Page 4 of SEAL’S Baby Surprise (Lanes #2)

AUSTIN

I smile as Lee settles in to her camp chair. She’s looking at me with those intelligent eyes, and they’re sparkling with interest.

I remember her telling me the story about the nudist colony. Something tells me that, as much as I love a good story, so does she. So, I decide to really lay it on.

Lee is definitely engaged. She leans forward, eyes wide. “Aren’t dogs supposed to bark?”

“That’s what Daddy said!” Julia giggled.

I nod. “She’s right. That’s what I said. I turned to the K-9 handler and asked him what was going to happen.”

Lee’s eyes go wide. “Oh gosh. What did he say?”

I made a frown, and my face was serious. ‘“We’re going to have to let him go,” the guy said,” I mimicked in a deep baritone.

“Who?” Lee asked.

I mimicked the deep voice of the K-9 sergeant. “Number 87. If we can’t find a suitable place to home him, we might have to put him down. He’s trained to attack, and that makes him too dangerous to give to just anybody.”

Lee gasped. “Oh no! He’s not dangerous!”

“He’s just a big sweetie!” Julia added.

I smiled. “He sure is. So on impulse, I said, ‘I’ll take him.’

“You sure?” the guy said. “He eats a lot.”

Julia laughed, like she always does at that part. “He does eat a lot!”

“So did they let you have him?” Lee asks.

I smile at her, and pet Ark. “Not right away. We had to train together, and they had to be sure we would be all right. They didn’t want to let a dog out that would one day snap and maybe kill someone.”

“Could Ark do that?” Julia asks, her eyes big and round.

She always asks that. It’s part of the story.

“Ark could, but he isn’t likely to. No matter how mean they were to him, they couldn’t take the sweetness out of that boy. Just like they couldn’t make him stop barking. I like his barking. It reminds me that I’m alive, and that I’m not buried under a building. He makes me feel safe.”

“I think he’s good at that,” Lee says, as if she feels the intense people-love that is just Ark all over.

“He is. Ark flunked out of K-9 patrol, but he was a star pupil in emotional support school. He could walk into a room of guys suffering from all kinds of mental hurts, and before you’d know it, they’d all be petting him, and saying what a great pup he is, and how handsome and so on.”

“So, three weeks later than I was originally intending to leave, I boarded a plane with Ark. When we got back stateside, I had a hard time renting a place to stay with a big, German shepherd as a roommate, even if he is my designated ESA. So, I bought this beat up old stalker van, rented a garage bay, and started to rebuild her.”

“Really?” Lee exclaims. “You did the renovation?”

“Yeah,” I reply, “It gave me something to do while I filled out forms, signed on the dotted line, and did a bunch of other stuff to locate Julia and then to get her out of the foster care system. The owner of the bay rented us a room. Ark helped pay for it by doing security for the storage unit.”

“My foster family was okay,” Julia says. “But there were a lot of us. When I went with Daddy, it made room for someone else who needed a place to be.”

“We lucked out,” I say. “Julia got placed with a family that genuinely cares about their kids and that does their best to help them. Julia’s mom had a lot of problems, and didn’t know how to be a good mommy, so Julia had some learning to do.”

I always make a point to put that in. No one should grow up hating or resenting their mother. It just goes against nature.

And since it’s true, my deceased wife had a lot of problems, it makes it easy to show that it hadn’t been because she hadn’t loved Julia that she didn’t take good care of her.

Even by all the accounts from the people I’d talked to when trying to find Julia, it had been true. But Izzy and I hadn’t known each other very well. We’d had a whirlwind romance, then I’d been off to the front.

Izzy had lost her job when her pregnancy started showing. I’d sent her money, but it had never seemed to be enough. Then, she’d stopped picking up the checks, and the folks in charge couldn’t find where to send them.

It was after that I’d gotten word that she’d mixed sleeping pills, antidepressants and alcohol into a fatal cocktail, and that Julia had been placed in foster care.

You could say that you can’t save everyone. I had been busy doing my duty when it all went down. My unit had achieved our objectives, but when you get back stateside and hear the opinions of other people…well, you never know if you really were doing the right thing.

As a military man, at my level and rank, it wasn’t my job to know these things. It was my job to carry out the mission.

But that’s one of those mental rabbit holes that can make a man crazy. Besides, I’d been quiet too long, and I was losing my audience.

“So,” I say, “back to Ark-Ark.” Ark looks hopeful at the sound of his name, and thumps his tail on the ground, so I give him a bite of leftover burger. He wolfs it down and gives me a lolling, tongue-out doggie grin. “That’s enough, Big Guy,” I tell him. “You don’t need a tummy ache.”

“Before Ark and I got sent home, there was one big, last thing that we had to do. I was allowed to take him with me because he wasn’t necessarily a combat dog, but everyone knew he would move heaven and earth to keep me and my guys safe.

We were out on a mission, and it was pretty scary with shooting all around, and ordinance exploding everywhere, planes and copters flying low overhead.

The guys and I were passing this burned-out apartment building, when something exploded nearby and brought it down on us.

We lucked out. Somehow, a slab got propped against another part of the rubble, and we were sheltered from the worst of the falling debris.

One of the guys had a leg trapped, and we carefully dug him out and put a field splint on the leg because it was broken in at least three places.

It wasn’t easy, because the place we were in was barely big enough for one of us to stretch out in it at a time. ”

I pause and take a drink of my coke. I’ve got my audience back again, and I can’t lie about the fact that I’m pretty interested in “So, we took turns stretching out beside the guy with the broken leg while the rest of us catnapped leaning up against the wall.”

“Why didn’t you dig out?” Lee asks.

I shake my head. “We tried that. Then stuff started shifting above us, and there was this rumbling like vehicles were driving over us, so we decided to keep quiet and wait a while. No point digging out in the middle of action — or bringing the whole thing down on ourselves. We each had water, emergency food bars, and some medical supplies.”

I take another drink of my soda.

“So we waited. It got quiet after a while, then we heard sounds above us. We yelled and hollered but didn’t get any response.

Some of us screamed, and the guy with the broken leg started to cry.

But then the sounds got quiet and went away.

That just about broke us, I don’t mind telling you.

I don’t care who you are, when you are facing the possibility that you might be buried alive, things break inside you, I don’t care how tough and manly you are.

Most of us tried to be brave for the other guys, though.

No point in starting a pity party. We sedated the guy with the broken leg with some stuff from our med supplies, and we waited. ”

For just a second, I’m back there. I remember that bleak time.

If we tried to dig, the rubble shifted. Sometimes it seemed to shift on its own.

One guy started singing a hymn about resting in Jesus’ arms, but it was too darned depressing, so we told him to shut the fuck up before we all started crying.

He just sighed and told us he would pray for us. We said, “Thank you, but not out loud please.” Like the rest of us weren’t praying, too. You get religious quick when near certain death is in your face.

I go on with my story.

“And then we heard it. Ark! Ark! Ark!” Ark lifts his head, and I scratch his ears.

“It was the barking dog, and he just would not shut up. He even dug at the rubble on his own until somebody got the message and broke out their folding shovels and started helping. I could hear them then, voices talking, someone saying ‘Can’t you get that dog to shut up? He’ll have the entire front down on us.

’ But he just kept barking. They were excited little barks now, with whines mixed in.

Then one of the guys propped up against the wall gave a little girly shriek as something grabbed him by the collar and started to pull.

Human hands reached down and helped pull. Then, we knew we were being rescued.”

I pause a moment and get another drink. This one is more for dramatic effect than anything. Time to add the capper.

“So, Ark was a hero. He’s a good dog, so they kept trying to get the bark trained out of him.

But it just wouldn’t go. So, yeah, I was glad to bring him home with me.

His bark makes me feel safe. And when the nightmares come, as you can be sure they will, he climbs in bed with me and licks my ear until I wake up and the bad things go away. ”

Ark sits up and leans against my knee for a minute or two, then he puppy wiggles his way around to each of my listeners, collecting pets, snuggles, and ear scratches.

And here’s the thing: what shock collars and other training techniques wouldn’t fix, all you have to do to get Ark to stop barking is to scratch his ears.

He gets this goofy look on his face, and just zens out. But I’m not sorry the trainers didn’t know that.