Black Heat Read Online Free Page B

his veterinary practice; he was just as solicitous with the humans who came through his doors.
    Dr. Raj had tried a variety of nonsurgical techniques to help Angel's dysplasia, but they had run out of options. Options that Roan could afford, anyway. Dr. Raj had already offered to do both hips for the price of a single surgery, and Roan had a feeling he was tempted to do the entire procedure for free, but she could never allow that.
    Roan had been on her own from the age of eighteen and one day, and she was determined to hang onto her independence, which was something you couldn't do by taking handouts.
    Roan went into the kitchen and knelt down next to Angel, who made a sound deep in her throat that Roan thought of as her purring sound. She yawned extravagantly and burrowed her head onto Roan's knees. Roan scratched her behind the ears and along her spine, taking care not to exert any pressure on the dog's hindquarters.
    "You up for a walk, girl?" she asked, fetching the leash from the hook on the wall. She'd walked Angel after her dinner and the dog didn't need to go out until morning, but the encounter with Calvin Dixon had left Roan unsettled. A walk in the cold night air would do her good.
    Roan closed the door behind her with care. Her landlady lived in the front of the house and her bedroom was on the same side as Roan's door. Mrs. Castleberry was quite elderly and probably would sleep through Armageddon, but many of their neighbors worked long shifts and cherished their sleep.
    They set out together, walking slowly—limping, in Angel's case. Angel was a bulldog/chocolate lab mix, as far as anyone could tell, and she wasn't yet six years old. Her severe dysplasia was sheer bad luck, Dr. Raj said, combined with the bulldog breed's tendency toward hip issues. With surgery, she could live pain free. Without it...
    Roan blinked away the moisture in her eyes. She wasn't a crier. Never had been and wasn't about to start now. Without surgery, having exhausted every other option, Angel would experience agony every time she took a step. Roan had given herself until the day after Thanksgiving, a week away, to find the money for the surgery. Dr. Raj, his kind old face looking unusually lined and tired, had nodded when they discussed what needed to be done. Roan knew that he would be waiting for her in his office if she needed him, even while his wife and daughters went shopping or enjoyed their holiday, and that he would do whatever could be done to make Angel's passing a peaceful one.
    " No ," Roan whispered, kicking a rock. Angel looked up at her quizzically, her ears perked. "Oh, not you, baby," Roan quickly assured her.
    It was ridiculous that Roan's best friend in the world was a dog. She'd lied to Cal—she didn't have plenty of friends. She had Walt and Hank and Justin, the guys from the shop; she occasionally went out for beers with Hank and his girlfriend, or went over to dinner at Justin's house, where she helped his wife Diane with the dishes and played with their toddler. She had a few friends from high school who had stayed in the area, but they were busy with boyfriends and husbands and babies, things that seemed more out of reach all the time.
    But Angel wasn't just a dog. She was the last thing that Roan's dad had given her, a month before he died. If Roan had known the heart attack was coming, she would have worked a lot harder to cement the fragile peace that she and her father had finally worked out. But she was still smarting from her mom's death and her father's marriage to Mimi, which had come much too fast—too fast for Roan, anyway, who needed a brash, flashy stepmother like she needed a hole in the head.
    They'd fought nearly from the start. Roan, thirteen at the time, had threatened to boycott the wedding, but her father had pleaded with her, so she'd put on the horrible pink dress Mimi picked out, posed for pictures, and snuck so much champagne that after the bride and groom left for the honeymoon, some