Free All or Nothing by Deborah Cooke Page B

said. “I can guess how he persuades you and I’m really not interested.”
    â€œAt all, or just with your brother?”
    â€œYou figure it out.” He gestured to his departing brother. “Since when has he had a sense of humor?”
    Maralys laughed and slipped her hand through Zach’s elbow. She ignored his question. “Come on in. I’ve missed you, Zach. You always liven things up. Let’s get some ice on that before you’re legally blind.”
    â€œThere’s a good plan.”
    â€œWhere do you think Roxanne’s gone?”
    â€œWhere’s Zoë? Where there’s a toddler, there’s spilled food...”
    Maralys laughed. “And that’s where you find a smart dog like Roxanne. Don’t you feed that beast?”
    â€œRight. Take a look at her and tell me that she’s just wasting away.”
    â€œHardly. She’s bigger every time I see her.”
    â€œYou haven’t seen her since I dropped off that contract. She was only a puppy then.”
    â€œNote that I wasn’t the one to say how infrequently you come by.”
    Zach chose to ignore that. “It’s the fur. I’m sure that if I had her trimmed, there’d be a third as much dog left.”
    â€œAh, but then everything you owned wouldn’t be garnished with four inch dog hairs.”
    â€œThat would be a loss,” Zach agreed solemnly.
    * * *
    They got to the kitchen and discovered that they had called it right. Zoë was sitting on the kitchen floor, feeding cheddar Goldfish crackers to Roxie, one at a time.
    With great concentration, Zoë pinched each cracker between her index finger and thumb. It was apparently of critical importance to present the cracker face-first to the dog and to hold the fish tail. Her hands were a bit gummy, probably from dog spit, which might have added to the challenge. Roxie sat obediently and calmly in front of the little girl. Even though the dog was the half the age of the toddler, she had to outweigh Zoë four pounds to one.
    â€œScene of the crime,” Maralys said.
    â€œBut Zoë is in total control.” Zach refused to be insulted that his dog did what a toddler told her to do and not always what he told her to do.
    â€œOf course, she is. She got that from me.” Maralys cast him a devilish grin, then stepped toward the freezer.
    Zach sat down, as he was told, and held the pack of ice over his eye, as he was told, and tried not to speculate as to why the kitchen table looked like it had been cleaned off in a hurry. He also tried to not feel that he had woken up on an alien planet, one that looked a lot like the one he knew but was populated by clones of people he knew who acted unpredictably.
    James had been concerned about him. It boggled Zach’s mind.
    It was kind of a nice feeling. That boggled him even more.
    He was distracted by Zoë, who came to stand right in front of him. “Zach fish,” she said, offering him a sticky cracker for his very own.
    Roxie stood immediately behind the little girl, avidly watching the cracker in transition. The dog salivated.
    Zach accepted the present, to his niece’s delight, then surreptitiously passed it to the dog after Zoë turned away. “I haven’t been gone that long,” he told Maralys. “Zoë remembers me.”
    â€œShe’s naturally brilliant,” Maralys said. “Not that I have a biased opinion or anything.”
    â€œShe’s more cute than should be legal.”
    â€œAnd has charm to spare.” Maralys sighed benignly as she watched her daughter. “She’s going to give me a serious crop of grey hair in ten or twelve years.”
    â€œOnly if I teach her everything I know,” Zach threatened and Maralys laughed.
    â€œWhat’s it going to cost me to get you to keep that information to yourself?”
    â€œI’m an artist. I can’t be bought.”
    â€œA hazard of dealing