Free The Admirer's Secret by Pamela Crane

dog could be.
    As he moved to close the fridge, Sheba moved with him. It certainly didn’t take long for her to get comfortable with him; she rarely left his side. If he was in the kitchen, she was there. In bed, she was there. In the shower, well, the bath thing wasn’t a hit the first time around, so she waited at the base of the tub.
    Most days he felt guilty when he headed off to work and caught a glimpse of her intently watching his departure from the window as he pulled away. Ten to twelve hours later, when his Ford F-150 rumbled up the driveway, she’d be planted exactly where he left her, wiggling her twisted, fluffy tail. He could barely get a moment’s peace, but he liked it. She was his and he was hers. Such loyalty was hard to find nowadays.
    Marc checked the pantry, with Sheba a nose-length behind whining tirelessly. He ignored her, rummaging through boxed dinners until he retrieved a dusty canister of oatmeal.
    The whining continued.
    “You gotta pee, girl?”
    She barked.
    Food would have to wait—not that oatmeal was really food.
    He shrugged on a coat over his bare chest, stepped into his boots, and headed outside to the back porch. Sheba took off for the woods.
    Now he had to go. “When nature calls…” This was what he loved about being a guy—the conveniences.
    Every time he stepped foot on his porch he was dolefully reminded of his acquisition of the property. Being the last of kin, Marc had inherited seventeen acres from the untimely death of his great-uncle when Marc was still a disinterested teenager. The land sat vacant for a number of years while he pursued a college degree and ran off to the big city of Buffalo, New York, to hunt down a career in computer science and chase love with the woman of his dreams. Well, not exactly the woman of his dreams, but close enough. She was gorgeous and ambitious, the perfect trophy wife for most guys, but now he knew she wasn’t his “true love.”
    Though it was far in the past, the memory of that loss still ached. Back then Marc had blindly thought he was in love with the woman he now referred to as “the ex,” but he knew the reality. True love wasn’t skin deep. It was knowing the other person’s heart and connecting with more than a kiss. Anyone could kiss another person and get high off the rush of excitement. But love—love didn’t need physical touch. Not that he didn’t like that aspect as well. But love was deeper, purer, and all things good. Love was knowing the person, and still adoring them, despite their flaws. True love was his high school sweetheart. Though it had been years, her name rolled off his tongue easily: “Julie Carter.”
    He relished the good ol’ days. He had met Julie in the beginning of their sophomore year of high school. But when he mustered the courage to actually talk to her, it was a month into the school year. They had been sitting next to each other in their math class since the end of August, but oddly they didn’t exchange a single word. Julie was always the studious type , he chuckled to himself. And I was the slacker . She always got As and he got solid Cs. Julie was smart, pretty, popular—everything Marc wasn’t at the time. In short, she was out of his league. So he ignored her. Until she made it nearly impossible to do so. When their teacher passed out their graded quizzes and Julie glanced over at Marc’s big fat red D , she offered to tutor him—after she made several jokes at his expense. For once his bad grades got him something more than a parental scolding and weeklong grounding. 
    He remembered when they first hit it off as friends, but soon Marc found himself walking Julie to classes, eating lunch with her at school, and sitting with her at church. On April first—at a fancy dinner out, compl iments of his dad’s credit card—Marc asked Julie to be his girlfriend. He shook his head as he remembered her response: “Is this an April Fool’s joke?”
    She made him want to be a better