Page 12 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

Cass snapped her fingers in his face, fast and loud, three quick pops. “ Don’t speak to her. From now on, you have to deal with me, and I’m not having it, you gigantic asswipe!”

A hand grabbed at the back of her jacket. “Cass,” Jamie hissed. “People are staring!”

“Good! Let them stare!” She cast a glance to either side; people were in fact staring, arrested on their way to and from class, eyes round with surprise and interest. Cass projected her voice, shouting now: “Behold! The human snotrag that is Sigmund Blackmon!”

Sig’s eyes got somehow wider. His nostrils flared, and he stared at her with a gratifying level of incomprehension. “What—Cassandra—Jamie— ladies, I don’t—”

“What’s going on here? What is this?!” Professor McGrath was a small, seemingly mild-mannered Ceramics prof with a voice like a foghorn when he got going. He charged down the hall, students scurrying to get away from him, and Jamie tugged hard on Cass’s jacket.

With one last ugly glare at Sig, Cass allowed herself to be dragged away and out the doors into the cold evening sunlight.

“Cass!” Jamie’s voice was shrill with panic. “What are you doing? You can’t just—oh my God—you can’t—” When Cass turned around, she saw that Jamie had halted in the middle of the sidewalk and bent forward to brace her hands on her knees, head hanging, breath wheezing asthmatically.

“Aw, Jesus,” Cass muttered, adjusted the strap of her bag, and went back to her side. “It’s okay. Everything’s fine.” She rubbed at the center of Jamie’s back, and felt the wracking tremors even through the thickness of her coat. “He’s in there and we’re out here.”

“You can’t just—can’t just yell at him like that!”

“Of course I can. He deserves it. He deserves worse than that, but I’ll settle for yelling while Melissa puts her case together.”

“Case…?” Jamie shook her head, hair swinging toward the cobblestones. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

They were blocking the flow of foot traffic, and earned wary, curious, and some angry looks from the students who had to veer around them.

“Sorry, sorry, yes, go around, thank you,” Cass said, waving at a pair of too-curious stragglers and one concerned older woman who looked on the verge of asking if Jamie was alright. “We’re fine, thank you.”

From the sea of students, a man emerged, walking straight toward them, immediately distinguishable from the artists around him.

It was the way he held himself, his sure stride, that captured her attention at first; this was a man who knew where he was going and who wasn’t afraid to throw some elbows to get there.

Familiar, in that sense, comforting; he walked the way a Dog walked, carving a straight path through the world not caring who noticed or took umbrage.

Come to think of it, he was dressed like a Dog, too. Boots, jeans, broken-down leather jacket. A wallet chain even winked at his hip with each purposeful stride.

Cass blamed preoccupation with Jamie, and the unlikely clashing of her two worlds, for her slow uptake.

When she finally looked at the man’s face, recognition hit her with a one-two punch: the soothing balm of relief, and a sharp spike of something hot and excited in the pit of her stomach that she quickly, though unsuccessfully tried to quash.

“Shep.”

He did not look happy to see her.

He didn’t slow, but walked straight up to her, hooked a big hand in the crook of her elbow, and attempted to steer her off the sidewalk. “A word , Miss Green?” His voice had that growling undertone that meant he was grinding his back teeth.

Cass dug in her feet and tried to get her arm loose. A futile effort, but she didn’t try all that hard, really; Shep didn’t release her, but he at least halted, brows knitted together, mouth pressed into a hard frown.

“The hell are you doing? Come over here, I need to talk to you.”

Jamie chose that moment to lift her head, and her eyes bugged when she saw Shep. “Oh my God.” She clapped her hand over her mouth, and then sucked in a breath, and Cass knew she was preparing to scream.

“Hold on, hold on, it’s okay.” She held up her free hand. “He’s a friend. Shep’s a friend, okay? He’s not”—she shot him a dark look, and he finally let go of her arm—“trying to kidnap me.”

“Is this the friend you took to the hospital?” Shep asked.

“This is my roommate, Jamie,” Cass said, with a meaningful eyebrow lift.

“Who you took to the hospital? With Dixon ,” the last he added with his own eyebrow action.

Shit.

Jamie said, in a high, thready voice, “Your friend ? But he’s, like, old .”

Shep’s face scrunched up with gratifying (cute) disgust. “Thanks.”

“Okay,” Cass said, and laid a hand on each of them, “let’s just…” She nodded toward a pavilion down a short crosswalk that offered benches, vending machines, and unnecessary shade.

Shep bought a Coke, and managed to hand it to Jamie in the unfriendliest way possible. “Drink that before you go into shock,” he ordered, and Jamie stared at him, stricken and trembling.

“He really is a friend,” Cass said. “I swear. He just looks like an asshole.”

Then she rounded on Shep and shoved him. He stood still, unimpressed, brow cocked, just to prove that she couldn’t physically move him, then let her shoo him over to the very edge of the pavilion.

He propped a shoulder against one of the wooden support pillars, and looked so incongruous against the scholastic backdrop she wanted to grin. She frowned, instead, and instead of saying that she was glad to see him, which she was, she always was, she said, “What are you doing here?”

His grin was wry, jaw working sideways as he stared her down. “Come on, kid. You call me from the hospital and I’m not supposed to check up on you?”

Like yesterday afternoon over the phone, she was struck full-force by his phrasing. Of course he worried about her, of course he would check on her. It left her insides clenching, and it took her a beat to regather her ticked-off composure.

“First off,” she said, holding up a finger.

“Jesus, here we go.”

“You waited twenty-four hours, so you weren’t that concerned. Two .” She stabbed her fingers toward his face when he started to retort. “How did you know which building I’d be in? And three, phones exist, you know.”

His mouth dropped open and his eyes widened in feigned shock.

Slowly, he pulled his phone out of his back pocket, and turned it over, examining it as though it was an ancient artifact.

“Wait. Do you mean this thing is a telephone? I can call people with it?” He put it up to his ear, still doing that slack-jawed face, and Cass bit her lip hard against a losing battle to hold back a smile.

“I hate you,” she said on a giggle. “You’re a horrible person.”

He grinned, quick and pleased, then pocketed his phone, folded his arms, and grew serious, head kicked back at an assessing angle. “So what happened?” He shot a glance toward Jamie, who was sipping at the Coke and watching them. “The basket case got raped and you took her to Dixon?”

A gasp pulled Cass’s attention; it wasn’t Jamie, but another girl, a stranger feeding coins into the candy machine.

“Oh my God, you can’t say that sort of thing out loud.” She swatted his arm. “Jesus…okay, come on, we can’t do this out in the open.”

They went back to her dorm, Jamie trailing with the hesitance of someone walking behind a wild tiger, and when they arrived, she grabbed a stack of books off the desk and slipped back into the hall with a hasty excuse about studying in the common room.

“She seems like a barrel of laughs,” Shep quipped, thumb hooked over his shoulder toward the door.

Cass rolled her eyes as she shut the door. “She’s normal, okay? And she’s been through a rough time.” She went to plop down on the edge of her bed. “Why didn’t you call if you wanted to know the story?”

He ignored her for the moment, and instead prowled around the small dorm room, peering at the artwork on the wall, at the clutter on the desk.

He picked up a foam stress ball printed with tiny blue and red cats and squished it down into nothing in his palm.

He had big hands, strong, square-knuckled.

She could see the flex of tendons in his wrist where his sleeve had ridden up.

“Shep.”

He put the ball down, and brushed aside a piece of clean paper to get a better look at what lay beneath, which, she remembered with a wave of self-consciousness, was a piece for her Comics class.

“Who the fuck is this?” Shep demanded, and she would have been gratified by the unguarded jealousy in his voice if her pulse hadn’t kicked up with nerves.

She popped off the bed and went to his side.

He glanced over at her, lips slowly spreading in a smile, gaze hectic in a way she couldn’t decipher. He looked startled, even a little alarmed, and she recalled the way he’d sounded yesterday on the phone, his voice touched with a fear she didn’t understand.

“Is this me ?”

“No.” She felt her face heat, and stared resolutely down at her painting, clipped to the board she was using to work on it, protective clear cover folded over it. “That’s Frank Castle.”

His attention snapped from her face, to the paper, and back, something she was keenly aware of in her periphery but which she refused to meet head-on. “My last name’s Shepherd ,” he said, like she was slow.

“You—” Her face was hot. She backhanded him in the chest (damn, all that gym time was paying off) and said, “It’s Frank Castle . The Punisher.” When she dared a look, his smirky smile was fading, his brows drawing together. “The comic book character? Marvel? Jamie’s right: you are old.”

He frowned, defensive now, and that was safer, that allowed her cheeks to cool and her pulse to slow. “I know who the Punisher is.”

“Then why did you think he was you?”

He shrugged, and nodded back down at the page. “You drew him to look like me.”

“Oh, please. Do you have a vest with a skull on it? Do you walk around dripping guns? He looks nothing like you.”