“You want to hear something really awesome?”

Bobby looked up from his work on the belt buckle to see Mackenzie leaning against the doorway of the sunroom, her sneakers tied together and flung over her shoulder. Sasha was at her side, looking up at Mackenzie with big, adoring brown eyes.

“What’s so awesome?” he asked, although he could guess it had something to do with a dog.

“Today I get to be Wolf’s victim!” she said.

It sounded so funny, he laughed. “All right, Mackenzie!” he said. “You get to be a victim!”

She made a face at him. “You don’t get it,” she said, walking into the room. She sat down in the chair behind Lacey’s worktable. “This is, like, a turning point,” she said, her hands cutting the air in her typical dramatic fashion. “Clay thinks Wolf is ready to start practicing his search stuff again, so I get to do the hide-in-the-woods thing and Wolf will find me.”

Clay had been working with Wolf for a week, and Bobby admired the man’s tenacity and skill. He was spending so much time with the dog that Bobby wondered what was happening to his architecture practice, but Clay did not seem concerned. Wolf was not the same dog who had lunged for Lacey that first day. The dog was nearly docile now. He was fatter, too, from all the little chunks of dried liver Clay was using to reward his good behavior. Wolf was even able to remain calm around Lacey, who would bravely walk near him while Clay held the end of the dog’s loose leash, just in case. Wolf still went berserk, though, if Lacey walked past his kennel while he was inside it. “That’s his territory,” Clay had said at the dinner table a few nights ago. “No one is to go into that kennel except me. Understood?” He’d looked directly at Mackenzie, who had nodded solemnly.

Wolf and Mackenzie, though, seemed to have a little mutual admiration society going. It was cool to see the dog greet her, his tail going so fast it was a blur. The first time Bobby saw the dog run toward her, though, he’d panicked. He’d been watching from the kitchen window, and he thought that Clay must have lost hold of the leash and that Wolf was on the attack. He’d run to the screen door, yanking it open, but then he saw the joy on Mackenzie’s face and the obvious playfulness in Wolf’s posture, and relaxed his grip on the doorknob, enormously relieved. The last thing he’d wanted to do was confront that dog. He couldn’t help it; he still felt nervous around him.

“Clay said you can come watch if you want to,” Mackenzie said now, getting up from her seat.

“I’d like that.” He’d hoped to finish the belt buckle in the next hour or so, but this seemed more important.

He walked outside with Mackenzie, a bit shaken to see that Wolf was not on a leash. The dog looked in their direction but didn’t budge from his sitting position in front of Clay.

“Clay has him on a stay,” Mackenzie explained. “Isn’t he beautiful? He’s such a good dog. I can’t believe they were thinking of killing him.”

“This is a good test,” Clay called to them as they neared him and the dog. “He wants to run to you, Mackenzie, but he knows he needs to stay.”

“Can I tell him to come to me?” Mackenzie asked.

“No, honey,” Clay said. “Let me be the one to release him. You just stand there, tempting him, while I give him another thirty seconds on the stay.”

Bobby stood next to Mackenzie, impressed by Wolf’s self-control and by the way his steady gaze was locked on Clay. The dog’s body quivered with the excitement of having Mackenzie so near and yet so far.

“Okay!” Clay said finally, and Wolf bounded over to Mackenzie, who dropped her sneakers in the sand and ran off with the dog toward the water.

“Man, you have done some amazing work with that animal,” Bobby said to Clay as he watched Mackenzie and Wolf play in the shallow water around the lighthouse.

“Well, it wasn’t like starting from scratch,” Clay said. He had his hands on his hips and his eye on the dog. “He already had all the training inside him. The trauma just knocked it out of him for a while.”

“You trust him completely with Mackenzie?”

Clay sighed, shaking his head. “I don’t trust him completely with anyone, yet,” he said. “He’s been great, but who knows what might still be misfiring in that brain of his. And I won’t rest easy until after we get that neurological exam next week.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Mackenzie!” he called. “Bring him back. Let’s get to work.”

Mackenzie walked back to them, Wolf trotting at her side.

“You ready to hide?” Clay asked her.

“Yup.” Mackenzie sat down on the sand and pulled on her sneakers, looking into the woods. “How far in should I go?” she asked, squinting up at Clay, the sun bright on her face.

“As deep as you feel comfortable,” Clay said. “You’ve got your phone with you in case there’s a problem?”

She stood up and nodded, jutting out her hip so that Clay could see the phone fastened to the low waistband of her shorts. She was going to be a seductress, just like her mother, Bobby thought. In another few years, she would be driving the Outer Banks boys crazy.

Clay patted his thigh and whistled, and Wolf trotted over to him. “I’ll take him for a walk around the other side of the house for ten minutes or so,” he said to Mackenzie. “Then I’ll send him after you.”

“Okay.” Mackenzie ran toward the woods, quickly disappearing into the thick brush. They should be checking this kid for ticks, Bobby thought. He would mention it to Lacey.

He joined Clay and Wolf as they started walking away from the woods and pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “Do you mind?” he asked, and Clay shook his head.

“Not out here,” Clay said. “Plenty of fresh air.” Wolf took off a few yards ahead of them, following some unseen trail in the sand. “Heel,” Clay said, not harshly, not even loudly, and the dog fell into step next to him again.

Around the side of the house, Bobby stopped to light his cigarette, turning his back on the breeze to prevent the match from going out. “I don’t want to smoke around Mackenzie,” he said, exhaling smoke as they started walking again. He might still have a vice or two, but Mackenzie did not need to know about them. His parents had both smoked—and drank—around him, his father even giving him sips of hard liquor when he was a toddler, thinking it was funny.

Since recognizing Clay a week earlier, he had toyed with the idea of talking to him about the night they met. He thought of asking, “Do you remember meeting me years ago?” But he didn’t. What would be the point?

So instead, they talked about Rani’s adoption as they slowly circled the house. What an incredible nightmare that had been! He’d known that Clay and Gina had faced a multitude of obstacles when they tried to adopt Rani, but he hadn’t understood how close they came to losing the little girl and how close Rani had come to losing her life because she was not able to get the heart surgery she’d needed in India.

“I’m glad it all worked out for you,” Bobby said. “Rani’s a lucky kid.”

Clay did not look directly at him, but he smiled. “So’s Mackenzie,” he said, and Bobby felt tears burn his eyes at the unexpected compliment.

They returned to the edge of the woods. Wolf stood on the alert, looking from the trees to Clay and back again, apparently waiting for some sort of signal. Clay bent low, saying something to the dog that Bobby couldn’t hear, before motioning toward the woods. “Go find!” Clay said.

Wolf took off into the woods, and Clay turned to Bobby as he set out after the dog. “See you in a while,” he said. “With victim in tow.”

Bobby nodded. “Good luck!” He watched as the woods swallowed the dog and the man, then started walking back to the house.

He was nearly to the porch when he heard the sound of tires on the gravel lane and turned to see Lacey’s car pull into the parking lot. Bobby waved at her, then thought of Wolf, loose in the woods, only yards from where Lacey was emerging from her car.

“Lacey, wait!” he called, quickly changing direction from the house to the parking lot. “Don’t get out of your car!”

“What?” She couldn’t hear him. She was already out of the car, reaching back inside the driver’s seat for something, and an image filled his head: Wolf, streaking out of the woods and knocking Lacey to the ground, his teeth sinking into her jugular.

“Get back in the car!” he called as he got closer. “Wolf is loose!”

At those words, she quickly slipped back into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut after her.

He reached her car and got in on the passenger side, moving a grocery bag off the seat to his lap.

“What do you mean, he’s loose?” she asked.

Bobby’s heart was pounding all out of proportion to the reality of the situation.

“He’s in the woods looking for Mackenzie.”

She looked alarmed for a moment.

“She’s playing victim,” he said, and her face relaxed.

“You scared me there for a second.” Then she laughed. “I think you overreacted just a teeny little bit,” she said, smiling at him in a way that showed her dimples. “If he’s in the woods looking for Mackenzie, he’s working. He’s not going to suddenly get my scent and come racing out of the woods after me.”

He laughed himself, feeling foolish. “I guess you’re right,” he said. He could see beads of perspiration on her freckled cheeks and forehead. The two of them were more likely to die from the heat in the car than from the attack of a dog.

He opened the car door. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ve got the groceries.”

Still shaken, he could think of nothing to say as they walked toward the house. He looked at her from the corner of his eye. She was barefoot, wearing a sundress that fell to her ankles and that, in the way it merely hinted at the body beneath it, was sexier than a bikini might have been on her. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was. He wanted to say he admired her, that he thought about her when he was in bed at night, that he wished he could make love to her now, and do it right this time.

Was she making love to Rick? There was no doubt in his mind that Rick would be far better for her than he could ever be. Money, status and security were all part of that package, not to mention good looks and hair. So he settled for putting an arm around her shoulders on the pretense of protecting her from a dog that was nowhere in sight.