Anger spiked within him. What sort of asshole hit a dog and didn’t even stop to see if it was okay or call for help?
“Anyone get a plate number?” he growled to the gathering and was answered with dismayed shakes of the head.
His eyes darted to the stoplight. This far out in the middle of nowhere, there weren’t any cameras.
The mangy creature lay on the pavement, lungs laboring up and down, whining. Not dead. As long as it was alive, it had a fighting chance. He sifted his fingers into the dog’s fur, too—a mutt, dirty, large but thin, ribs rolling in ridges down its sides. No compound indications, thank hell, but just because a bone hadn’t punctured the skin didn’t mean it wasn’t suffering internal bleeding.
An impatient horn beeped somewhere in the backing up row of trucks, but Skylar paid it no mind. He watched her gentle hands, watched her fingers drag across the dog’s emaciated ribs like shock absorbers on a cattle grate, watched her focus as if in an impenetrable bubble, feeling the animal’s pain. How was she not spitting angry at that hit-and-run driver?
Her hand grazed his. Nerves erupted in tingling where they touched. Her eyes flitted to his, shuttering and yet brimming with energy, then back down. But the anguish he’d seen there was almost too much to bear, and the impulse to wipe away the lingering moisture nearly got the better of him. She’d thought he was dead? Dammit, Sky. The admission had twisted a knife in his chest.
Now that he was grounded in his current frame of mind and not flashing back to that stint in Afghanistan, he considered the magnitude of her words. Letting her go suddenly didn’t feel so altruistic. If she hadn’t known he’d lived, leaving her with no explanation seemed cruel. He hadn’t known that she’d transferred out of state, but he could have tracked her down, at least to tell her, but he hadn’t known. Hell, Alpine had practically thrown him a parade when he’d arrived home. The papers blasted nonsense about “harrowing acts of heroism,” even though he hadn’t done shit, like he’d defeated Hercules. How had she not known he’d lived?
Like a moth to a lamp, he couldn’t help feeling drawn to her now. She rolled her palms over every inch of the dog, as if brushing the seed heads of prairie grass in a breeze, head, shoulders, belly, forelegs, hindlegs, bending each one—
The dog yelped and snarled as she maneuvered the hip joint.
“Whoa…easy, pup…” he said, trying to gentle the dog before it bit his girl—not his girl, but he had a mind to right the mistake he’d once made and make her his again.
She persisted, undeterred. The dog’s curled lips relaxed.
“That’s it, mama,” she crooned, her voice like silk. “Good girl. I know you’re in pain and you’re scared. Let me help you…” Doolittle indeed, with that bleeding heart still a mile wide. One of her hands slipped into her jeans pocket and pulled out a tiny dog treat. She set it on the pavement in front of the dog’s nose.
A wistful smile tugged up his mouth as the dog, even in such pain, desperately took the treat, whining again. Now this was just like the Sky he’d met at that humane society, so sensitive. That one meeting had changed the course of their lives. She still had the magic touch. No wonder everyone called her an animal whisperer.
Could they ever come back together again? Or had he, in his pain, coping with the trauma he’d endured that had torn his family apart, caused Skylar too much grief to ever be overcome?
“Fractured hip, maybe?” he asked. “Femoral trauma?”
But Skylar was shaking her head, her brows drawn together. “I won’t know for sure until I get some radiographs.”
“You need help taking her in?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Her gaze flitted up to his. “Thanks. I need some makeshift transport to lift her.”
“Will a blanket work?” he asked.
“That’ll be perfect, Trav…” Skylar eyed him as the old nickname fell from her lips, as though it surprised her, too, and though she still didn’t smile, she looked grateful and nodded.
“All right, I got you, then,” he said, and the longing he saw flash in her eyes at his remark was quickly banked by a frown he didn’t understand. He pushed to standing, his damn knee joint popping, and strode to his truck, dragging a fleece blanket out from behind his seat. Yoda sat on the curb, worried, and he spared a pat for the dog’s head.
“It’s all right, Yodabear. Stay.”
Returning to the cluster that had formed around the dog, he slipped through the bodies and squatted back down, handing the blanket from his emergency kit to Skylar, who breezed it from his fingers and laid it out on the ground.
“Let’s put her in your bed,” she said. “It’s not ideal, but I don’t have a crate and my truck bed’s filled with crap. It’s all I have until insurance pays out on my accident repairs.” She eyed her truck across the road. “Just drive slowly, okay?”
“Yep. You got work gloves?” he asked. “I don’t want her to bite you.”
Skylar shook her head. “In my truck box, but it’s way over there. Let’s just slide her onto the blanket from behind so she drags her legs. I don’t want to bend ’em. One…two…three…”
She orchestrated the move so swiftly. The old Sky would have been nervous or conceded to the director at the animal shelter. This new Sky took charge. He gazed at her profile, tension coiling her lean muscles, sweat beading her brow as the sun heated up the world. She was so beautiful. Yeah, salt of the earth, unvarnished from sterile medical corridors and lab coat luncheons at ritzy hotels, unlike him. She’d never severed her roots, like he had, but instead had embraced the land and the creatures that dwelled on it, dug her roots firmly into this hardened, cacti-ridden soil like she was stubborn mesquite, to give herself stability after her daddy had failed her. After I failed her.
Shit, how could he ever make this up to her?
The dog growled and snarled, but together, they moved her in harmony, their shoulders and arms rubbing, tingling like whispers blown into his ears, erupting in goose bumps up his spine, that friction tying him in knots. Redness erupted on her cheeks. Did she feel it, too?
He hoped so.