Pets: Bach's Story Read Online Free Page B

sat there, the perfect little angel, for the short time that he stood watching her. But when he turned to get a diaper from the changing table, she scrambled up to swing her leg over the top of the rail. He caught her before she shimmied down to the floor and rolled her back into the crib. That started a whole new argument, especially when he worked the diaper under her hips.
    “Be a good girl, Pani,” he told her as she simultaneously fought to roll over and kick his hands away. “Hold still.”
    But she was having no part of that diaper. He won because he was bigger and because she wore herself out, but he could remember diapering his own daughters and trying to put one on Pani was almost an athletic event in comparison.
    Shaking his head, he covered her with a blanket. Immediately she tried to crawl out from under it, but he pulled her back into the center of the mattress, rolled her onto her back, and covered her with the blanket again. He dropped two toys into bed next to her.
    “You need a nap,” he told her. Turning around, he headed for the door.
    Sitting up, she picked up one of the toys and looked at it—a round, clear plastic maze with three silver beads trapped in separate dead-end bends inside. Then she looked at him, at the bed, around the room, and then back at the object in her hand. As Bach walked out of the room, the toy hit the wall near his head and ricocheted back at her.
    My, but she was turning into such a naughty and disagreeable thing.
    Bach closed the door anyway. He’d let her get away with it this once, because she was new and because all this was strange and had to be very unsettling for her. But many more tantrums like that and he was going to skip ahead two chapters in that book and go straight to chapter four: How to Discipline Your Pet.
    He stopped in the bathroom to wash and bandage his injured thumb, then headed downstairs to the kitchen to make dinner. It was the first time in two years that he wouldn’t be eating alone. So, even though he knew she wouldn’t appreciate it, he fixed a special meal of all his favorite foods. Two hours later, when he was ready to set the table, there were more than eight steaming platters surrounding his place. He only set out one plate, but moved her baby-styled highchair closer to his seat so he could feed her himself.
    Since he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of using either Gema’s or Kali’s highchairs—
    both of which were still carefully stored up in the attic—he’d bought Pani her own and had it modified as the book suggested, with padded wrist and ankle restraints. When everything was finally ready, he went back upstairs for Pani.
    He got his second pet-induced surprise of the day when he opened the door to find the diaper lying unused in the middle of the floor and Pani not in it. Instead, she had pushed the crib across the room and quite ingeniously used it as a stepping stool to reach the window latch. Of her, all he could see were two white-knuckled hands tightly gripped around the thick branch of the ancient, drooping willow tree, which grew just outside the window.
    As he stood there in shock, her soft but nervous grunts floating back in through the window to his ears, Bach suddenly realized her hands were beginning to slip from the branch.
    She was at least thirty feet off the ground!
    He ran back downstairs, barely making it outside and around the corner of his house in time to catch her as she fell.
    It was debatable whether or not she realized the mistake of her actions, but for all of three seconds after she’d dropped into his arms, Pani grabbed onto his shoulders and hugged herself to him, trembling as she clung. For those three perfect seconds, she was the sweet and darling pet he’d thought her to be at Exotics, Incorporated.
    Then she pulled her head back and she looked at him. And the wild animal in her suddenly returned full fury. She erupted in his arms. Her limbs becoming a windmill of hitting fists and