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Her hormones got a kick in the shins as she screwed on her best smile. “Sure! What did you have in mind?”

“It’ll explain itself when you see it.”

“Hmm. Going all mysterious on me, are you?”

Dylan’s smirk was her only answer.

“Wow,” Cat groaned as she sunk into the padded leather luxury of Dylan’s 427SC Cobra. “Maybe I’ll skip playing altogether and move right into coaching, if

this is how the other half lives.”

“The ‘other half’ got this while she was still playing,” Dylan remarked, eyes shifting rapidly from her rearview mirror to the windshield and back again as

she maneuvered the sports car into thick, rush hour traffic.

“Oh. Guess that means I’ve gotta stick around a few more years, then, huh?”

Dylan smiled slightly. “That would be best, yes.”

The two settled quickly into a comfortable silence; a silence broken only by the wind as it rushed through their hair, whipping it back in flying streamers of

black and gold. Soon, rush hour traffic was a thing of the past as Dylan took an exit off the main freeway and headed north. City congestion dwindled into

rural complacency, and greenery began to make a reappearance. Further on, ranches, farmlands, and large estates dotted the landscape here and there;

the dark, straight ribbon of highway cutting through like a plumb line.

Cat took in several deep breaths of clean, country air and grinned. A city girl by nature, she’d always loved trips into the country, especially when she was

young. Her father would get it into his head that the family “needed air”, and off they’d go, half in the old VW bus they named “Stinky”, and the other half

in the wood-paneled station wagon.

God, Cat thought, we were the Brady Bunch come to life!

Shuddering at the thought, she pushed it down and away, instead concentrating on the beautiful scenery passing quickly by.

At last, after almost an hour of travel, Dylan pulled into a long driveway and came to a stop in front of a large ranch house. When Dylan shut the engine

off, Cat could hear the barking of dogs and the whinnying of horses. Bemused, she levered herself out of the car and watched as the front door opened and

a tall, handsome woman appeared. In her early forties, she wore her long, blonde hair tightly braided. Her eyes, a deep amber, were very intelligent, and

her smile was radiant as she spied Dylan unfolding herself from the car.

The two women met midway between the house and the car, and embraced tightly. Watching the reunion from her place by the car, Cat felt a spark of

something she refused to identify as jealousy move through her. She shook the feeling off and approached the duo as they broke apart, turning their smiles

on her.

“Catherine, I’d like you to meet Tamara, an old friend. Tam, this is Cat.”

The two exchanged warm handshakes. “C’mon then,” Tam said, gesturing with her chin. “Let’s go see what you came for.”

As the tall blonde strode away, Cat was left to look up at Dylan. “Coach?”

“Mm?”

“What did we come for?”

Dylan smirked. “You’ll see.”

The pair walked down a winding brick path that rounded the corner of the large house. A huge, fenced corral became immediately visible, as did several

striking horses who frolicked and danced in the warm sun. Tam opened a small gate and a group of large, sleek, black dogs came bolting out, barking

wildly.

Cat stiffened in fear, instantly transported back to age seven, when she had been walking home from school and a German Shepherd had chased her down

the block, snapping and slathering. She’d been scared to walk home for a week after that incident. It had taken twice that long for the nightmares to go

away.

“Shit,” she managed to get out of a suddenly closed throat, before noticing that the dogs weren’t headed for her, but for Dylan, who stood directly in their

path. An instinctive reaction broke through her temporary paralysis and she jumped forward, pushing Dylan just as the dogs collided with the tall woman.

The entire group went down in a jumbled heap. Intuitively, Cat brought her arms up around her head, waiting for the sharp white teeth to puncture and

rend and tear at her flesh and bone. She could hear Dylan groan and feel her body shake.

No! she silently screamed, trying her hardest to push up from the pile. But Dylan’s body was too heavy, especially with the dogs on top of it. She might as

well have been trying to move a mountain.

As she took a deep breath to try again, she was stilled by sounds of….laughter?

What the….?

Suddenly, as if a cork had been released from a bottle, the pressure eased and Cat was able to roll away. As she sat up, muscles tense, she realized that

she really had heard what she thought she did. Dylan was laughing!

And the dogs, far from attacking her coach, were fighting to lick each and every inch of skin they could find; and on Dylan, that was a lot of skin.

“Anschlag!”

The dogs, six in all, immediately dropped to their bellies, looking guilty as only scolded puppies can. Tamara strode toward them, biting the inside of her