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advertising that fact.
    The rain slashed at the windowpanes, and Crawford’s heart beat right along with it. When Marty winked it meant she wanted sex.
    Crawford, like most people with business drive, also had a high sex drive. He adored making love on a rainy night, too.
    He reached up and rubbed her neck. “Did I tell you how crazy I am about you?”
    What he didn’t tell her was that he had not given up his long-standing goal of becoming joint-master of the Jefferson Hunt and that that very day he had put his plan in motion. By God, he would be joint-master whether Jane Arnold wanted him or not.

CHAPTER 5
    Large, overhead industrial fans set high in the ceiling swirled, their flat blades pushing the air downward, and window fans also sucked in air from the outside and sent it over the sleeping hounds. This arrangement kept flies out of the kennels as well.
    It was late afternoon, the day after Nola had been discovered. The rains had been followed by the oppressive heat typical of the South.
    The Jefferson Hunt Club Kennels, built in the 1950s, were simple and graceful. The building’s exterior was brick, much too expensive to use now thanks to higher taxes and higher labor costs. The large square structure housed the office, the feed rooms, and an examination room where a hound could be isolated for worming or the administration of medicines. At the back of this was a 150-foot-square courtyard of poured concrete sloping down to a central drain. The roofline from the main building gracefully extended over one side of this courtyard by about eight feet. Lovely arches much like those underneath the walkways at Monticello supported the overhang.
    Open archways bounded the courtyard, again like the ones at Monticello. The dog hounds lived on the right side and the gyps on the left. Each gender had its own runs and kennel houses with raised beds and little porches. The puppies lived at the rear with their own courtyard and special house. A small, separate sick bay nestled under trees far to the right.
    The design—simple, functional—was pleasing to the eye. Doorways into the sleeping quarters were covered with tin to discourage chewing. The center sections of the doors to the runs were cut out and covered with a swinging heavy rubber flat, like a large mud flap on a truck, so the hounds could come and go as they wished. Eventually someone would get the bright idea to chew the flap, but a large square of rubber was easier to replace than an entire door.
    All sleeping quarters were washed down every morning and evening. Painted cinder-block walls discouraged insect infestation. The floors sloped to central drains.
    Many hounds slept in their raised beds, the wash of refreshing air keeping them cool. Others were dreaming in the huge runs, a quarter of an acre each, filled with large deciduous and fir trees. Some hounds felt the only proper response to blistering weather was to dig a crater in the earth, curling up in it. Fans whirling over kennel beds was sissy stuff.
    Two such tough characters, Diana and Cora, faced each other from their shallow earthen holes, now muddy, which pleased them.
    â€œHate summer,”
Cora grumbled.
    â€œIt’s not so bad,”
the beautiful tricolor replied, her head resting on the edge of her crater.
    â€œYou’re still young. Heat gets harder to handle as you
get older,”
Cora said. She had recently turned six.
    Six, while not old, gave Cora maturity. She was the strike hound, the hound who pushes forward. She sensed she was slowing just the tiniest bit and knew Dragon, Diana’s littermate, would jostle for her position.
    Cora hated Dragon as much as she loved his sister. Quite a few hounds loathed the talented, arrogant Dragon.
    Being the strike hound didn’t mean that Cora always found the scent first. But she worked a bit ahead of the rest—not much, perhaps only five yards in front, but she was first and she wanted to keep it that