After a moment, however, she set him to rights. “You can’t give a service dog table scraps.” She swooped down to take the granola bar package from him. “She’s not a pet. She’s your companion.”

Bubbles gave a tiny growl and attempted to take the snack back from Sophie with a leap that lifted her an impressive two inches into the air.

“See? You’ve had her for ten minutes, and she’s already acting like a spoiled lapdog.” With a stern lowering of her brow, Sophie turned her attention to the puppy. “No, Bubbles. You don’t get to speak to me like that.”

Bubbles reacted instinctively to the command in Sophie’s voice. She sat and gulped, looking up at her trainer with a remarkable amount of remorse. Harrison was tempted to do the same.

Since he wasn’t an adorable two-pound ball of fur, however, he settled for a gruff, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t know.”

At the sound of his voice, all of the indignation in Sophie’s stance melted away. Her eyes widened and a stricken flush colored her cheeks. He could tell he’d done it again—scared her with his inability to react to situations like a normal human being.

“No,” she said, flustered. “No, of course you didn’t.”

He attempted to heal the breach by drawing to his feet, but all that did was highlight the difference in their sizes. At six feet tall, Harrison was hardly a giant, but he felt every inch like it was mile, each one carrying him farther away from her.

In an effort to regain some of that lost ground, he said, “Okay, so no table scraps. What other rules should I know about?”

Sophie eyed him with misgiving. “Haven’t you ever had a dog before?”

“No. Never.”

“Really? Not even as a kid?”

“We weren’t a cozy, white-picket-fence-and-puppy sort of family. I never even had a goldfish.”

“Well, you can’t feed table scraps to goldfish either,” she said. “In case it ever comes up.”

He was startled into a laugh. She was doing it again—making jokes. About him, with him. “My ignorance doesn’t extend that far, thankfully. Can I at least pet her and stuff?”

Sophie shifted from one leg to another, watching him with a wariness he couldn’t easily explain. It wasn’t a scared wariness; it was more worry, like she was regretting her promise to train both him and Bubbles.

Like she wasn’t sure he’d be able to make this work.

But he could. And he would too. He might not be a prince charming, but he wasn’t an ogre either. At least, not most of the time.

“You mean I can’t pet her?” he asked.