Chapter Four

Careful not to spook him, Delilah casually acted like she hadn’t noticed Hunter.

“Good girl, Elizabeth Swann,” Delilah said and handed the dog another treat. Over her shoulder, she called, “Would you like to give her one?”

“Me?” the boy yelped. “I can’t do that. She’ll bite me.”

Delilah didn’t turn around, worried if she focused on Hunter, he’d balk, and she couldn’t pass up a golden opportunity to dig into his fear of dogs a bit more. While no one had expressly told her it was part of her job to get him comfortable with the crew, her soul hurt for the little boy who couldn’t run around in the yard with the ranch dogs to his heart’s content.

“You don’t have to let her take it from your hand.” To demonstrate, she threw the treat to the ground in front of the Labrador, who cared not at all where she got it from, wolfing it down immediately. “The important thing is that you don’t give it to her until she earns it.”

The faint rustle of wood shavings against the concrete floor told her that Hunter had moved a tiny bit closer, which gave her almost as much joy as the training progress she’d made.

“How does she earn it?” he asked, his curiosity obviously outweighing his hesitation, like she’d hoped.

“Well, usually by doing what I tell her to. But sometimes, I give her one just because, so she knows that I’m her friend.”

Hunter absorbed that for a minute. “I don’t have any friends who give me treats.”

Oh, man. Delilah bit her lip before she blurted out something ridiculous, like I’ll be your friend. She couldn’t make an overture like that, not when she’d only be here until her loan came through. Maybe not even that long, if the dogs all responded as well as Elizabeth Swann to training.

Guilt soured her stomach as all the ramifications of the balancing act she’d set up here at the Flying Pig fell on her shoulders at once.

She couldn’t train these dogs too fast.

In the space of one day, she’d gone from worrying she’d be able to train them at all to the stark realization that the better of a job she did, the faster she’d be out the door.

Delilah did turn around then, her primary goal sliding away with the ticking of the second hand on her watch. “You don’t have any friends at school?”

Hunter shook his head, hand on the wood gate closing off the horse stall he’d backed up against. “I don’t go to school. My mom is supposed to be teaching me, but most days she calls it off early.”

Well, that settled it. This kid needed to stop being afraid of these dogs more than Zero needed them to stop running rampant around the ranch. Granted, she could accomplish both potentially by just getting the crew to calm down, but the sheer desperation for companionship practically bleeding from this little boy called for something a little more hands-on.

This painting would be called Match Made in Heaven, with four dogs and a boy in the frame painted in acrylic. Nothing else.

“Watch this,” she told him with a smile and knelt down to Elizabeth Swann, who patiently waited for her next command and treat.

Delilah stuck out her hand, and on cue, the Lab lifted her paw and dropped it into her palm to shake. She even left it there as Delilah threw her a treat.

“Oh, no way!” Hunter had let go of the wooden gate and stood there bug-eyed as he watched. “How did you get her to do that?”

An echo of Zero, who’d said the same thing yesterday. It was like almost everyone had figured out she’d never trained dogs before, thus had lowered expectations.

She couldn’t be happier to prove everyone wrong. Except now she had to slow down and not do too good of a job.

Shrugging, Delilah held out a hand to tell the dog to lie down, which she did after a pause as she made sure that was really the next thing that was supposed to happen since usually, they’d repeated the same exercise over and over. Smart didn’t begin to describe this dog, and Delilah silently congratulated herself on picking Elizabeth Swann to start with.

She had a feeling the others wouldn’t be as easy.

“This is how dogs are supposed to be,” she told Hunter earnestly and shifted slightly to face him, still down on one knee from her interaction with the dog. “They like pleasing their people. And they like to have jobs. You know what I think Elizabeth Swann’s job should be?”

Hunter shook his head.

“To be your friend.” The look on the boy’s face nearly undid her. Part terror, part absolute hope she wasn’t kidding. “I’m serious. She would love that. She would sleep near you to make sure you were safe. She would always let you pet her when you were feeling down. You feel sad a lot, don’t you?”

A stab in the dark, but she didn’t think she was wrong, given he’d lost his father. And clearly he didn’t have 100 percent of his mother, either.

“Yeah, sometimes.” The kid stared at Elizabeth Swann without blinking, his eyes wide as the wheels turned in his head. “She would sleep in my room?”

Uh oh. She’d taken the idea too far, too fast for a boy who’d made it clear he couldn’t even get within ten feet of the Lab before his phobia kicked in.

“Well, not right away,” Delilah amended hastily. “She’d have to go through some more training to be sure she knows you’re her friend, too. But maybe if you’d like her to be in your room in case you needed her, we could arrange it later on.”

“Do you think she’s scared of the dark?” he asked, his gaze still on the dog but something a lot different than fear shining in his expression. “Because I’d let her sleep with the light on. Then it’s not so bad.”

Delilah’s heart squeezed so hard the pain nearly brought tears to her eyes. She choked it back, though. The kid didn’t need her sympathy. He needed her to get a dog in place by his side pronto.

“Buddy, when I’m done with Elizabeth Swann, she’ll do whatever you want. If you felt like tucking her into your bed and letting her sleep with her head under the covers, she would.”

“You can teach her to do that?”

Hunter’s fascination with the entire process could not be overstated. He clearly had very little interaction with anyone in his life, if the ins and outs of dog training had captured his attention so thoroughly. She couldn’t stand the thought of him going another hour still worried that Elizabeth Swann would bite him.

After all, he’d named the dogs at some point, as Zero had mentioned. Obviously, Hunter cared about them in some form or fashion. It was up to her to figure out how to get him and the dogs on speaking terms. Starting with this one.

She nodded. “I sure can. Hang out with me a bit. Watch how I do things. Later, if you decide you’d like to, you can try some of the commands.”

Eyes shining, he promptly climbed up on the wooden gate, perching precariously several feet off the floor, well out of what he perceived to be harm’s way. She didn’t comment, determined to let him lead the show, but just as determined to make progress on what she now considered her primary objective—making a little boy’s life a little less terrible.

She demonstrated several commands Elizabeth Swann had learned in the last few hours, including sit, stay, come, and roll over, which pulled a small laugh out of Hunter.

“You’re not supposed to laugh,” she told him with a grin, shooting him a goofy face over her shoulder. “You’re supposed to tell her she’s a pretty girl and give her a treat. Women like to be given compliments and special things to eat. File that away for later and remember I told you that when you start dating.”

“Ew.” Hunter wrinkled his nose. “Girls are gross.”

Present company excluded, she hoped, though it wasn’t a stretch to assume he didn’t associate her with one. “One day you won’t think so, I promise. Until then, you can practice on Elizabeth Swann. I’m about to start teaching her to heel on a leash, which is new. Watch how I let her get used to the idea.”

She showed the dog the collar and the leash, letting the Lab sniff it a few times, and went through the motions of slipping it over Elizabeth Swann’s head, then gave her a treat. Hunter watched every move she made, his gaze darting everywhere at once.

After a few repetitions of this, she motioned him over and stage whispered, “She said she wants to sniff you.”

“Me?” His incredulity put an adorable squeak in his voice, but he didn’t move from his perch on the gate. “She didn’t say that. Dogs can’t talk.”

“They absolutely do. It’s our job to pay attention to what they’re telling us.”

A sudden, painful reminder burned her throat of the time she’d informed her father one of his dogs had told her he didn’t like the brand of dog food his humans had been feeding him. No, she hadn’t heard an actual voice come out of the dog’s mouth, cartoon style. It was more of an intuitive thing that sprang from paying attention to the dog’s cues and body language.

Of all people, she’d have thought her father would understand a sixth sense when it came to dogs. Instead, he’d made her feel small and ridiculous.

That’s when she’d escaped into art. Paintings had their own kind of silent language and no one thought it was crazy if you said an artist had spoken to you via the brush strokes across the canvas.

Dr. Kersey wasn’t here, though. Delilah could run this gig however she wished, and the freedom of that filled her with a giddiness she couldn’t temper. Wouldn’t temper, either. Never would she have thought she’d enjoy spending the day in a dusty barn with an eight-year-old and a Labrador named after a character in a movie.

But here they were.

By three o’clock, Hunter had not only climbed down off of his gate, he’d walked a leashed Elizabeth Swann around the main area of the barn three times and then commanded her to sit with his hand signals.

He still wouldn’t let her take the treat from his palm, but otherwise, the boy had blossomed. That spelled a successful session all day long, judging by the way the boy’s eyes shone. It was like he’d taken off a coat of miasma since he’d first crept into the barn.

“You’re doing great,” she told him. “I can’t believe how brave you are to hold Elizabeth Swann’s leash like that.”

The boy puffed up, a tiny bit of swagger infusing his steps as he rounded the barn one more time, dog in tow. “I’m like my dad, right?”

“Oh, for sure, Buddy.” She swallowed the hot ball of emotion in her throat. “Exactly like.”

If she could do nothing else but infuse in him a sense of connection to his late father, she’d call that a win.

“There you are!”

Zero’s frantic voice punctured the happy bubble surrounding the three of them with an almost audible pop. Uh oh. Was Hunter not supposed to be in the barn?

The boy shrank into himself as his uncle strode across the barn floor, heavy boots stirring up the dust. Uh, no, Zero did not get to come in here and ruin all of her hard work to get Hunter to open up.

Just as she tensed to step in front of the boy to explain things, Zero skirted her and scooped up Hunter into a fierce embrace, the expression on her employer’s face hooking something deep inside her. Her eyes misted over out of nowhere.

The concern and clear love for his nephew poured off Zero, making her feel like an intruder. They were family with a capital F, something she’d never had, never understood, never would have claimed to want or need. Until that moment.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, loath to break their bubble the same way Zero had broken hers. “Were you looking for Hunter?”

Zero met her gaze over his nephew’s head, his expression icing over. “No one knew where he’d gone to. You have to let someone know when you involve a child in your training sessions.”

“Again, sorry,” she repeated but didn’t correct his interpretation of the events that had led to the scene he’d come upon—Hunter with a leash in his hand. Better to have Zero blame her than the kid. “It won’t happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t. His mother is pretty upset. It’s been thirty minutes since the last time anyone saw him.”

Had she once thought of his voice as sexy? There was no trace of those chocolatey tones now as he gave her his best icicle impersonation, coating everything in the barn with a layer of frost.

She stared at him. “I’m starting to get what you meant when you told me why they called you Zero in basic training.”

As in Absolute Zero. The lowest possible temperature in existence, well below freezing. Zero Renshaw had gained a reputation for being stone cold under pressure and apparently had allowed that to extend to people and situations that displeased him. Her, in particular.

Hunter didn’t get that same treatment.

He set his nephew down but kept a tight grip on the boy’s hand. Because Zero knew Hunter was afraid of the dogs and thought Elizabeth Swann still fell in that category? She could tell him the kid had been a real champ the whole time.

But she didn’t. The message he intended for her to take from this came through loud and clear: Zero and Hunter were a unit, and she’d been here all of five minutes. She wasn’t allowed to be part of their circle.

Well, that was fine. She wasn’t here to make friends and be part of a family. Good grief, as soon as her loan came through, she’d be kissing the Flying Pig goodbye with gusto, thrilled to get back to Fernando De Leon Da Rosa, a man she understood inside and out despite the fact that he’d been dead for 150 years.

Zero pursed his very much alive lips, drawing her gaze to them against her will. “They called me Zero then for the same reason I’m standing here now. Zero excuses. Zero room for failure. Hunter is my responsibility, and that means I would move heaven and earth to keep him safe.”

Yeah, she got it.

As her employer led Hunter from the barn, she dusted off her hands, determined to get back to work. But all she could think about was what it would be like to have a man feel that way about her. Not any man. One in particular.