Fight For Me ✔

Epilogue

Ten years later...

The faint whimpering from the monitor breaks my concentration, causing the straight line I'm trying to paint to become swaying and uneven. I curse softly under my breath. Damn I love the little bugger, but couldn't she have slept for just five more minutes? No wait, actually another minute would have done the trick.

With a sigh, I put down the paint brush and walk over to wash the paint off my hands. With one last glimpse of the offending line, I turn to leave my atelier. Really it's just a conservatory made entirely of glass, but it's my space and my space only. My work, both commissioned and personal, line the walls in stacks, only the best of them put on display where there's room on the actual wall. The one I'm currently working on, a piece made for my own pleasure, is standing on an easel smack dab in the middle of the overflowing chaos.

As soon as I leave the atelier I'm immediately followed by my faithful companions, the ones I simply couldn't bear to part with for one reason or the other.

Though my painting skills have improved greatly, to the point of me having an occasional commission and selling paintings on my webpage every once in a while, I didn't end up becoming a professional artist as I had planned in high school. Instead, my life took me in a completely unexpected direction.

I never finished my training with Bernie, because there was always something new to teach him, and every time he performed a new trick or command to perfection my heart would soar with pride. I started coming to the Paine property whenever Liam left for training to work more with Bernie. Before I knew it I started helping Winston with small tasks in the Paine kennel, slowly taking on bigger and bigger tasks until I was pretty much his assistant dog trainer. But I never really took to Brutus, Yonda and Ranger, the three dogs who chased me the first time I visited Liam, and they never really took to me either. But after many hours of training, glaring and bribery we learned to tolerate each other well enough.

After high school, I worked there fulltime for two years before branching out on my own. Now at twenty-seven, I had done a little bit of everything. I worked with the police to train both drug and bomb detection dogs and regular police dogs. I had trained therapy dogs and I held weekly seminars for private dog owners. Heck, I had even worked for a small local circus for a year, teaching the dogs small, mostly useless but fun tricks.

Shaking my head as I walk up the stairs with my four dogs strong posse close behind me, I marvel at how things sometimes end up. Who would have ever thought that a girl with a raging fear of dogs would overcome it and end up loving them so fiercely?

Well, I've mostly overcome it, I think with a glance at the Pitbull Terrier following nervously behind the other three. Terry, as I've so imaginatively named her, is the project I consider my last hurdle to full recovery. Born in a puppy factory and later used and abused in dogfights, Terry has had a rough life and would have been put down if my soft heart hadn't gotten the better of me. She is quick to aggression, nervous, unsure and distrustful. I have never handled such a severely damaged dog before, and if I could help her to recovery without slipping back into fear, it would be the last step to me putting my past completely behind me, since Augustus Hall had finally kicked the bucket in a prison brawl a year ago and Jasper Samuel was looking to spend the rest of his life behind bars, thanks to Liam's ruthless lawyers.

There is no one left in the world for me to fear.

A quiet, simple command of 'stay' has them all sitting down outside the door to the former spare room, now nursery. Once they were all seated quietly I opened the door and was met with an unexpected but heartwarming sight.

I'm pretty sure I felt my ovaries shiver in delight at the sight of Liam's massive bulk, walking around with a slight bounce and with a small head topped with red hair resting on his shoulder. Wait, was he singing? Good God he was!