“Tramp!” the protester yelled.
Piper froze to the spot. All the eyes in the park followed the angry protester’s pointing finger. The twentysomething girl was dressed in a green bohemian maxi-dress, her wild, curly hair snaking from her head like a furious Mother Nature incarnate. And Piper was her target.
But it wasn’t Mother Nature. Just an old pain in the ass of Piper’s. The one person she dreaded running into. “Oh, good,” she muttered under her breath. “Laura.”
“Liar!” Laura screamed again.
Not exactly the glowing recommendation one hopes for during an interview. Piper tugged Aiden’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”
Colin stood his ground, ready to defend his lady’s honor. Hoping to avoid a confrontation, Piper tugged on his leash and headed for the way out. But who was she kidding? There was always a confrontation.
For the last few years, Laura’s hobby had been to harass Piper whenever possible—“stalk” was more like it. And every time Laura confronted her in public, Piper tried to extract herself from the situation with her head high and her mouth clamped shut. But no matter how many times she tried to take the high road, she always found herself getting sucked in.
Aiden hurried to keep up with Piper. “Do you know that girl?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but Laura had caught up to them. “Hey.” She gripped Piper’s arm, her fingernails digging into her flesh. “I’m talking to you.”
“Laura,” Piper said. “So good to see you. It’s been too long.”
“How dare you show your face here,” she growled at Piper.
Piper took a deep breath and tried to remain calm, knowing it would piss Laura off more. But Piper also knew that it wouldn’t last long. Be cool, she told herself. Be cool.
“At a dog park? With my dog? Yeah, I’m pure evil.”
“What, are you stalking me?” Laura eyed her up like she was Satan’s spawn and Colin her hellhound—which, admittedly, he was at times.
Piper laughed incredulously. “I’m stalking you?”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” she spat. “You’ve already won. Why won’t you just leave me alone?”
She loomed close enough that Piper could read her I heart my dog earrings, but she spoke loud enough for the entire park to hear. Everyone had stopped playing with their pets or reading their books to listen.
Getting the attention she wanted, Laura spun dramatically toward her captive audience. “You already lied and got me kicked out of the veterinary program. Are you trying to kick me out of my favorite park too?”
Piper’s cool turned to lukewarm. Her fists clenched at her sides. “That is not what happened and you know it.” Besides, that was her favorite park, and Laura knew it too.
“Are you denying that you got me expelled?”
“Your own actions got you expelled!” Okay, hot, boiling hot.
Colin and Sophie began to growl at Laura in support. We got your back.
Laura gasped in hurt shock, a hand on her chest. “Me? What did I do? Worked hard, did the best I could? I guess you just couldn’t suppress your jealousy. You couldn’t stand that I was at the head of the class and you couldn’t even pass a pop quiz.”
Piper rubbed her temples. She could have passed that pop quiz, but she’d forgotten to set her alarm that morning and missed it altogether. She snorted. “Head of the class? You couldn’t have identified a flea if it bit you in the ass. You were only doing as well as you were because you were copying off your friends.”
“That’s the story you managed to convince our professor. I wonder how you did that?” Her eyes narrowed. “Well, I suppose lying is your specialty. Only for our professor you were lying on your back.”
“I wasn’t sleeping with the professor!” But no one heard her because Laura had turned to plead with the crowd, talking over her.
“I just want to move on with my life. She follows me everywhere I go. Someone please get her away from me. Call the cops.”
Piper was steaming. Random people started getting to their feet uncertainly. A couple of her SFAAC friends took a few steps toward Laura and Piper, as though about to intervene.
Laura turned to Piper and beamed triumphantly, speaking low enough for only Piper and Aiden to hear. “You know, if it’s in self-defense, I can’t get in trouble for hitting you.”
“I would have to attack you first,” Piper said.
“Look around.” She glanced back at the park. “All these people have witnessed that you’re here to harass me. Who knows what you’ll do when we cross paths again?”
Piper took a step forward, but Aiden spoke first. “Do it and she can press harassment charges. And lay another finger on her and I’ll call the cops. That goes for the rest of you.” He gave the advancing onlookers a threatening glance.
“This is a protest. We got a permit and everything. We’re not doing anything wrong.” Laura glared at Aiden. “But Piper here looks about ready to hit me. Are you going to hit me?” She tapped her own cheek, egging Piper on. “Come on. Do you want to punch me?”
“Don’t tempt me.” Piper’s hands balled at her sides.
Aiden’s warm hand clasped over hers. The touch was so unexpected, so gentle, that her fist relaxed in shock. His fingers interlaced with hers and he began to draw her away from the tense crowd.
All Piper could focus on was the sensation of his warm hand in hers, his own steady composure contrasting with her behavior, chastising her. She’d thrown a hissy fit like a five-year-old who hadn’t learned how to play well with others, and here was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company who had probably never lost his cool in his life.
Who gave a shit about Laura, anyway? About what those people thought? About anything else but that hand in hers?
The park faded into the distance, the chanting, the yelling. She barely heard Laura call out to her back, “Maybe someone should expose you for what you really are, Piper! You hear me? Force you to confess how you cheated me out of a university education.” Because Piper couldn’t hear anything over all those morphos fluttering around inside her.
When she and Aiden had walked a little ways—she wasn’t paying any attention to how far—his hand dropped away.
“I’m sorry,” Aiden said. “I thought it was best to leave. There was no reasoning with her.”
Piper nodded, not trusting her voice. Of course, he wasn’t really holding her hand. He did it to get her out of the situation. Don’t be stupid, Pipe, she told herself. She felt a pang of disappointment but quickly smothered it with annoyance. She didn’t need him to interfere. She was doing just fine on her own.
She picked up her pace, marching ahead on the path so Aiden was forced to jog to catch up. With her shoulders pinned back and her chin raised high, she marched forward at a brisk clip.
A moment later, she felt Aiden’s arm grab her firmly around the waist, stopping her in her tracks. Thrown off balance, she swung into him and found herself chest to chest with him. He held her, smiling down in surprise.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she managed with a trembling voice.
“Uh, you were about to…” He glanced down at the ground, and when she did the same she saw that the poopetrators had struck again.
If she weren’t so frustrated she would have laughed. But her heart was racing, with anger, with surprise, and, if she was honest, from Aiden’s touch. How did she keep getting into such embarrassing situations? Ones that Aiden always seemed to be around for, to pull her out of.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She knew he didn’t mean physically. Piper turned away and began to straighten her disheveled tank top. It took a moment to find her voice, to pinpoint what feeling was plaguing her the most: embarrassment, anger, bitterness, or her pity for Laura the day the truth came out. Then of course there was the last three years of constantly having to watch her back.
“That was humiliating,” she said.
All those people glaring at her like she was the one who did something wrong. Of course, they didn’t know what had really happened. How could they? Laura was a little too convincing. She wouldn’t have a future as a veterinarian, but she would make one hell of a soap star.
It occurred to Piper that Aiden didn’t know what happened, either. She wondered what he must be thinking after witnessing that. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he rescinded his offer of employment right there and then.
“I’m sorry about back there,” she said. “It isn’t like how she said it was.”
“What was all that about?” Aiden jiggled Sophie’s leash so she would follow him down the path, back through the park, back to the parking lot, to get away from Piper, no doubt.
Her heart gave a funny squeeze.
“I did get Laura kicked out of the veterinary program,” she explained as they walked. “Only it wasn’t because I was jealous. Far from it. It was because I caught her cheating. It was after class one day, and we’d all just handed in a final assignment for the semester. After I’d left the classroom, I realized my cell phone had fallen out of my pocket. When I got back to the room, I caught her rifling through the assignments while the teacher had stepped out. She was swapping her paper with mine.”
“And her story about the professor?”
“I’ve barely had time to date, far less manage a highly unethical affair with one of my professors. That was just her way of trying to take the focus off her and to discredit me, not to mention the professor, who had his own doubts about her. After the investigation, it turned out she’d been cheating her way through the whole semester.”
“I’m guessing that’s not how she remembers it.” Aiden thrust his chin back toward the off-leash park.
“Laura will believe what she wants to believe. In a way, I feel kind of bad for her. I know how much she loves animals and wanted to work with them. But the program is tough. She never would have gotten very far. Besides, if I had to bring my sick pet to a veterinarian I wouldn’t want one who didn’t have the skill or knowledge to graduate on their own.”
Aiden made some noncommittal noise in response. She wondered what he was thinking.
“She went to the media with her own version of the scandal, and it got completely out of hand. They ran the story without checking with the school first. Next thing you know, I’m crossing angry picket lines at school for weeks.”
Aiden frowned. “That’s not right.”
“Once the newspaper heard of the real story, they printed a retraction.”
“Did it help?”
“No. They buried it somewhere on page twenty-five. I guess the headline ‘Newspaper Screws Up: Oops, Sorry’ wasn’t as catchy as ‘Veterinary Violation: Student Wrongly Dismissed.’” She used sarcastic air quotes with her fingers. “Besides, the damage was done. Laura’s slander campaign had reached enough of the campus that no one quite knew what to believe. They just knew to avoid me.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s been a lonely few years. Other students stayed clear of me. Not that I’ve had much time for friends, anyway.” She shrugged it off. “But our professor got the worst of it. His reputation was damaged. The next week, he’d already been replaced. I think maybe he took a job at another university.”
They walked in silence for a minute. Piper glanced at Aiden out of the corner of her eye. She wished she knew what was going through his mind. As good as she was at reading animals, Aiden remained a complete mystery to her.
“If you could go back?” he asked. “Would you make the same decision? Would you turn her in?”
Piper blew out a long breath. “Yeah. As terrible as it all turned out, I would have. Laura was wrong to do what she did.”
And it was true. But deep down, Piper still wished it all could have gone so differently. That she could have avoided the public shame, the drama, the misplaced guilt. If only she hadn’t left her cell phone behind, that her professor could have caught Laura in the act instead of her. But then again, maybe Laura would have gotten away with it. Maybe it would have been Piper forced to leave the program because she’d failed the assignment. No, as hard as it was, she’d done the right thing. She’d worked too hard to let someone like Laura take it all away from her.
“I thought once things died down, she’d move on with her life,” Piper said. “But ever since, Laura has been harassing me any chance she gets. I was once a member of SFAAC. I used to fund-raise and protest with them on my free weekends. Then Laura weaseled her way in, spread her lies, turned certain members against me. It got toxic, so I left.”
The steam that had built up inside of Piper from the argument condensed into tears, and without warning they filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She swiped at them with the back of her hand, but not before Aiden saw.
He reached into the sports jacket slung over his arm. Fishing out his pocket square, he handed it to her. If she hadn’t been so grateful for it, she would have made up a new uniform rule about no handkerchiefs in a dog park—even a fashionable one.
“Thanks.” She dabbed at the tears and tried to hand it back, but he waved it away. She tucked it into her own pocket. Maybe she’d keep it as a souvenir, a reminder of that not-a-date she once had with one of San Francisco’s most eligible bachelors.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back to my place.”
The statement was so out of place, like a giraffe as a house pet, that she thought she misheard. “What?”
“I’ll show you around and give you the codes to get in.”
It took her a moment to comprehend what he was saying. “You mean, you still want me to work for you?” She couldn’t keep the incredulity from seeping into her voice. “Even after all that?”
“No,” he said. “It’s because of all that.”
Feeling tired, and confused, and emotionally drained, she stopped walking. “Come again?”
When he noticed she wasn’t walking next to him, Aiden turned to face her. He drew close enough that she saw his eyes weren’t just mint green; they also had a ring of brown around the pupil, making them appear larger, like all he wanted to see right then was her, to drink her in.
“I am confident that anyone as honest and ethical as you will take great care of Sophie.”
When she didn’t answer right away, he raised his eyebrows. “Will you be my dog walker?”
Piper stared into those eyes and felt herself get sucked right in. She wasn’t sure she could say no even if she could afford to.
She nodded. “I will take great care of your wiener.”