Third Time's The Bride!

The emphatic responses made Dawn blink. “It’s not exactly a life-or-death situation.”

“Yet.”

Callie’s response carried considerably less emphasis but still hit home. “You told us you thought Brian was a fantastic dad, but otherwise a little cool and detached. Does that remind you of anyone?”

Dawn blinked again. “Oh! Well. Maybe.”

Fiancé Number One hadn’t been either cool or remote, but he did tend to act supercilious toward store clerks and restaurant servers. Having worked as both during her high school and college years, Dawn was finally forced to admit the truth. Not only did she not love the guy, she didn’t really like him.

Fiancé Number Two was outgoing, gregarious and a generous tipper. Until he decided someone had wronged him, that is. Then he morphed from fun-loving to icily, unrelentingly determined on revenge. Dawn still carried the scars from that close encounter of the scary kind.

She couldn’t see Brian morphing into another Mr. Hyde. She really couldn’t. Then again, she’d been wrong before.

“All right,” she told her friends. “I’ll lay in a new supply of shampoo tomorrow.”

“Do it,” Kate urged again, giving her the evil eye. “I’d better not catch a single whiff of lemons or lotus blossoms when you and Brian and Tommy come to dinner this Saturday.”

“We’re coming to dinner?”

“You are. Seven o’clock. My place. Correction,” she amended with a quick, goofy smile. “Our place. Travis gets in that morning.”

“I thought he needed to fly back to Florida after he wraps things up at Aviano.”

“He does, but he’s taking a few days in between to scope out his new job at Ellis Aeronautical Systems. Callie will be there, too,” Kate offered as added incentive. “Despite her objections to banging headboards, she’s agreed to spend some time with us in Washington. So Saturday. Seven o’clock. Our place.”

“Got it!”

Dawn signed off, relieved that she’d shared the incident with Brian but feeling guilty that she’d lumped him in with her two late, unlamented ex-fiancés. Yes, he was aloof at times. And yes, he held something of himself back from everyone but Tommy. But she hadn’t seen him condescend to anyone. Take his pilot and limo driver, for example. Judging by their interaction with their boss, the relationship was one of mutual respect.

Nor could Dawn imagine Brian peeling back that calm, unruffled exterior to reveal a core as petty as Fiancé Number Two’s. Of course, she’d never imagined Two having that hidden vindictive streak, either.

Just remembering what the bastard had put her through after their breakup gave Dawn a queasy feeling. Slamming the laptop lid, she dumped it on the nightstand, flipped off the lamp and slithered down on the soft sheets. Their sunshine-fresh scent reinforced her determination to hit a drugstore and buy some bland-smelling shampoo first thing in the morning. Then, she decided with an effort to rechannel her thoughts, she and Tommy would have some F-U-N!

* * *

The next four days flew by. Dawn stuck to her proposed agenda of zoo, Smithsonian and shopping, with side excursions to Fort Washington, the United States Mint and paddle-boating on the Tidal Basin. The outings weren’t totally without peril. Fortunately, Dawn grabbed the back strap of Tommy’s life preserver just in time to keep him from nose-diving into the water when he tried to scramble out of the paddleboat. And she only lost him for a few, panic-filled moments at the Air and Space Museum.

Those near disasters aside, she cheerfully answered his barrage of questions and fed off his seemingly inexhaustible, hop-skip-jump energy. Together, they thoroughly enjoyed revisiting so many of her old stomping grounds.

As an added bonus, the weather couldn’t have been more perfect. An early cold snap had rolled down from Canada and erased every last trace of summer heat and smog. Washington flaunted itself in the resulting brisk autumn air. The monuments gleamed in sparkling sunshine. The fat lines at tourist sites skinnied down. There was even a faint whiff of wood smoke in the air when the two explorers retuned home Friday afternoon, pooped but happy.

They’d saved a picnic on the grounds of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial for their last major excursion of the week. The memorial had opened during Dawn’s last year at Georgetown, when she’d been too swamped with course work and partying to explore the site. So her grin was as wide as Tommy’s at dinner that evening, as he proudly displayed the photo snapped by an accommodating bystander. It portrayed him and Dawn hunched down to get cheek-to-jowl with the statue of FDR’s much-loved Scottish terrier.

“He’s the only dog to have his statue right there, with a president,” Tommy informed his dad.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Me, neither. We Googled him, though, and learned all kinds of interesting stuff. His name was Fala, ’n he could perform a whole bag of tricks, like sit ’n roll over ’n bark for his dinner.”

“Sounds like a smart pooch.”

“He was! ’N he was in the army!” The historical events got a little blurry at that point. Forehead scrunching, Tommy jabbed at his braised pork. “A sergeant or general or something.”

“I think he was a private,” Dawn supplied.

“Right, a private. ’Cause he put a dollar in a piggy bank every single day to help pay for soldiers’ uniforms ’n stuff.” His fork stopped halfway to his mouth. “Musta been a big piggy bank.”

Brian flashed Dawn a grin, quick and potent and totally devastating. She was still feeling its whammy when he broke the code for his son.

“I suspect maybe the piggy bank was a bit of WWII propaganda. A story put out by the media,” he explained, “to get people to buy bonds or otherwise contribute to the war effort.”

Tommy didn’t appear to appreciate this seeming denigration of the heroic terrier. Chin jutting, he conceded the point with obvious reluctance. “Maybe. But Fala was more than just proper...popor...”

“Propaganda.”

“Right. Dawn ’n me...” His dad’s brows lifted, and the boy made a swift midcourse correction. “Dawn ’n I read that soldiers used his name as a code word during some big battle.”

“The Battle of the Bulge,” she confirmed when his cornflower blue eyes turned her way.

“Yeah, that one. ’N if the Germans didn’t know who Fala was, our guys blasted ’em.”

Dawn was a little surprised at how many details the boy had retained of FDR’s beloved pet. Brian, however, appeared to know exactly where this detailed narrative was headed. Setting down his fork, he leaned back in his chair.

“Let me guess,” he said to his son. “You now want a Scottish terrier instead of the English bulldog you campaigned for last month.”

“Well...”

“And what about the beagle you insisted you wanted before the bulldog?”

Tommy’s blue eyes turned turbulent, and Dawn had a sudden sinking sensation. Too late, she understood the motivation behind the boy’s seemingly innocent request for her to check out the grooming requirements for Scottish terriers.

“Beagles ’n bulldogs shed,” he stated, chin jutting again. “Like the spaniel you said we had when I was a baby. The one I was ’lergic to. But Scotties don’t shed. They gotta be clipped. ’N they’re really good with kids. Dawn read that on Google,” he finished triumphantly. “She thinks a Fala dog would be perfect for me.”

Four days, Dawn thought with a silent groan. She and Brian had maintained a civilized facade for four entire days. After her emergency purchase of the blandest shampoo on the market, there’d been no leaning. No sniffing. No near misses. Just a polite nonacknowledgment of the desire that had reared its head for those few, breathless moments.

The glance Brian now shot her suggested the polite facade had developed a serious crack. But his voice was unruffled as he addressed his son’s apparently urgent requirement for a canine companion.

“We talked about this, buddy. Remember? With the trip to Italy this summer and you just about to start school, we decided to wait awhile before bringing home a puppy.”

“You decided, not me.”

“Puppies need a lot of attention. You can’t leave them alone all day and...”

“He wouldn’t be alone. Dawn can watch him while I’m at school ’n clean up his poop ’n stuff.”

The crack yawned deeper and wider.

“Dawn’s already been very generous with her time,” Brian told his son, his tone easy but his eyes cool. “I’m sure she wants to get back to her job and her friends. We can’t ask her to take on puppy training before she goes home to Boston.”