Skye had never had a puppy before. It hadn’t been allowed after she’d gone to live with her foster parents, because her foster father had been allergic to both cats and dogs.
Before her foster family …
She stared up at the ceiling for long moments before turning her gaze back to the puppy as she whined once again.
“At least you’re welcome here.” Poor little baby. Skye knew how it felt to be an orphan, to beg to be one place while being forced to live in another.
The puppy gave a low, saddened little sigh before laying her wrinkled little face against her paws to stare back at Skye with the same confusion and sadness Skye felt herself.
Sliding her hand to the pug’s back, Skye petted her gently before staring up at that ceiling and wondering if sleep would come this morning or if, as she had the last week, she would simply toss, turn, and awaken herself time and again as her fingers found the aroused flesh between her thighs.
This time, she at least had something warm next to her that wouldn’t ask questions. That wouldn’t probe or curse when she didn’t get answers, if the nightmares did by chance invade the daylight.
At least this time, Skye might feel lonelier than ever, but she had company.
That thought had another tear sliding from her closed eyes. She still felt unwanted, though.
* * *
Logan couldn’t hear the pitiful whines coming from the patio anymore. The scratching against the glass was silenced, and the knowledge that while sleeping on the couch Logan could at least hear if she was in distress was no longer uppermost in his mind.
The little bit of fluff was a replica to one Logan had owned twenty years before, the last gift he’d received from his grandfather before his parents’ deaths.
Logan’s grandparents had given him the pup, a male that time, because he was about to drive them insane.
According to his grandmother, who bred the animals, the pup had cried since the first breath he took. He had been crying when Logan’s grandparents stepped into the house, glared at his father, then turned and looked at Logan with expressions that to this day he couldn’t decipher.
A mix between pain and rage in his grandfather’s gaze and the agony filling Logan’s grandmother’s.
His grandmother, Tandy Rafferty, had stepped slowly to him, the whimpering puppy in her extended hands. Large, wet brown eyes, creamy coat, and a black face. The minute Logan had accepted the tiny bundle he had stopped whining. His wrinkled face had stared up at him as though he was finally where he belonged.
Tandy had turned and left the house immediately without saying a word.
Saul had stared at Logan silently for long moments.
Crouching down, Saul had looked Logan in the eye and said, “Sometimes, there’s a gift waiting for you that you didn’t even know existed. That little baby has cried since the day he was born. Keeping it alive has been a pain in your gram’s rear. He’s yours now. He was meant for you. Take care of him, son.”
A year later he had died in Logan’s arms from a poisoned hamburger he’d found while Logan was at one of the socials the county threw through the summer.
He’d died as Logan and his cousins had stood outside the vet’s door banging and screaming at the man to help.
He’d been home.
He’d opened the door seconds after Jack, as Logan had called him, had taken his last, agonized breath.
Now there was another pup whose whimpering sounds of misery and distress hadn’t stopped since the day Logan had returned home to find her.
She couldn’t be more than ten weeks old. The same age as the pup Tandy Rafferty had brought Logan.
Grimacing, he stalked to the living room, jerked up his cell phone, and made a call.
“What do you want?” Ill-tempered, filled with anger, Saul Rafferty answered the phone on the first ring.
Logan paced back to the kitchen. “Why did you do this, you old bastard,” he snarled. “Come get it.”
Saul grunted. “That little bitch has squalled since it was born. Your grandmother wouldn’t rest until I gave it to you. Now you have it. Shut the f**k up and take care of it.”
“So you can kill another one?”
Silence filled the line for long moments before Saul Rafferty sighed with what seemed like weariness.
“Never turn your back on your food.” His voice dropped, and Logan was certain he only heard that hint of grief in Saul’s tone because he wanted to hear it.
“Fuck you!” Logan snapped.
“That’s the last litter out of My Gal, your gram’s favorite.” Saul ignored the curse. “She was diagnosed with canine cancer last week, only weeks after your gram was. I won’t take it back. She made me give it to you; now you have it.”
“I gave it away,” Logan said with distinct pleasure. “I don’t want a damned thing from either of you.”
Saul snorted. “You’ve given it away six times since I dropped it off and every time it’s been brought back. Stop being so f**king hardheaded. It’s from your gram.”
“And I don’t want a f**king thing from her, either. I’ll drop it off if it comes back here again.”
“Return the little bitch and I’ll slit her throat before your gram sees it. I won’t see her upset.”
“As though anything about me could upset either of you. Other than the fact that I live. That and your inability to steal every f**king thing my mother wanted me to have. I gave every goddamned bit of it away too, Saul. All of it.”
Saul was silent for long moments before he said, “That’s what I would have done, boy. It’s exactly what I would have done.”
The call disconnected.
Standing alone in the kitchen, Logan stared around the darkness, wishing the anger and the grief raging inside him were just because of Rafferty.
Logan just wished he could say it was because a grandmother he’d never known, one who had never wanted him, was dying.
He just wished the rage eating at him could be placed somewhere but where he knew it lay.
In his own aloneness. In the fact that there was something he wanted right now, more than any kid could possibly want a pup.
Because he couldn’t have the pup, or the woman.
As Logan stood in the darkened kitchen, his hands braced on the counter where Skye had just lain, her body spread out for him, willing and heated was the image that played behind his closed lids.