Diamond in the Ruff (Matchmaking Mamas Book 13) Read Free

Looking down, she saw that the puppy, who she’d just assumed would follow her to a food source, was otherwise occupied. He was busy gnawing on one of the legs of her kitchen chair. “Hey!” she cried. “Stop that!”
    The puppy went right on gnawing until she physically separated him from the chair. He looked up at her, clearly confused.
    In her house for less than five minutes and the Labrador puppy had already presented her with a dilemma, Lily thought.
    “Oh, God, you’re teething, aren’t you? If I leave you here, by the time I get back it’ll look like a swarm of locusts had come through, won’t it?” She knew the answer to that one. Lily sighed. It was true what they said, no good deed went unpunished. “Well, you can’t stay here, then.” Lily looked around the kitchen and the small family room just beyond. Almost all the furniture, except for the TV monitor, was older than she was. “I don’t have any money for new furniture.”
    As if he understood that he was about to be put out again, the puppy looked up at her and then began to whine.
    Pathetically.
    Softhearted to begin with, Lily found that she was no match for the sad little four-footed fur ball. Closing the door on him would be akin to abandoning the puppy in a snowdrift.
    “All right, all right, all right, you can come with me,” she cried, giving in. “Maybe someone at work will have a suggestion as to what I can do with you.”
    Lily stood for a minute, studying the puppy warily. Would it bite her if she attempted to pick it up? Her experience with dogs was limited to the canines she saw on television. After what she’d just witnessed, she knew that she definitely couldn’t leave the puppy alone in her house. At the same time, she did have the uneasy feeling that the Labrador wasn’t exactly trained to be obedient yet.
    Still, trained or not, she felt as if she should at least
try
to get the puppy to follow her instructions. So she walked back over to the front door. The puppy was watching her every move intently, but remained exactly where he was. Lily tried patting her leg three times in short, quick succession. The puppy cocked its head, as if to say,
Now what?
    “C’mon, boy, come here,” Lily called to him, patting her leg again, this time a little more urgently. To her relief—as well as surprise—this time the puppy came up to her without any hesitation.
    Opening the front door, Lily patted her leg again—and was rewarded with the same response. The puppy came up to her side—the side she’d just patted—his eager expression all but shouting,
Okay, I’m here. Now what?
    Lily currently had no answer for that, but she hoped to within the hour.
    * * *
    “Hey, I don’t remember anyone declaring that this was ‘bring your pet to work’ day,” Alfredo Delgado, one of the chefs that Theresa Manetti employed at her catering company, quipped when Lily walked into the storefront office. She was holding a makeshift leash, fashioned out of rope. The black Lab was on the other end of the leash, ready to give the office a thorough investigation the moment the other end of the leash was dropped.
    Theresa walked out of her small inner office and regarded the animal, her expression completely unfathomable.
    “I’m sorry I’m late,” Lily apologized to the woman who wrote out her checks. “I ran into a snag.”
    “From here it looks like the snag is following you,” Theresa observed.
    She glanced expectantly at the young woman she’d taken under her wing a little more than a year ago. That was when she’d hired Lily as her pastry chef after discovering that Lily could create delicacies so delicious, they could make the average person weep. But, softhearted woman that she was, Theresa hadn’t taken her on because of her skills so much as because Lily’s mother had recently passed away, leaving her daughter all alone in the world. Theresa, like her friends Maizie and Cecilia, had a great capacity for sympathy.
    Lily flushed