Kiwi To My Heart: Soul Mutts, #6

By Lori R. Taylor

It's easier to be brave with a good dog by your side.

 

Leslie Durant, owner of Pretty Paws, doesn't care that she's always giving all of her time and attention to others: it's worth the joy of helping abandoned animals find loving forever homes. But if she can't find a way to bring more money into the struggling shelter, the sacrifices she's made will all be for nothing.

 

Then her brother leaves her with an inheritance, with two stipulations: she must work with her estranged mother to host a successful charity event and find a loving home for Peter's dog, Kiwi.

 

But Leslie's not sure she can forgive the woman who cowered in a corner while Leslie's father hit her.

 

Kiwi was severely abused before Peter adopted her. No matter where Leslie places Kiwi, the nervous cockapoo keeps showing up on her doorstep. She seems determined to stay with Leslie, no matter what.

 

Even though Kiwi is terrified of everything, the sweet little dog makes Leslie feel braver. With Kiwi by her side, can Leslie save the shelter, face down the demons of her past, and take the risk of forgiving the mother who let her down when Leslie needed her most?

 

The Kiwi To My Heart is the sixth and final book in the Soul Mutts series, heartwarming stories of lost dogs finding new homes with the humans they were born to heal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sterling & Stone
• Release date: Dec 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201728410

Book preview

Chapter One

Leslie usually avoided going back into the clinic if she could — it felt rude to barge in on what Dale and Tessa were trying to do, possibly upsetting the dogs they were working with, and adding to the distractions they didn’t need.

But Dale was her business partner, and it wouldn’t be right to conceal this from him any longer.

Not that Leslie had been hiding things — mostly she’d just kept this news to herself because she wanted to find out if it was something she could fix without having to bother Dale. That was what she was here for, to run the parts of the shelter that he wasn’t equipped to handle.

And she’d hired the accountant in the first place. It was her responsibility to try to clean up the mistakes.

But this was getting out of hand — the letter in her hand, all official-looking in an unspeakably alarming way, needed addressed, and Leslie wasn’t sure how to go about addressing it.

She stepped through the door that separated the clinic from the rest of the shelter. Tessa was perched on a stool in front of their shabby old computer and smiled at Leslie when she came in. Hey.

The last year had been good for her. It was hard to see the woman who’d had a nasty panic attack out in the shelter’s lobby in the quiet but calm woman who sat there now.

Leslie smiled back, and she had to focus a little to make the smile as warm as it should be. Is Dale around?

Tessa tipped her head toward Dale’s closed door at the back of the room.

Leslie went to the door, pausing only briefly to bump her foot affectionately against Princess, Tessa’s little gray terrier, who wagged her tail back. Like Tessa, Princess had come a long way in the last year as well.

She knocked once on Dale’s door, then opened it without waiting for him to answer. Got a minute?

He smiled and set aside the paper he was looking at — something so dense with impossibly small type that it looked black. For you, two.

She closed the door but then couldn’t quite decide what to do with herself. What did she normally do with her hands? Her eyes? Her feet? Should she sit down? There was another chair pulled up on the far side of his desk.

But would that be weird?

Why was it that Dale — Dale Savage of all the people in the world — made her feel so unsure of what to do with her body? And why had it only gotten worse in the last few years?

Leslie flicked her head, chasing those feelings away. Now was hardly the time for them. She remained standing. At least that gave her some sense of control, a little added height in a world that tended to tower over her 5’2" stature.

Truth was, there was no good way to start the conversation. Might as well go direct. We’ve got a problem.

She put the letter down on his desk, careful not to scatter the mess of papers coating it, but making it clear that, whatever those papers were, this was the most important of them.

Dale pulled it toward him and looked it over quickly, his eyebrows pulling into a frown as he read. What does this mean?

From her pocket, Leslie’s phone rang. She reached in and hit the buttons at the edge of it until it went quiet.

It means we owe $200,000 in back taxes if we don’t get this sorted.

They rejected our non-profit status?

Something about the paperwork not being filed correctly.

Dale set the IRS letter down slowly, as carefully as if it might explode and scatter shrapnel around his office if handled too fast. Then, with the same hand he’d been holding the paper with, he reached up and rubbed at his eyes, pushing the rim of his glasses up off his nose. Christ.

Leslie couldn’t keep on her feet anymore; the adrenaline that had kept her too anxious to sit drained out of her all at once, and she slumped into the chair in front of Dale’s desk.

Right. Dale dropped his hand, adjusted his glasses so they sat straight again, and reached for a smile. It wasn’t genuine, but Leslie could appreciate the effort. How do we get it sorted?

Leslie huffed out a breath. She’d been trying to figure that out for the last two days. Obviously, the accountant who fudged up the paperwork had to go — Leslie had already taken care of that. But to correct the mistake, to appeal the IRS’ repeal of Pretty Paws’ 501(c) status? That wasn’t something Vanessa had known how to do even before Leslie fired her. And the IRS website, which she’d spent the last two days poring over, wasn’t exactly a fount of helpfulness.

There was no way they could afford to pay all those years of back taxes — Pretty Paws’ finances were balanced on a knife’s edge as it was. And the IRS wasn’t exactly known for being understanding and helpful.

Leslie’s phone rang again. Dale tried again, this time with a little more success, to smile. Someone’s trying to reach you.

They can wait, Leslie said and silenced the ringer again.

If it’s just a mistake in paperwork filing, surely there’s some way to undo it, he suggested. File the right papers and just let them deal with the fact that it’s a few months late.

"That’s just it, I can’t tell. We might need to reapply for non-profit status, which might mean we’ll still owe the back taxes, even if — when — we get reapproved."

Have you spoken to someone at the IRS?

Leslie sighed. Not yet. Was kind of hoping I wouldn’t need to, that fixing it would be something simple, but it doesn’t seem to be, so that’s next.

Mmm. He stared down at the letter for another long moment, then handed it back to her and fixed that same concentrated attention onto her. Is there something I can be doing?

Looking after the dogs.

Obviously. But with this—

Leslie shook her head. Don’t worry about it. I’ll get it sorted. I just thought you should know, if I’m a bit cranky for a while, that’s probably why.

You, cranky? Dale smiled, just a little, with just the corners of his lips, and Leslie wasn’t ever sure how to tell him what that little smile did to her stomach. Never.

Don’t say never, Dale. It’s bound to happen sometime, and I’m not sure sometime isn’t going to start today.

For the third time in perhaps as many minutes, Leslie’s phone rang. Dale glanced at her pocket where the screen lit up through the worn blue fabric of her scrub pants and grinned. You should probably answer that.

Leslie huffed out another breath, but the important bits of this conversation were probably over, so she pulled her phone out of her pocket.

And froze.

The lit screen of her phone showed a name. A name she had in her contacts list because it had clung on in the bowels of her contacts, migrated from one phone to the next over the years but never popping up. Never dialed.

Harriet Durant.

Mom.

Leslie got up from the chair, ignored the way she sensed Dale frowning at her as she left his office — no doubt he’d noticed the way she reacted to the name on the phone screen — and stepped out of the clinic. Not through the door that would put her back in the lobby of Pretty Paws, but through the emergency exit door that spat her out behind the Staples that anchored their little strip mall plaza. There was nothing here but dumpsters that smelled mostly of half-rotted fish from the Chinese takeout on the other side of the shelter and a couple of delivery cars, but it was private, away from the lobby and out of the clinic.

Only there, in the privacy of the back end of the plaza, sheltered by bad fish and away from any curious eyes and ears, did Leslie answer her phone.

Hello? She wasn’t trying to make her voice sound suspicious — that was just the tone that came out of her at the prospect of speaking to her mother for the first time in — well, she wasn’t actually sure. Years, anyway.

Leslie. It was Harriet’s voice, older than Leslie remembered, and cracking with emotion, but definitely the same voice.

Mom, she answered and frowned. What’s wrong?

It’s Peter. He… I just got off the phone with the police. He’s dead.

Chapter Two

There were strange men in her house.

Kiwi didn’t like strangers, and Peter knew that. He didn’t usually let strangers into the house because he didn’t like strangers either. Both of them were too shy, too worried, about what strangers might do to be okay with them wandering freely through their safe place.

But now strangers moved around, shifting things, grabbing pillows and blankets like they had the right to them, and Kiwi didn’t know why Peter allowed it.

She couldn’t find him. She’d looked and looked. All day, she’d been looking. Sometimes he left the house without her, but he’d never stayed away so long. If he was going to be gone for the whole day, he would take her with him, or he would pop by a couple of times to take her for a quick walk and refill her food dish and talk to her and make sure she was okay.

He never, never left her alone all day long. Never made her stay in the house without him, and never let strangers inside while he wasn’t there.

They’d banged on the door at first. Hitting it like they were trying to get through it even when it didn’t open. Their voices were angry, and Kiwi had run upstairs, crawled under the bed, and couldn’t understand why Peter wasn’t there to keep them out.

She wasn’t sure if they’d gotten a key — there was one hidden under the garden rock on the east side of the house — or if they’d actually succeeded in breaking down the door like they tried to do. It didn’t matter really because now they were inside. She could hear them clomping around the house, moving things. Touching things. Like those things were theirs to be moved and touched.

She wanted to leave the bed and defend her home from the strangers. They shouldn’t wander around her house like they had the right to it. Peter didn’t let them in. Peter would’ve never let them in. And he wasn’t here, so it was her responsibility to protect the house until he came back.

But she couldn’t move. The thought of going over to face the strangers made her limbs seize up, her body tremble in terror.

Strangers were dangerous. If she let them see her, they would come for her. They would hurt her.

And Peter wasn’t home to protect her.

Why wasn’t he home? Where had he gone?

One set of footsteps was on the stairs now, clomp-clomp-clomping up them in boots that could break her bones with one kick. Kiwi pressed herself back against the wall, as far away from any edge of the bed as she could get, and made herself small and silent.

Clomp-clomp, went the boots. Down the hall, opening doors as he went.

Where was Peter?

The bedroom door creaked. Boots moved across the sliver of visible space between the bed skirt and the floor. Shadows moved with them.

Kiwi held her breath. Her tags jingled a little when she trembled; she lowered her head so the tags were caught between her throat and paws and didn’t make any noise.

A hand pulled up the bed skirt, and a face peered into her hiding spot. Oh, hey, said the stranger. There you are.

Kiwi wanted to growl. She wished she could growl, to warn the stranger away. But she couldn’t. Her throat didn’t work. She could only sit perfectly still and hope he would go away.

C’mere, honey, the stranger ordered.

If he were Peter, she’d be happy to obey. Happy to leap into his arms and kiss his face and tell him with her happiness how much she’d missed him while he was away.

But this man wasn’t Peter. He was light-skinned and smelled like rain — not unpleasant, necessarily, but not like the coffee and pastries that Peter smelled like.

More footsteps clomped up the stairs. For a moment, the man looking at her turned his head and called out to his stranger companions. Found her! In the bedroom.

An acknowledging sort of noise, not really any kind of word, came back from the boots on the stairs.

The man turned back to Kiwi. He put a hand under the bed. Kiwi couldn’t shrink much further back from him with the wall pressed against her rump as it was, but she tried.

It’s all right, pup. We’re going to get you out of here.

Out of here? Kiwi didn’t want to go. This was home.

Where was Peter? Why was he letting these strange men come into their house like this?

More boots walked across the bedroom floor. The man once again looked away from her. She’s under the bed. Frightened out of her mind, poor thing.

Someone on the far side of the bed grunted.

If we could just shift it a little, we might be able to get a lead around her…

And, before Kiwi could quite understand what was happening, the bed above her shook. Shifted. The legs scratched against the floor, and a rope looped around her neck.

Kiwi yelped once. She couldn’t help it — the noise escaped her throat before she knew it was there, before she could tamp down on it. The rope was tight against her throat. Not choking, not yet, but she knew about tight ropes and how they could become choking if she fought too hard.

But it had been a while since she’d felt that — not since before Peter really — and the instinct to flee was suddenly much stronger than what she knew about ropes.

She didn’t make it even a step before the rope tightened into a choke hold, and she couldn’t breathe. Memories flashed before her