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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2019 by Tracy Mort Hopkins

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks

  Cover designed by Dawn Adams

  Cover image © Rob Lang Photography

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Puppy Christmas

  Back Cover

  For Stella; the best brown dog we ever had.

  Prologue

  Afghanistan, nine months ago

  “Hey, Collins, are we clear?”

  Marcus Talbott’s voice crackled into Adam’s earpiece, barely suppressed tension thickening the soldier’s Kentucky drawl.

  Tank snuffled next to Adam, tugging at his lead. “Hold back,” Adam murmured into his mic. The dog hadn’t alerted to explosives but continued to weave his head back and forth, every now and then pausing when he caught a hint of something that troubled his world-class nose. He didn’t stop for long in any one spot however.

  Adam forced himself to breathe in and out for a count of five and tried to let Tank take his time. Adrenaline and exhaustion fought for dominance in his blood, and it was only long hours of training and experience that kept Adam from urging Tank to give the all clear so the team they were assigned to could do their thing. Everyone was tired and ready to end this. Four other highly trained soldiers crouched close by, weapons ready to blast their target the moment Yasim Mansour showed his evil, drug-dealing, bomb-building self.

  It would have been safer to make sure the run-down shack was clear of innocents, then blow the bastard up from a distance, but that wasn’t an option. Mansour had important information about the next link in the chain of terror.

  “If he’s in there, he’ll be in the back bedroom,” First Lieutenant Jake Williams whispered through the airwaves. The kid was still wet behind his West Pointy ears but smart as hell. He knew everything there was to know about their insurgent of the moment, so Mansour would be exactly where Jake said he’d be.

  It was up to Adam and Tank to make sure the path to the bad guy wasn’t booby-trapped. And Tank, the chillest IED-detecting dog Adam had worked with, wasn’t ready to stop searching. Tank raised his head, ears pricked, then sniffed at a shadow. He looked back at Adam as if to ask if he should keep going. Adam nodded, mentally promising Tank half of his own dinner tonight for working overtime on this mission.

  “Come on, Sar’nt,” Talbott urged.

  Adam held up a hand that he hoped the team could see through the dim, dusty twilight, asking for patience. He and Tank had been assigned to this unit for a couple of months now, and the team knew how he worked with his dog, had accepted the pair as one of their own. Some of the younger guys treated Adam like a respected elder, but others, especially Talbott, added Adam to their own special brotherhood, which was probably why the lunkhead was screwing with him now.

  “I’ve got a date with some pictures of your sister,” Talbott continued. “So, you know…”

  Adam sent another hand signal, one used for offering opinions to bad drivers and other assholes around the world. Tank was tired, damn it. So was he, and in no mood for Talbott’s normally tension-defusing banter. Talbott chuckled in Adam’s earpiece, about to continue, but then Jake spoke. “There’s a light on in the back bedroom now. I can see two people. We need to get moving before they vaporize through a vent.” These guys had more escape routes than a meerkat colony. “Can you give us an all clear?”

  Adam considered the dog. Tank stared back at him, patient and trusting. He’d done his job, and it was time for Adam to do his part and make the final call.

  Once again, Adam raised his hand, this time with the go signal. He clicked his mic and murmured, “Stay on the right.” He summoned Tank to his side and waited for the team to silently enter the house and gather behind him. Adam and Tank would take point until they reached the end of the hallway, then Talbott would sweep around and kick in the door.

  The door.

  Why was there a door? Most of the rooms in these houses had curtains, if anything. It niggled at Adam, but everything made his hair stand on end these days, even someone knocking on the side of the damned latrine. There was a door because the bedroom wasn’t really a bedroom. It was a command center for one of the biggest scumbags in the Middle East.

  Talbott, no longer joking, jaw set, moved silently toward Adam and Tank. He was followed by Emilio Garcia, Max Zimmerman, and finally Jake, the young lieutenant.

  The operation began like clockwork. The soldiers moved past each other in near-perfect silence, the only noise the sound of their own adrenaline-amplified heartbeats.

  And then it all went to hell.

  * * *

  Later—days later—when the brass debriefed him, Adam said Tank suddenly started to freak out, barking and fighting the leash, and tried to run to the front of the line of soldiers. The dog knocked Talbott against a shelf on the wall. If that was what triggered the bomb or if it was the
men in the room beyond, no one would ever know. The ensuing explosion blew every damned one of them into the street, and not a single man could remember exactly what happened.

  Not Adam or Max Zimmerman, who each had a mild concussion and a few bumps and bruises. Not Marcus Talbott, with a cracked pelvis, knee, vertebra—if it was bone, Talbott’s was broken. Not Jake Williams, who was in an induced coma following surgery to relieve pressure in his brain. And not Emilio Garcia, because he was on life support in Germany.

  Why hadn’t the dog alerted to the danger? Tank wasn’t talking. He was lying under four feet of desert sand, his collar hanging from a post.

  Chapter 1

  Present day, just past the middle of nowhere, Texas

  Houston was three hours and a couple of broken dreams behind her when Lizzie Vanhook crossed the Chance County line, right about the same time the Check Tire Pressure light in her dashboard blinked on.

  Crap. She’d been in the homestretch. There was something symbolic about an uninterrupted beeline home, to the place she planned to find her center of gravity. Maybe start doing yoga. Eat all organic. Drink herbal tea and learn to play the pan flute.

  “Get over yourself,” she said to the boxes and suitcases in the back end of the SUV. She’d do that getting over herself thing just as soon as she checked this tire at the truck stop.

  Flipping the turn signal, she pulled into Big America Fuel and stopped near the sign for Free Air. She stepped out onto the cracked gray asphalt and bent to search for the pressure gauge her dad always insisted she keep in the pocket of the door but came up empty.

  It’s here somewhere. Lizzie would admit to giving a major eye roll for each Dad-and-the-art-of-vehicle-maintenance lesson her father had put her through, but she was secretly grateful. She was surprised Dad hadn’t sent her text updates about the traffic report in Houston before she left this morning. There wasn’t much going on in Big Chance, so he watched Lizzie’s news on the internet and always called to warn her of congestion on the way to work. Her throat tightened when she acknowledged the reason he hadn’t sent her a text today was because he was at the clinic in Fredericksburg getting his treatment. He and Mom might claim this prostate cancer was “just a little inconvenience,” but Lizzie was glad she’d be home to confirm he was as fabulous as he claimed to be.

  She abandoned the driver’s side and went to the passenger door, hesitating when she noticed the dog leaning against the nearby air pump. The big dog. It was missing some significant patches of hair, and the rest was black and matted. Its big, shiny teeth were bared in what she hoped was a friendly smile. Its football-player-forearm-sized tail thumped the ground, raising a cloud of sunbaked, Central Texas dust. Lizzie sneezed. The dog stopped wagging and raised an ear in her direction.

  “Good boy,” she told it, hoping that was the right thing to say. It was one thing to misunderstand the intentions of a tiny fuzzball of a dog and need a few stitches. Ignoring a warning from something this size could be lethal. It had to weigh at least a hundred pounds.

  She kept the beast in her peripheral vision while she bent to search for the tire gauge. Ah ha!

  “Y’all need some help?”

  “No!” Lizzie straightened and turned, the pressure gauge clenched in her raised fist.

  “Whoa there!” A sun-bronzed elderly man, about half Lizzie’s size, held his hands in front of him in a gesture of peace.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, relaxing slightly. “The dog—” She gestured, but the thing was gone.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you, darlin’,” the old man said, tilting his Big America ball cap back. “We’re a little slow today, so I thought I’d check on you.” He indicated the vacant parking lot.

  “It’s fine,” she said. She should remember she was back on her own turf, where it was way more likely that a stranger at a gas station really did want to help you out rather than distract you and rob you blind. “It’s been a long drive, and I’m a little overcaffeinated.”

  “No problem. You local?”

  “Yes,” Lizzie said. Even though she’d been gone for years, it was about to be true again.

  The attendant squinted at the tool she carried. “You got a leaky tire?”

  “I don’t know.” She stooped to unscrew the cap of the first valve. “The little light went on while I was driving.” Nope. That one wasn’t low. She put the cap back on and continued her way around the car while her new friend followed, chatting about Big Chance. He wondered about the likelihood the Chance County High School quarterback would get a scholarship offer. Lizzie had no idea; she hadn’t been keeping up. He speculated on the probability that the Feed and Seed might close, now that there was a new Home Depot over in Fredericksburg. She expected she’d hear about it from her mom and dad if the local place was closing and wondered if her friend Emma still worked there.

  It had been ages since Lizzie had spoken to Emma, and a wave of guilt washed over her. After swearing to always be BFF’s, Lizzie left for Texas A&M and only looked back on Christmas and Easter. She’d gone to Austin for Emma and Todd’s last-minute before-he-deployed wedding but hadn’t been able to come home for Todd’s funeral.

  Finally, the last valve was checked, and she screwed the cap back on. She reached through the open window and dropped the tire gauge on the passenger seat while she said “Everybody’s full. Must be a false alarm.” She wrinkled her nose as she caught a whiff of the interior of her car. Sheesh. The service station probably sold air fresheners; maybe she should invest in one. Compared to the breezy, wide open spaces of home, her car smelled like an inside-out dead deer. She wanted to get home, though, so she decided to deal with it later.

  “Well, everything’s got enough air,” she told the attendant. “I don’t know why the light went on.”

  “Those sensors are a waste of time, if you ask me. You don’t have nitrogen in there, like those fancy places put in, do you?” he asked, then launched into a diatribe about modern technology.

  One of the things she’d not missed about Chance County was the tendency of the residents to ramble as long as possible when given the opportunity. “Well, thanks again,” she told the man. “I’ve got to run.”

  It wasn’t until she was backing out onto the main road that she realized the awful smell inside her vehicle wasn’t just long-drive funk. There was something—something big and black and furry—sitting in the middle of her back seat, panting and grinning in her rearview mirror.

  “Ack!” She hit the brakes, then jammed her SUV into forward and pulled into the parking lot again. She opened the door to jump out, barely remembering to put the SUV into park before it dragged her under. She finally whipped open the back door and glared at the scruffy passenger. “Out. You. Out.”

  She looked around frantically for the old man who’d been chatting her up, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  The dog panted and tilted its head at her.

  “Out. I mean it.”

  It wasn’t wearing a collar, not that she’d reach in to grab him anyway, in case he mistook her hand for a Milk-Bone.

  “Come on, puppy. Seriously. Get out.”

  The dog sighed and lay down, taking up every inch of her back seat.

  She was afraid to leave the thing alone in her car, so she pulled her phone from her pocket and stood next to the back end. She Googled the number for the Big America station and waited for the call to connect.

  “Y’ello,” said the gravelly voice she’d been chatting with a moment ago.

  “Sir, this is Lizzie Vanhook. From the air pump just now.”

  “Sure, darlin’. What can I do you for?”

  “I’m right outside.”

  “I see ya.”

  She looked up, and sure enough, he was waving to her through the glass.

  “There’s a big dog in the back of my car.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the man said.
“He showed up here a week or so ago. Kind of invaded, so we’ve been calling him D-Day. Real sweet little guy.”

  She eyed the sweet little guy. Uh-huh. “Could you come help me get him out of my car?”

  Laughter. “I don’t think you can get that boy to do anything he don’t want to do.”

  “But he’s in my car.”

  A sigh. “Well, I’ve been threatening to call the animal control officer for a few days now, but I kept hoping his family would come looking for him.”

  “Don’t you think the shelter would be the first place they’d go?”

  With a snort, the man said, “There’s only room for a coupla dogs over there. Don’t even take cats. They’d probably have to fast-track that one to the gas chamber, seein’ as how he’s so big and would eat a month’s worth of food at one meal. Besides, he’s ugly as sin, with all them bald spots.”

  Right on cue, D-Day sat up and stuck his nose through the open window, giving Lizzie’s arm a nudge and turning liquid coal eyes up to gaze at her. Reluctantly, she stroked his surprisingly silky head. And then she gave his ears a scratch. So soft.

  D-Day licked Lizzie’s hand. What the heck was she going to do with this guy? Mom and Dad weren’t too crazy about dogs. Lizzie loved dogs, but Dean, her loser ex, had been unwilling to get a dog of their own. As a matter of fact, one of their biggest fights was the weekend she’d volunteered to babysit a friend’s perfectly mannered labradoodle. Then, when Lizzie called her mom for support, she’d gotten an “I don’t blame him. Dogs are a pain in the neck.”

  “I can’t take this dog with me.” Lizzie sounded defeated even to her own ears, which contradicted her plans for an optimistic return to Big Chance and a fresh start.

  The attendant said, “I’ll give the shelter a call. Shame, though. I think he’s still a pup.”

  Those big black eyes stared up at her. D-Day needed a fresh start, too.

  Lizzie decided that Mom would tolerate a canine house guest if Lizzie promised he was moving on. “Never mind,” she said. “Thanks anyway.”

  Who did she still know in town who might take a dog? The Collins family came to mind right off the bat. Adam Collins specifically. Oh no. She wasn’t going to start thinking about him, now that she was moving home. Not. At. All. And really, she wouldn’t be running into him. It had been years since he’d joined the army, and his main goal in life, other than becoming a military policeman so he could work with dogs, had been to get—and stay—as far from Big Chance as possible.