“No, Dad.” Harrison scooped Bubbles up and placed her inside the box of supplies. The soothing scent of a twenty-pound bag of puppy chow seemed to bring her commensurate happiness, so she stayed put. “I’m talking to my new dog.”

“Eh? You really went through with that?”

Harrison trudged up the steps to find his father standing in the doorway, looking like an extension of the house in faded overalls and a work-worn shirt. As he also had a red-stained apron tied around his waist, it was an interesting picture. “I don’t have a choice, unfortunately. Oscar won’t let me go back to work unless I play along.”

“What’d you get?” His dad leaned to peer around him, a frown crossing his grizzled face when no frisky Great Dane followed in his wake. “Huh. It must not like you. Damn thing ran away already.”

“No, she didn’t.” He turned the box so the puppy’s tiny head faced his father. “Dad, meet Bubbles. My new lifeline.”

To be fair, his dad’s response was about a hundred times better than his own had been. Hearty, chest-heaving laughter might not be the ideal reaction to a service dog, but at least his dad retained the capability of speech.

“That’s not a dog,” he said between wheezing laughs. “That’s a rat in a Halloween costume.”

Bubbles, unaware that her appearance was being denigrated in the extreme, panted a friendly hello.

“She’s a Pomeranian,” Harrison explained. “They’re very good at scent detection, apparently. And according to my, uh, handler, she’s also very portable.”

“What? Are you going to carry her around in your pocket?”

It wasn’t a bad idea, actually. Except for the part where she’d fall out the first time he bent over to dig a ditch.

“I haven’t worked through the logistics yet.”

Harrison moved the rest of the way into the house and set down the box, taking in the strawberry-scented air with a grateful sigh. Today was a good day, then. Those had been few and far between since his dad’s retirement three months ago. For Harrison, being forced to take a temporary sabbatical from the Department of Natural Resources had been a blow. For his dad, leaving a forty-year stint as a highway patrol officer over a bad back had been nothing short of a tragedy.

“You’ve been busy,” Harrison added in a voice he hoped was nonchalant. “Preserves?”

His dad grunted. “The damn strawberries are taking over the backyard. I had to do something with them. You hungry?”

Harrison was, but he needed to check his blood sugar levels first, and he had to figure out where he was going to put Bubbles for the night. Instinct told him that no matter what he decided, the puppy would have her own ideas about where she wanted to be.