The Marriage Pact (Hqn) Read Online Free PDF Page B

with her hair and bake a cake for dessert.
    She was taking one last narrow-eyed look around the living room, making sure everything was as it should be, when she heard the familiar whimper outside on the porch, followed by persistent scratching at the screen door.
    Muggles was back.
    Hadleigh hurried to open up, and her heart went out to the soggy golden retriever sitting forlornly on her welcome mat, brown eyes luminous and hopeful and apologetically miserable, all at once.
    “Hey, Mugs,” Hadleigh said with a welcoming smile. She unlatched the screen door and stepped back to admit the neighbor’s dog. “What’s up?”
    Muggles crossed the threshold slowly, stood dripping on the colorful hooked rug in the small foyer, and gazed up at Hadleigh again, bereft.
    “It’s okay,” Hadleigh assured her visitor, bending to pat the critter’s head. “You just sit tight, and I’ll get you a nice, fluffy towel. Then you can have something to eat and curl up in front of the fire.”
    Obediently, Muggles dropped onto her haunches, rainwater puddling all around her.
    Hadleigh rushed into the downstairs bathroom—Gram had always called it “the powder room”—and snatched a blue towel off the rack between the sink and the toilet.
    After returning to the foyer, she crouched to bundle Muggles in the towel, draping it around those shivering shoulders, drying the animal’s grubby coat as gently as she could.
    “Now for some food,” she said when Muggles was as clean as could be expected, without an actual tub bath or a thorough hosing-down. “Follow me.”
    Muggles wagged her plumy tail once and rose from the rug.
    The poor thing smelled like—well, a wet dog—and clumps of mud still clung to her fur, but it didn’t occur to Hadleigh to fret about her clean carpets and just-washed floors.
    Reaching the kitchen, which was pleasantly outdated like the rest of the house, Hadleigh made her way to the pantry and found the plastic bowls she’d bought especially for Muggles, who’d been a frequent visitor over the three months since her doting mistress, Eula Rollins, had passed away. Eula’s husband, Earl, was elderly, grieving the loss of the wife he’d adored, and in frail health besides. While Earl certainly wasn’t an unkind person, he understandably tended to forget certain things—like letting the dog back inside after she’d gone out.
    That was why Hadleigh kept a fifty-pound sack of kibble on the screened-in back porch and a stash of old blankets in the hall closet, for those times when Muggles needed water, a meal and a place to crash.
    At the sink, she filled one of the bowls with water and set it down nearby. While Muggles drank thirstily, Hadleigh zipped out onto the porch to scoop up a generous portion of kibble.
    As Muggles munched away on her supper, Hadleigh fetched the blankets from the closet in the hall and arranged them carefully in front of the pellet stove in the corner of the kitchen. The moment she’d eaten her fill, the animal ambled wearily over to the improvised dog bed, circled a few times and lay down to sleep.
    Hadleigh sighed. Like most of the other women in the neighborhood, she’d taken her turn looking in on Earl, bringing over a casserole now and then or a freshly baked pie, picking up his medicine at the pharmacy, carrying in his newspaper and his mail. Before each visit, she’d made up her mind to speak to the old man about Muggles, very gently of course, but once she’d crossed the street and knocked on the familiar door and he’d let her in, his loneliness and despair so poignantly evident that she felt bruised herself, she always seemed to lose whatever momentum she’d managed to drum up.
    Another time, she’d tell herself guiltily. I’ll make my pitch to adopt Muggles tomorrow or the next day. Earl loves this dog. And she’s all he has left of Eula, besides a lot of bittersweet memories, this old house and its overabundance of knickknacks.
    Well, she thought now with another