Page 17 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer

"Chief's stitches are clean." I rest my forearm on the cool pine, catching Griff's gaze across the table. "Checked the knots right before we left. No swelling, no heat. He'll be good."

"He didn't settle until four." Griffin offers one slow nod, the tension around his jaw relaxing an inch. "Every time the draft hit the tin roof, he went flat on the concrete. I should've stayed up there tonight."

"None of us are sleeping up there until week two." Nadia taps her knuckles against the wood. "Pike's rules. The dogs learn to settle without us hovering."

"It feels like walking away from your post." Griff's voice drops low.

I know that feeling. It's the same cold twist in my stomach every time I think of Juno sitting silent in run seven. In CCATT, you never leave a litter deck until the handoff is complete. Sitting in a heated bar while your unit stays behind in the storm goes against every instinct years of flight nursing built into my bones.

I look past them, toward the back corner of the bar where the light from the oil lamps doesn't quite reach.

A man sits alone at the small two-top near the stone hearth. He has a scarred cheek, a white ridge of skin running from the corner of his left eye down to his jawline. A shepherd mix lies under his chair, its muzzle gray, its ears flat against its head. The animal stays still, its chin resting on the man's boot, matching his deliberate breath.

The man doesn't talk to anyone. He has a battered leather notebook open on the table, his fingers tracing a line of neat black ink.

His scarred hand turns the page. His movements are steady, his fingers tracing coordinates in the margins.

Maybe it's a log of days survived, or coordinates of places he left behind. The notebook looks old, the leather scuffed at the corners. He reads like a chart I've seen before. A man who has found a way to occupy a corner without taking up space, his shepherd mix keeping him anchored to the floorboards.

He looks up, his dark eyes meeting mine for one second. There's no challenge in the look. Just a quiet mutual recognition of the noise we're both keeping behind our teeth.

The tavern door swings open, letting in a blast of mountain air smelling of pine needles and wet diesel. The draft runs along the floor, freezing the skin above my boots.

Jason Pike walks in.

He doesn't wear the orange vest or the gloves. Just a dark canvas coat, his boots caked with snow melting onto the floorboards. He stands by the door for three seconds, his gaze scanning the room, his jaw set.

Barnaby isn't with him. Even Jason left his mastiff-boxer mix up at the shelter, enforcing the same rule on himself that he gave the trainees.

He looks taller in the low light of the tavern, the canvas of his coat stiff with frozen grease. He doesn't look at the trainees' table. He doesn't look at Eleanor or Mabel.

Or me.

He walks to the bar, his boots heavy on the pine.

"Pike, you're late. The ribs are cold." Ruth slides a bottle of amber beer toward him without being asked.

"Barn six had a latch block." Jason lifts the bottle. "The ice is freezing the pins."

"I told Wyatt that he needs to grease the springs." Mabel turns her knitting. "He doesn't listen. He thinks cold is a state of mind."

Jason takes a long drink of the beer, his throat moving, his scarred hands steady on the glass.

He clocks our table—the trainees, Eleanor, and Mabel clustered together at the long pine board. Again, he doesn't look at me.

His jaw sets. He doesn't join. Instead, he walks to the small two-top near the kitchen door, choosing the distance. He sits alone, pulling his bottle of beer close, looking like a man absorbing heat before heading back out.

A sharp twist of disappointment hits my stomach.

He's avoiding us. Avoiding me.

I don't like the exclusion, the deliberate wall he builds between his table and ours, but my eyes drag back to him anyway.

There's a quiet authority in the way he takes a room, a gravity that pulls at my attention no matter how hard I try to look away. Under the table, my thumbs slide along the seam of my jeans, my skin warming under my collar.

He carries the kind of steady focus that makes the noise in the tavern drop out. The broad line of his shoulders under the damp canvas pulls at me, an attraction that threatens to breach the distance I'm trying so hard to keep between us.

Then the noise spikes.