One Intimate Night

She was just reassuring herself for the hundred and somethingth time that she most certainly was not in love with him when she heard his furious shout, followed, as she rushed to open the kitchen door, by a far less noisy but far more ominous deeply angry call of, ‘Ben’. This shouting after Ben was coming to be a habit.

As she rushed to the stairs, her heart pounding nervously, Georgia stopped dead.

Ben was on his way downstairs, and in his mouth...

She swallowed and closed her eyes in dismay, praying that the shoe—that very mangled and chewed shoe Ben was so proudly bringing to her, his whole body wriggling with happy excitement—did not belong to Piers, even though she could see quite clearly that it was most definitely a man’s shoe, and the only man in the house was Piers.

As Ben dutifully dropped the shoe at her feet and then stood back, waiting for her to praise him, Georgia’s heart sank even further. She had been throwing sticks for him when she’d walked him, praising him for returning to her with them, and now...

As she looked up the stairs she could see Piers walking slowly down, watching them both.

‘This is your handiwork, I suppose,’ he accused her menacingly.

‘I... He...’ Georgia fell silent, then shook her head as she told Ben sorrowfully, ‘Bad dog, Ben.’

The dog’s tail dropped, and so did his nose, his eyes losing their expectant shine. Georgia could feel a huge lump forming in her throat as she forgot what an arch-manipulator Ben could be and remembered only that the dog was probably simply carrying out a ritual she herself had taught him.

‘That dog—’ Piers began, but Georgia, fearing what he might say, immediately leapt to Ben’s defence.

She told him quickly, ‘He wasn’t being deliberately destructive. He’s simply following his instincts of retrieval.’

‘With my shoe?’ Piers asked her sarcastically.

‘It’s because he relates to you as a member of his pack.’ Georgia defended the dog. ‘And he—’

‘Those shoes are—were—leather and handmade,’ Piers overrode her coldly.

Handmade leather shoes. Georgia’s heart sank even further. She could just imagine how much they would cost to replace, and, of course, she would have to offer to replace them, although technically Ben wasn’t her dog.

‘I’ll pay to replace them, of course,’ she offered quickly.

‘They’re handmade,’ Piers repeated. ‘That means they take time to be made. One can’t simply go out and just buy a pair...’

He really was enjoying making her squirm, Georgia decided, anger starting to replace her initial feelings of dismay and guilt.

‘Ben obviously shares your expensive tastes,’ she told him lightly. ‘But I’m sure they can’t be the only pair of shoes you possess.’

The dull ache in his head which Piers had woken up with had turned with unpleasant speed into the kind of headache he knew, from past experience, would quickly reach a raging crescendo of pain unless he took something for it...and soon. It infuriated him that instead of castigating the dog Georgia actually seemed to be defending him, and even implying that he, Piers, deserved to have his shoes destroyed. He hadn’t missed either that faintly scornful look in her eyes when he had pointed out to her that the shoes were handmade and expensive. Perhaps he had sounded like the worst kind of successful entrepreneur, but he hadn’t intended to be boastful—simply to make her understand the gravity of Ben’s crime.

‘No,’ he agreed, now suddenly as defensive over his choice of footwear as Georgia had been over Ben’s enjoyment of it. ‘They aren’t the only pair I have to wear, but right at this moment they are the only pair I wanted to wear, the pair I had chosen to wear. Not that it matters. The real issue here is—’

Ben, not getting the reaction he had hoped for from Georgia, darted forward and picked up the shoe, proudly carrying it right to Georgia’s feet and sitting down waiting for her to praise him. Helplessly Georgia looked from the dog’s expectant eyes to Piers’s condemning ones.

‘He isn’t being deliberately destructive,’ she repeated to Piers helplessly. ‘He thinks...he believes...’ She stopped as she saw the way Piers’s mouth was curling with biting anger.

‘Perhaps you were right after all... Perhaps he is far more intelligent, far easier to train than I believed,’ Piers told her with deliberation, sharply biting off each word as he delivered them to her almost like condemnatory blows.

‘I haven’t taught him to do that,’ Georgia retorted hotly as the meaning of what Piers had said sank in. ‘I throw sticks for him to retrieve...like any other dog owner, but as to shoes...’