Upholding the Paw

 

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, thanks to my brilliant editor, Holly Ingraham, for your smart and insightful suggestions. Thanks also to Sarah Melnyck, Paul Hochman, and the rest of the team at St. Martin's whose hard work got this book into readers' hands.

Thanks to my agent, Helen Breitwieser, for all of your work in furthering my writing career.

Thanks to Liz Bemis-Hittinger of Bemis Promotions for my great Web site and newsletters.

Thanks to all my great writer friends from Romance Writers of America, especially Hadley Holt, Sherrel Lee, Angela Hicks, Celya Bowers, Kennedy Shaw, and Trinity Blake. You're such an encouraging group and I'm glad to have you all in my life.

And finally, thanks to my readers. I love connecting with you through the books. Enjoy this fast-paced adventure with Megan and Brigit!

Chapter One

Spring Has Sprung

Fort Worth Police Officer Megan Luz

It was the first day of spring. After recently blasting north Texas with a severe ice storm that had caused numerous traffic snarls, school closings, and slips on the ice resulting in broken arms and cracked tailbones, Mother Nature had decided to cut Fort Worth some slack. The day dawned bright and sunny. Forecasters predicted temperatures in the low sixties by noon.

Yahoo!

Neither Mother Nature nor the forecasters would get any complaints from me. Working as a cop required me to spend a large part of my day outside writing speeding tickets, directing traffic, or checking on houses where alarms had been activated. Performing these mundane tasks was hardly fun to begin with, but carrying out my duties in cold, wet weather was far worse.

My furry shepherd mix partner and I had been out on patrol for an hour or so when she emitted a soft whine from her enclosure behind me. I glanced at my rearview mirror. “Need a potty break, Brigit?”

Though she didn't answer with actual words, her
woof
told me that, yes, she'd appreciate the opportunity to take a tinkle. We were in luck. Just a block farther down was the fire station where my boyfriend, Seth Rutledge, worked as a firefighter and bomb squad officer. The station had a nice patch of grass out front, the perfect place to relieve oneself. If one were a dog, that is.

I turned into the station to see Seth at the back of the parking lot, tossing a Frisbee for Blast, his yellow lab who was trained in explosives detection. I flipped my siren on for a brief moment, the abbreviated
woo
alerting Seth and Blast to our presence.

Their two heads snapped our way and, as always, I was struck by how many similarities they shared. Blond hair. Square jaws. A little scruff on the chins. Where the dog's eyes were brown like mine and Brigit's, Seth's were a shade of green a girl could find herself getting lost in. That's why I was careful not to stare into them too long and had downloaded that compass app on my Smartphone to set me back on course in case I began to go adrift. It's not that I didn't want to get serious with Seth—
eventually
. It's just that I'd spent my entire childhood looking after my four younger siblings, and had picked up the slack for one irresponsible roommate after another during college. For now, I wanted to enjoy being young and free and not having to answer to anyone but myself.

I pulled into a parking spot next to Seth's '72 blue Nova. The car had orange flames painted down the sides and personalized plates that read KABOOM. A bit flashy perhaps, but a fitting ride for a bomb squad officer and his canine partner.

Seth and Blast reached the cruiser as I climbed out of it. Seth greeted me with a smile and a “Hey.” A kiss would have been nice, but both of us were on the city's clock so such behavior in public would have been inappropriate. Blast stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the back door of my patrol car, greeting Brigit with a tail whipping back and forth in excitement and an
Arf-arf-arf!

I angled my head toward Brigit, who stood on her platform in the back of the vehicle, scratching at the inside of the door. “My partner needs to utilize your g-grass.”

Yeah, I've got a stutter. Had it since I was a kid. Though I'd been unable to shake it entirely, it had become less pronounced over the years. Sometimes it bothered me, but mostly I took it in stride. After all, everyone's got something to deal with, right? Still, the stutter had been the bane of my existence as a child, making me feel awkward and self-conscious, an easy target for bullies. I'd often chosen to spend my time with books rather than other kids. I don't entirely regret my lonely childhood, though. I learned a lot about crime solving from those books. In fact, it was the old Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes books that first got me interested in becoming a detective.

But first things first. In Fort Worth, before making detective, a person had to put in a minimum of four years as a police officer.

I'd become a cop to fight for truth and justice, to serve and protect those who weren't able to protect themselves—
like little girls who couldn't make their words come out right.
Okay, clearly I'd suffered some emotional scars. But what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right? Or at least motivates us, gives our lives direction and purpose. If not for my stutter and the resulting teasing, I might have ended up processing paperwork at an insurance company. Not the worst job, probably, but not one likely to give a person a sense of self-actualization.

“'Scuse me, boy.” I nudged Blast aside, opened the door, and let Brigit out of her cage. She hopped down to the pavement, exchanged a quick sniff with Blast, and trotted over to the grass where she squatted shamelessly for all the world to see.

Seth tucked the Frisbee under his arm, leaned back against the fender of my car, and looked up into the cloudless sky. “Can you believe this weather?”

I followed his gaze, squinting against the sun, enjoying the feel of its warm rays on my face. “It's gorgeous. Hope it lasts.”

It probably wouldn't. Mother Nature could be such a tease in the spring.

Blast and Brigit returned from relieving themselves and looked hopefully up at Seth.

He readied the Frisbee in his hand. “On your mark,” he said, causing the dogs to quiver in anticipation. “Get set.” He turned to the side and bent his knees for leverage. “Go!”

Seth sent the Frisbee sailing down the drive with a smooth throw, his well-developed shoulder muscles flexing under his fitted navy T-shirt. All those laps at the YMCA's indoor pool this past winter had kept him in great shape.

As the dogs took off running, Seth turned and
damn
! He caught me ogling him. A grin tugged at his lips but he had enough sense not to call me on it. I prided myself on being above such base carnal desires. Of course I wasn't
actually
above such desires, but I was damn good at lying to myself.

The dogs' paws thundered on the asphalt as each vied to be the first to get to the disc and snatch it out of the air. Brigit beat Blast by a whisker, leaping into the air and grabbing the Frisbee in her teeth just as it began its descent. Fortunately, Blast didn't appear to feel emasculated by Brigit's superior skills. Perhaps being neutered had rendered his masculinity irrelevant. At any rate, he galloped along beside her as she brought the disc back to Seth for another throw.

“Good girl!” Seth praised my dog, ruffled her ears, and tugged the Frisbee out of her teeth for another toss. With the dogs on their way once again, Seth turned his attention back to me. “How's your morning going? Anything exciting happen?”

“Nope. All I've done so far is write a warning for a broken taillight.”

As much as I wanted to fight for truth and justice, the reality of working as a beat officer was that 99 percent of our shifts were spent driving around looking for trouble and finding only minor, routine infractions. During these downtimes, I entertained myself by listening to NPR or podcasts on my phone. But the other 1 percent of the time, when I was chasing a burglary suspect on foot, wrangling with an angry drunk or a violent felon? That was an entirely different story.

I probably shouldn't admit it, but those moments terrified me. While I loved making a bust, I was not one of those cops who enjoyed engaging physically with suspects, who got some type of rush from risking my life and safety in shootouts or hand-to-hand combat. Don't get me wrong. When push came to shove, I
could
shove. Didn't mean I liked it, though. If every suspect would raise their hands in the air and surrender willingly, I'd be just fine with that.

Brigit ran up, having once again won the race. Blast had asserted himself this time, though, clamping down on the side of the Frisbee where it hung out of Brigit's mouth and running alongside her. It was a
Lady and the Tramp
moment, but with a plastic disc rather than spaghetti.

Seth ruffled his own dog's ears. “Nice try, Blast.”

I wrestled the disc out of their mouths and tossed it myself this time. Of course my throw paled in comparison to Seth's, flying slower and lower and likely to reach only half the distance. Nonetheless, the dogs scrabbled on the pavement and took off after the disc a third time.

With our partners on their way, I turned back to Seth. “How about you? Fight any fires this morning?”

“Not a one. It's been a dull shift. Not even a single kitten in a tree.”

Seth's job was similar to mine in that it involved a lot of downtime punctuated by moments of life-threatening action. At least he could spend his downtime exercising his dog and hanging with the guys at the station playing poker and watching television.

Crunk-crunk-crunk-crunk.
A metallic rumble sounded as the door rolled up on one of the truck bays. The flashing lights illuminated on the large red truck, and one of the firefighters appeared in the doorway. He waved Seth inside. “Suit up, Rutledge! We got a call!”

Seth shook his head. “Spoke too soon, huh?”

The dogs returned, the Frisbee clamped in both of their mouths again. Not a second later the voice of a female dispatcher came over my shoulder-mounted radio. “Officer needed at Eighth Avenue and Oleander. We have a report of a fire in a Dumpster.”