricks dropped the ball and trotted off to sniff out something interesting.
Morgan had turned back and was looking out over the lake. Bo could feel him wanting to get back in the water, but he waited, not knowing how Tricks would react. For Bo’s part, she was content for him to stand there, because just looking at him made her hormones whisper, “Oh man, he’s fine.” As good as he looked now, with water dripping off his lean, muscled body, she could only imagine what he was like at full strength. For him, “weak” was most people’s normal.
The scar on his chest wasn’t the only scar he bore; there was a white slash across his right triceps, a dark discoloring along his left thigh that looked like road rash, a jagged scar under his left shoulder blade, even a raised white slash of scar tissue on top of his left foot. She wondered if all the injuries on his left side had occurred at the same time. And all she could see right now were those on his back; she hadn’t noticed any on his front last night, but then she’d been preoccupied with other things-plus the light had been off.
Her gaze lingered on the way his wet boxers were hanging low on his hips and clinging to his ass. The muscle definition in his legs was mouthwatering. Come to think of it, there wasn’t anything about him that wasn’t mouthwatering, but those legs looked as strong as trees. Thick pads of muscle lined the indentation of his spine, laced along his ribs. She remembered that when he’d arrived his arms had looked thin; they certainly didn’t now. She didn’t know what he’d been doing while she was at the police station, but she suspected he hadn’t rested much, not to fight his way back this far.
He had the body of a warrior. She didn’t try to forget what he was, but in the day-to-day normality of the routine they’d established, one reality would sink out of sight below the other reality. Yet every time she’d almost forgotten, something would happen to remind her. Yesterday it had been that moment when he’d taken Kyle down, the savagery in his gaze, the almost absent way he’d slammed Kyle’s head into the pavement to knock him out. Today it was seeing the scars he bore. Since the moment when he’d choked her, he’d been careful to keep himself under control and on low intensity, but by then it was too late. The people in town might have bought it, but she knew the truth.
“You’ve been really careful since you’ve been here, haven’t you?” she asked as she bent down to retrieve her jeans. “Simmer instead of boil. You walk a tightrope when you’re stateside, don’t you?”