Made For Loving You (Rescue My Heart Book 3) by Kait Nolan (i can read book club txt) 📕

that love’s not worth it, but sometimes the timing is off. Or the other person might have a bigger wound than you know what to do with. Sometimes they need a wakeup call.” And sometimes love isn’t enough.

Ari frowned. “I’m going on record saying that this is a mistake.”

“Noted.” Paisley wasn’t sure that it wasn’t. But she didn’t think there was a right move here. “It was cool to meet you Ari. I’ll come back sometime, and we can hang. Maybe do some more plotting.”

“I’d love that.”

Paisley whistled. “C’mon, Duke. Time to go!”

But the dog didn’t come immediately bounding over to the car at the magic word.

“Duke! Here boy.”

Still, no jangle of tags or scrabble of paws.

“What has he gotten into? I swear to God, if he found something dead to roll in…”

She marched around the house, calling his name. Ari fell in with her. But by the time they’d circled the perimeter, there was no Duke. No barking. No sign of her beloved dog. Alarm overtook annoyance. “Where is he?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” Ari assured her. “He probably just chased a bunny or something. I’ll round up some more people to help look.”

While she disappeared into the house, Paisley made another circuit in a wider circle, into the edge of the woods surrounding the property. Why couldn’t it have rained or snowed recently so there were convenient paw prints leading her to her recalcitrant dog? More to the point, why had he wandered off? He hadn’t pulled the escape artist routine since she’d first gotten him. Not since she’d stopped trying to put him in a crate. Maybe he was too overwhelmed by the fun and interesting stuff to sniff that they didn’t have at home in the city.

A distant sound carried on the wind. Was that a bark?

“Duke!”

The sound came again. Definitely a bark.

Was he stuck somewhere? Taking off in the direction she thought she’d heard him, she shouted again, course correcting deeper into the woods. The bark was closer this time. Relief surged through her. He wasn’t gone, and he didn’t sound distressed. He’d just wandered too far and gotten into something.

Abruptly the sound cut off.

“Duke?”

Nothing.

There were cliffs around here. Caves. Hell, even bears. Her city-born dog was not prepared for any of that. Anxiety mounting again, Paisley ran faster, frantically scanning for a flash of tawny fur.

Something caught her shins, and she tumbled headlong into the dead leaves and dirt. Breathless from the impact, for a moment, she could only lie there, hands stinging. On a wheeze, she started to roll over and caught a flash of movement to the left.

She didn’t even have time to draw breath for a scream before the figure in black was on her, wrenching her arms backward and pressing her into the ground. Adrenaline surged, and she tried to buck him off, but the knee in her back kept her pinned, her limbs flailing uselessly. Something sharp jabbed her in the hip. A needle? What the hell was he injecting her with?

Even as she could feel darkness creeping in, Paisley struggled to turn her head, to see her attacker. But all she could take in was a smear of clay across the toe of his dark brown hiking boots in the incongruous shape of a cross. Then there was nothing at all.

“Get up.”

A snapping voice cut through the questionable oblivion of sleep. As the sound tunneled through to Ty’s brain, with it came awareness of pain. Instinctively, he fought to stay under, shrinking away from inevitable agony.

“Get up, damn it!”

“Honey, what are you—”

Something struck him. A solid but…soft? something. Not hard enough to really hurt but sufficient impact to drag him through another layer toward consciousness.

“If he’s not up in the next thirty seconds, I’m hitting him with my stun gun instead of a pillow.”

What the actual hell is going on?

Ty cracked his eyes open enough to catch a glimpse of an irate Ivy in the doorway before the slanting sunlight through the window forced him to slam them shut again. “I’m awake,” he rasped.

“Harrison, go get him some pain killers. He doesn’t deserve them, but he’s going to need them.”

For what? A dressing down? Like she could rival the drill sergeants he’d put up with in the Army? “What the hell has gotten into you?”

“Do you actually want to loll around and give Paisley a chance to decide to leave your ass, or do you want to fix this?”

Ty jack-knifed into an upright position and regretted it as the room spun on an unsteady axis. He gritted his teeth against the nausea. “What do you mean leave? She can’t leave.”

“She can and probably will if you don’t do some serious damage control.”

“Fuck.” He vaulted out of bed, staggered and slapped a hand against the wall to steady himself. “Where’s my phone?”

Harrison shrugged. “Must be in your truck up at the bar or back at the inn. Wasn’t on you when we got back last night.”

Ty couldn’t get his brain to work as he tried to assess whether he was just hung over or still drunk. His head pounded like a helicopter blade was thrumming in his ears, and his eyes ached, but now that he was vertical, things were starting to stabilize. Not still drunk, then. This was what he got for drinking more than a beer for the first time in a year and a half and picking rot gut whiskey to do it.

“Shit. I didn’t even text her where I was last night.”

“I did. And I did you a solid by not mentioning you’d decided to take yourself on a bender.”

“Thanks, man.” He didn’t need any further evidence of his weakness paraded in front of her. Willing himself steady, he took a few steps toward the door.

Ivy wrinkled her nose. “No matter what kind of apology you manage, Paisley isn’t going to want to take you back if you smell like a distillery and look like something she scraped off her shoe. Get in