Operation Blind Date. Justine Davis

      Chapter 1

      Change was coming.

      He could feel it in the air, Teague Johnson thought. It wouldn’t be long before the trees started to turn. Soon after that there would be a riot of color as the Pacific Northwest said goodbye to summer and settled in for a long, likely wet and maybe cold winter.

      He’d missed that. As a kid, all he’d wanted was out of the wet, but after a while spent at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, he’d found the lack of defined seasons oddly disconcerting. It messed with his sense of time passing. And when he’d finally come home, he’d welcomed the shift from summer to fall and winter to spring in a way he never had before.

      You never miss it until you lose it.

      Terri’s voice echoed in his head as the pain jabbed at his gut. He steeled himself against it with the ease of long and frequent practice. The past had been nagging him lately, in all its various ghostly forms. That was usually a signal he’d been living too much in his head, and the cure was something hard, physical and exhausting. Maybe he’d borrow Cutter for a long, mostly uphill run.

      “Crazy dog,” he muttered, but he was smiling. The uncannily clever beast had quickly gone from being the pet of his boss’s fiancée to being an amazingly useful member of the team.

      He hesitated for a moment, looking at the small coffee place next door to the groomer’s. Another sure seasonal sign; they were putting up the sign for a string of pumpkin spice items. Tempting. He had a silly weakness for them. Maybe he’d pick up a latte and grab a muffin to share with Cutter, who seemed to have an affinity for the particular flavor as well. That would, if nothing else, guilt him into taking that long, hard run.

      After, he decided. He continued toward the groomer’s, smiling at the image of a floppy-eared dog in a tub of suds painted on the window.

      A bell rang as he pulled open the door of the small shop. A humming sound from the back halted just as he stepped inside, and a split second later he heard a woof of greeting come from the back. He couldn’t see the dog, but obviously Cutter knew he was here.

      “Almost done, be right out.”

      The female voice calling from the room at the back was low, even husky, but there was another note in it that made his brows furrow. An unsteadiness or something that was noticeable. He shrugged it off; it wasn’t his business. Maybe she had a cold. Or maybe the mess Cutter had gotten into—Hayley, said fiancée and the dog’s first chosen person, had said he was mud and muck from nose to plumy tale—had required some heavy-duty cleaners, although the only thing he could smell was a faint scent of something that reminded him of cough drops. Eucalyptus or something.

      The humming began anew, and he realized it was a hair dryer of some sort. The image that brought on made him smile, but he had to admit Cutter had enough long, thick fur that it would probably take him hours to dry without the electronic assist.

      He wandered as he waited, feeling a bit out of place here amid the displays of dog stuff. He’d had no idea there were so many different kinds of food and supplements. The toys were more familiar, and a couple made him smile; one designed as a fire hydrant actually made him chuckle. He noticed, here and there, more pictures like the one painted on the front window, featuring the same dog, with various expressions from mournful—over the diet foods, he noticed with a grin—to silly. Whoever the artist was, he or she had a great imagination, and clearly a good sense of humor.

      He walked toward a few pictures he saw on a side wall. Photos from local 5K and 10K charity runs, in which the shop had apparently participated or sponsored a team. Community involvement. He looked at the people in the shots, wondered if the owner was one of them.

      He stopped in front of a rack of colorful collars and leashes, each one sporting a fabric pattern of varying designs and degrees of whimsy. He picked up one with fire hydrants on it, and again chuckled. Bark Boutique, the tag said, with a website of the same name. He wondered if they did custom work. A collar with alternating doggie angels and imps would be more in order for the irrepressible Cutter.

      On that thought, the dog appeared in the back of the store. Tail up and newly fluffed, he trotted toward Teague sporting his usual attentive expression. With gleaming black fur from his nose to well back over his shoulders, where the thick coat shifted gradually to a rich, reddish brown, and upright, alert ears, he was, Teague admitted, a beautiful animal. But it was the gold-flecked amber eyes and the uncanny intelligence behind them that was his most striking feature. And Teague had quickly learned the intensity in that gaze wasn’t effective just on sheep.

      “Hey, boy,” he said when the dog reached him and sat expectantly at his feet. “Don’t you look all spit-and-polish.”

      He reached down to deliver the anticipated scratch behind the dog’s right ear. He remembered that Hayley had told him how impressed she’d been when she’d brought Cutter here the first time, and the owner had carefully researched his breed to learn the proper way to groom him.

      “At least, the breed he looks like,” Hayley had added with a laugh. It was of no concern at all to her that nobody knew for sure the ancestry of her fey lost waif. “I want to see her make a go of it. I like that she donates groomings to shelter animals, so they can look their best at adoption days.”

      Teague liked that himself.

      “You’re Teague?”

      The woman called from the doorway to what was apparently the grooming room. Her voice was steady now, whatever he’d heard before gone.

      “Teague Johnson,” he agreed as the woman approached. She was tall, maybe