her heart for the dog and cut him more than his share of slack. Of all the canines Kayla McKenna had taken in, his was one of the saddest stories.
Before she’d rescued the small German shepherd, someone had used him for target practice. When the dog had come to her attention, Winchester had a bullet in his front right leg and was running a low-grade fever because an infection had set in. Rather than go through the expense of removing the object, the local animal shelter, where she’d found the wounded dog on her bimonthly rounds, had only placed a splint on the leg.
The dog she’d whimsically named Winchester, after a rifle made popular during the winning of the West, was down to only a few hours before termination when she’d come across him. The instant she’d insisted that the attendant open up his cage, Winchester had come hobbling out and laid his head on her lap. Kayla was a goner from that moment on.
It was her habit to frequent the shelters every few weeks or so, looking for German shepherds that had, for one reason or another, been abandoned or turned out. If she could she would have taken all the dogs home with her, to treat, nurse and groom for adoption into good, loving homes. But even she, with her huge heart, knew she had to draw the line somewhere.
So she made her choice based on her childhood. Hailey had been her very first dog when she was a little girl—a big, lovable, atypical shepherd. As a guard dog, she was a complete failure, but she was so affectionate she’d stolen Kayla’s heart from the start. Her parents had had the dog spayed, so she never had any puppies. But in a way, Kayla thought of Hailey as the mother of all the dogs she’d rescued since moving back here after getting her degree.
Kayla had all but lost count of the number of dogs she’d taken into her home, acting as foster guardian until such time as someone came along to adopt them. It didn’t hurt matters that she was also a vet, so that the cost of caring for the neglected, often battered animals was nominal.
“You’ll never get rich this way,” Brett had sneered condescendingly. “And if you want me to marry you, you’re going to have to get rid of these dogs. You know that, don’t you?”
Yes, she thought now, lifting the lantern she’d brought out with her, to afford some sort of visibility in the driving rain. She’d known that, and hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. She’d met Brett in school. He was gorgeous, and she had fallen wildly in love. But it turned out she had completely misjudged him. He was not the man she could spend the rest of her life with.
So she’d kept the dogs and gotten rid of her fiancé and in her heart, she knew that she had made the better deal.
The wind shifted, lashing at her from the front now instead of the back. She tried to pull her hood down with her other hand, but the gusts had other ideas, ripping it from her fingers. Her hair was soaked in a matter of seconds.
“Winchester!”
The wind stole her breath before Kayla could finish calling for the German shepherd.
Damn it, dog, why did you have to run off today of all days? This wasn’t the first time he’d disappeared on her. Winchester was exceedingly nervous—the result of mistreatment, no doubt—and any loud noise could send him into hiding.
“Winchester, please, come back!” The futility of her plea seemed to mock her as the wind brought her words back to her. “Taylor, we need to find him,” she said to the dog on her left.
Taylor was one of the dogs she’d decided to keep for herself. He was at least seven, and no one wanted an old dog. They represented mounting bills because of health problems, and heartache because their time was short. But Kayla felt that every one of God’s creatures deserved love—with the possible exception of Brett.
Suddenly, both Taylor and Ariel, the dog at her other side, began to bark.
“What? You see something?” she asked the animals.
Shading her eyes with her free hand, she raised the lantern higher with the other. As she squinted against the all but blinding rain, Kayla thought she saw what it was that Taylor and Ariel were barking at.
What all three of her dogs were barking at, because she could suddenly make out Winchester’s shape. He was there, too, not more than five feet away from the cherry-red vehicle that, from this vantage point, seemed to be doing the impossible: it looked as if it were climbing up the oak tree. Its nose and front tires were more than a foot off the ground, urgently pressed up against the hundred-year-old trunk.
Despite the rain, Kayla could swear that she smelled the odor of smoke even from where she was standing.
One second her legs were frozen, the next she was pumping them, running toward the car as fast as she could. The rain lashed against her skin like a thousand tiny needles.
She almost slid into a rear wheel as she reached the vehicle. Rain had somehow gotten into the lantern and almost put the flame out. There was just enough light for her to see into the interior of the disabled sports car.
Dimly, Kayla could make out the back of a man’s head. His face appeared to be all but swallowed up by the air bag that had deployed.
She heard a groan and realized it was coming from her, not him.
Her runaway, Winchester, was hopping on his hind legs, as if to tell her that he had discovered the man first. This had to be the canine variation on “He followed me home, can I keep him?”
The man wasn’t moving.
Kayla held her breath. Was the driver just unconscious, or—?
“This is the part where I tell you to go for help,” she murmured to the dogs, trying to think. “If there was someone to go get.”
Which there wasn’t. She lived alone and the closest neighbor was more than three miles away. Even if she could send the dogs there, no one would understand why they were barking. More than likely they’d call the sheriff, or just ignore the animals.
In either case, it did her no good. She was on her own here.
Setting the lantern down, Kayla tried the driver’s door. At first it didn’t budge, but she put her whole weight into pulling it. After several mighty tugs, miraculously, the door gave way. Kayla stumbled backward and would have fallen into the mud had the tree not been at her back. She slammed into it, felt the vibration up and down her spine, jarring her teeth.
She hung on to the door handle for a moment, trying to get her breath. As she drew in moist air, she stared into the car. The driver’s face was still buried in the air bag, and the seat belt had a tight grip on the rest of him, holding him in place. Admitted to the party, the rain was now leaving its mark, hungrily anointing every exposed part of the stranger and soaking him to the skin.
And he still wasn’t moving.
Chapter Two
“Mister. Hey, mister.” Kayla raised her voice to be heard above the howl of the wind. “Can you hear me?”
When there was no response, she shook the man by the shoulder. Again, nothing happened. The stranger didn’t lift his head, didn’t try to move or make a sound. He was as still as death.
The uneasiness she felt began to grow. What if he was seriously injured, or—?
“Oh, God,”
