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keep her inside on a cold night; the most she could enforce was the compromise of the dog room.
           Brenna tossed a few towels into the bottom of the new crate and went out to reel Sunny in and crate her with an outlandish bone. She'd been intending to use a slip-lead on the Cardi, but when he got a glimpse of the crate, he pushed his way through the partially open door and installed himself in his new quarters.
           Brenna put a hand on her hip and made a face at him. "So you're crate-trained. Show-off." She freed her hair from her sweatshirt and debated whether or not to feed him—he'd need it, but she didn't want to dump food down him when he'd been stressed—and ended up giving him a scant handful of kibble. "Make yourself at home," she told him, deciding she wasn't going to be spooked away from her tub. "I've been waiting for my own bath all day, and I'm about to have it."
           He met her gaze for a few moments, and then deliberately turned to the kibble, nuzzling it first and finally settling in to eat with a cat-like finickiness.
           "I guess I know when I'm dismissed," she said, but couldn't help but linger to watch him, so at home in her own kitchen, the very picture of a content dog. It was almost enough to make her forget the strange circumstances of his arrival.
           But not quite.
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    CHAPTER 4 PERTH An Initiation Early afternoon found her in the Pets! parking lot—a shared lot in a strip mall that no longer held the sparkle of fresh construction but hadn't quite descended into rattiness. Bills paid, laundry done, and she'd even found some old boards in the barn to lay over the mud hole between the house and the car shed. The Cardigan had jumped readily into her pickup to sit on the towel she'd laid over the seat, happy enough to be in the car, happy enough to keep her company. Happy enough to hop out again, onto the warm asphalt of a spring day that had actually chosen to be sunny.
           Which left Brenna entirely unprepared when he took one look at the Pets! storefront and screamed like a panicked child.
           He tried to bolt, couldn't, and flopped at the end of the leash like an enraged fish out of water, issuing bloodcurdling screams, foaming at the mouth—and whew , there he went—blowing his anal glands on top of it all. Of course, he could hardly pitch a protest of these proportions and not release his anal glands.
           In a way, Brenna supposed she was lucky. They were lucky. He was in an empty parking space, and not in the path of careless parking lot traffic. And unlike the average dog owner, she'd seen this kind of thing before. She'd had dogs squirt out the tub, screaming in outrage; she'd had cats ping-pong across the wall like something out of The Exorcist . She'd dealt with pets in all stages of temper tantrum and protest. So now she held the end of the leash and rolled her eyes and tried to figure out what had set him off while she waited for it to end.
           Not that he hadn't been through enough. The night hadn't been easy on either of them. She had emerged from the tub to find him sleepy and satisfied, and he'd even, after some hesitation, accepted the longe line rigging for his outs before bed. But—dry now, if still muddy—he hadn't been so happy about returning to the crate. Once inside, he had given her a look, a this isn't the way it's supposed to be look , and she'd almost let him out.
           Almost. But a second look at his dry but no less grimy state brought her up short, and she murmured an apology and took herself to bed—not quite as soon as Emily's children despite her intentions, and exhausted to the bone. Maybe she'd even sleep in, despite her body's natural greet-the-dawn inclinations; she'd certainly sleep hard.
           Or maybe not. Maybe it was the dog's fussing that woke her; maybe it was something else. But this time, when she went to the kitchen to