Author: Debbie Burns
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Publication Date: 4/28/2020
Who rescued who? Love can
lead to your forever home in this charming contemporary romance from
best-selling author Debbie Burns.
Olivia Graham isn't in a
place to have a dog of her own, but her new position as a volunteer rescue
driver for the local animal shelter will keep her close to her four-legged
friends. When she's called to transport pets that have been misplaced by
flooding, she doesn't hesitate to help, but then her aging car breaks down…
Veterinarian Gabe Wentworth,
former EMT and firefighter, is also heading to the rescue site and reluctantly
agrees to pick up Olivia on the way. After a bad breakup, Gabe's embraced the
hermit life. When he meets Olivia, he can't deny their irresistible mutual
attraction, and his first thought is to run the other direction. But then the
two band together in a risky maneuver to save a beautiful abandoned dog from
rising floodwaters. The more Gabe learns about the woman who would risk
everything to save vulnerable animals, the more he realizes what he might be willing
to risk…
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Excerpt:
Olive and Gabe spotted the house at the same time.
“If we’re too late…” She swallowed back the rest. They weren’t too
late. They were right on time. It couldn’t be any other way.
Gabe’s tires skidded to a halt on the wet gravel driveway. The teens
who’d spotted the dog were nowhere in sight. Olivia grabbed the bolt cutters
and hopped out into the rain. The soft gurgle of rushing water made the hair on
the back of her neck and arms stand on end. Gabe jogged around to the back of
the truck, and in the space of a minute, he had a tightly wound rope slung over
his shoulder, a set of gloves shoved into his back pocket, and an ax and a
jumbled mass of nylon in one hand.
As they headed along the side of the house, his free hand locked
around her elbow. “Look, I don’t want to come off sounding like a macho prick,
but there’s no trusting floodwater, not the current, not what it carries. So, if
I don’t like the look of things, I’m going to ask you to hang back. I’d
appreciate it if you’d trust me. I don’t want to have to choose between saving
a dog and saving you.”
Electricity raced up her arm at the gentle strength in his grip, and
his words struck a chord. She was a good swimmer, but she’d never swum in a
current before. “Okay. You say it like you have experience in floodwater.”
“Technically, I do. Ten hours of water rescue training and one
real-time rescue.”
Olivia started to ask him what
he meant, but they’d rounded the corner of the house, and her heart lurched
into her throat. A hundred or so feet out in the rushing, choppy water there
was a dog pen attached to a small, rotted shed. From the creaks and groans
emanating from it, the shed was on the verge of collapsing from the massive
pressure of the water rushing into and past it.
Inside the pen, a large liver-brown and spotted-white hound balanced
precariously atop a nearly submerged doghouse that must have been swept by the
pressure of the water into the far corner. He was standing on all fours, his
gangly legs balancing on the half-hexagon roof, his tail tucked tightly between
his legs, and his head bowed low. The dog let out a giant bay that stabbed
straight into Olivia’s heart.
“Water moving this fast has undercurrents, and you never know when
you’re going to step into a strong one.” Gabe’s free hand locked around
Olivia’s arm another a second or two. “Would you stay back and hold the rope
for me? We could use that tree as a pivot joint.”
Olivia frowned. If she went in and the water knocked her off her
feet, four years of high-school swim team might enable her to reach the pen, but
there’d be no carrying out a dog that size through the water. She was willing
to bet he was seventy or eighty pounds. Pushing through rushing water while
holding a gangly, heavy dog would be a challenge even for Gabe, and he probably
had half a foot of height and fifty pounds on her.
It was Olivia’s turn to squeeze Gabe’s arm, and even in the stress
of the moment, some instinctive part of her responded to the solid feel of his
biceps. “Just promise not to get into anything you can’t handle.”
“I’ll do my best.” He pulled out the gloves tucked into his back
pocket and offered them to her along with the rope. “You’ll need gloves to hold
the rope if I end up fighting with that water.”
The dog let out a series of long bays. To Olivia’s horror, she
realized the water was close to tipping the doghouse over right underneath him.
It was knocking back and forth against the metal fence of the pen from the
pressure of the water. Dogs can swim, Olivia told herself
over and over. They’re great swimmers. Even if it tips, he’ll
be fine till Gabe reaches him.
Olivia tugged on the several-sizes-too-big gloves as Gabe threaded
one end of the long rope through the belt loops of his jeans. His cotton shirt
was lifted in the process, exposing an inch or two of remarkably defined
obliques and a pronounced vee disappearing into his jeans and sending a wash of
saliva over the back of Olivia’s mouth.
When finished, he hooked the backpack-looking strap over his
shoulders. Just before he tugged a red-handled pull poking out from its left
tip, Olivia realized it was a self-inflating life jacket, just a much slimmer
one than the bulky Styrofoam-filled floaty she’d worn strapped around her on
float trips as a kid.
Before she realized she was doing it, she leaned forward and pressed
a kiss onto his cheek. “Be safe.” Certain her face betrayed the easygoing
demeanor she hoped to portray, she flushed tomato-red. She could feel the heat
of it lighting her skin.
His hazel-green eyes locked on hers for a single second, then he
turned and took off down the yard, leaving Olivia to unwind the rope and pivot
it around a relatively young but sturdy-looking tree not far out of the water.
“Water’s damn cold for late March,” Gabe said when he was a few feet
in. The brown water parted around his legs, rippling in a heart-shaped wave and
forming soft bubbles against his jeans.
A large, floating branch struck the shed with a solid whack, bounced
against it for a few seconds, then was swept away by the water.
She wanted to keep watching, but Gabe was pushing through the water
fast enough that she needed to focus on unwinding the rope and providing him
with the right amount of slack. A quick glance showed he was fifteen or twenty
feet in, and the water was already over his knees. He still had a long way to
go before he reached the dog. As a rush of fear pressed over her, all Olivia
could think to do was pray harder than she’d prayed in a long time.
***
Excerpted from Head Over Paws by Debbie Burns. © 2020 by Debbie Burns. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of
Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.
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About the author:
Debbie Burns is an award-winning author
and 2019 HOLT Medallion Award of Merit recipient. Her highly praised Rescue Me
romance series features happily ever afters of the two and four-legged kind.
She lives in Saint Louis in a gingerbread house that's almost cute enough to
eat. In her free time, you can find her enjoying time with her two teens, two
phenomenal rescue dogs, and a somewhat tetchy Maine Coon cat who everyone loves
anyway.
Author
Website: authordebbieburns.com
