Book 7 of the Must Love Dogs series.
(Scroll down to read an excerpt.)
Buy Must Love Dogs: Hearts & Barks (#7)
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In the charming beach town of Marshbury, Valentine’s Day is in the air. But preschool teacher Sarah is feeling more relationship-challenged than ever. She just wants to survive February, the longest-shortest month of the year. John wants to elope, but it’s not exactly easy to find someone to watch their ever-growing four-legged pack, which now consists of two dogs and five cats.
Teacher assistant and housemate Polly’s baby bump is growing, too, and it’s a constant reminder to Sarah that everybody else and their goat seem to be able to get pregnant like it’s no big deal at all. Cupid’s arrows are misfiring everywhere, and even Sarah’s bossy big sister Carol’s marriage could be heading for trouble. And Bayberry Preschool has declared a moratorium on Valentine’s Day candy, so who’s leaving those conversation hearts taped to the classroom door?
“Whether you are a long-time fan or a new reader, jump right in to Claire Cook’s newest Must Love Dogs adventures. Your spirits will be lifted, and you’ll be charmed by the witty repartee, the twinkle in the author’s eye, a beautifully structured plot, and a wonderfully resilient main character to cheer for. —Pamela Kramer
“After spending time with the gang in the seventh installment, Hearts and Barks, I’m thrilled to report that I love them even more, and I have the distinct feeling that we’ll be continuing our friendship for a long, long time.”—Stephanie Burns, Book Perfume
Nobody drives you crazier than family, and nobody loves you more.
“Every time I get my paws on a new Must Love Dogs book, I feel like my pup on the verge of getting a favorite treat. I jump, I squeal, and I promptly devour the whole thing. Claire Cook’s characters are like family at this point, and it feels so doggone good to be spending the holidays with them.”—Book Perfume
“Must Love Dogs has already been a major motion picture, and now New York Timesbestselling author Claire Cook’s hilarious and heartwarming series is begging to hit the screen again as a miniseries or a sitcom.” –Nancy Carty Lepri, New York Journal of Books
“Reading about how life goes for this wacky marvelously lovable family becomes addictive.”-Pamela Kramer, Examiner
“Funny and pitch perfect.” -Chicago Tribune
“Wildly witty” -USA Today
“Cook dishes up plenty of charm.” -San Francisco Chronicle
“A hoot” -The Boston Globe
“A hilariously original tale about dating and its place in a modern woman’s life.” –BookPage
Read An Excerpt
Excerpted from Must Love Dogs: Hearts & Barks (#7)
Copyright © 2019 Claire Cook. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Valentine’s Day was in the air. Given my track record in the hearts and flowers department, there was a slight chance that this could turn out to be a problem. Just a hunch.
John and I kissed each other good morning, the five Fancy Feast paté-filled cat bowls I cradled in my arms pressed between us. He tasted like toothpaste and coffee, but in a good way. I lingered, taking in the woodsy smell of his soap.
When I juggled the cat bowls to rest my hand on John’s forearm, I managed to dunk my fingers into one of the two canned Blue Buffalo Wilderness-filled dog dishes he was holding.
“Eww,” I said.
“Not you,” I added. I was considerate like that. I hightailed it over to the cat-feeding station in one corner of the kitchen. Pebbles and her four kittens followed me single-file like I was the Pied Piper.
Diagonally across the kitchen in the dog-feeding station, John put the two upscale dog dishes down on the cracked linoleum floor next to the water bowl. Horatio and Scruffy Dog sat. They waited until John clapped his hands, then both dogs dug in.
The cats were already chowing down, since cats basically call the shots. John had accidentally done a little bit of clicker training with them while he was working with Horatio, but if we were going to take it up a notch, my vote would be to try to get the cats to use the toilet. Cleaning litterboxes for five cats was almost as much work as being a preschool teacher. And sometimes not all that different.
“If we make reservations today,” John was saying, “we’ve still got time to plan a quick Valentine’s Day elopement.” John’s Heath Bar eyes, circles of toffee ringed in dark chocolate, held my ordinary hazel eyes. I felt that same little jolt I always did. Well, almost always.
“How about Tulum, Mexico?” John continued. “No stress, no pressure, entirely laid back. If we’re feeling adventurous, we could get married on horseback.”
John ran the accounting department at a digital game company called Necrogamiac. We’d recently sold my tiny ranchburger, rented out John’s Boston condo through a short-term executive rental company, and bought and begun to renovate the 1890 Victorian I’d grown up in. John’s boss had agreed to let him work remote most days, so he wouldn’t have to deal with the ridiculous commute into Boston.
“Or even on his and her turquoise beach cruiser bicycles,” John said.
There should be a rule that people who work remotely shouldn’t start conversations like this on work mornings with people who don’t. That little love jolt I’d felt had been completely replaced by a hot streak of pressure shooting upward from the pit of my stomach, like mercury in an old thermometer. Maybe people shouldn’t start conversations like this at all.
“Turquoise?” I said. “Matching?”
John shrugged. “Unless you’d prefer separate colors. Or in the interests of simplicity, getting married barefoot on the beach could work.”
“You hate to go barefoot.” I gave the ancient kitchen clock a quick glance. “The soles of those Midwestern feet of yours are landlubber soft. Unlike mine, which were scorched from Memorial Day until Labor Day by the hot sand of the Marshbury beaches throughout my formative years.”
John gave me his you’re missing the point look.
I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “You know, Gandhi walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him frail. And because of his diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him—wait for it—a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.”
John was still giving me that look. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Polly putting on her coat as she walked by in the wide center hallway without glancing in our direction.
“Get it?” I said to John as the front door creaked open. “It’s a pun on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, one of my favorite words in the whole wide world. I’m still not over the fact that I wasn’t old enough to get in to see the original Mary Poppins at the Marshbury Playhouse for free by saying the word correctly when the movie was first released.” I gulped down some air. “Basically, because I wasn’t quite born yet. But still—”
“Besides,” I said, interrupting myself, because somebody had to, “eloping on Valentine’s Day is the ultimate cliché.”
John slid his glasses up the bridge of his nose and closer to his eyes, perhaps the better to see me. “Or the ultimate romantic adventure.”
I chugged some coffee, made a mental note to cut back on my morning caffeine and leave the stale puns to John, who was better at them. I looked at the kitchen clock again. Wondered if I had time to point out a few of our many and myriad elopement obstacles before I was late for work.
For starters, John and his dog Horatio had been a package deal. Right after we’d decided to buy my family house, a feral cat we named Pebbles had given birth to four kittens under the front porch, and we’d kept them all. Scruffy Dog was our most recent canine addition—she’d been a stray, and she and Horatio had fallen madly in love at the beach. It took John a while to come around, but eventually he did the right thing and Scruffy Dog became part of our pack.
It wasn’t easy to find someone to keep an eye on seven pets, plus my father, who’d come with the Hurlihy family house and was even more work than all the animals put together. My pregnant and single assistant teacher Polly had moved in with us, too, after being traumatized when a nor’easter rolled through her waterfront winter rental on the other side of Marshbury. And last time I checked, my brother Johnny was still separated from his wife and living out back in my father’s friend Ernie’s canned ham trailer.
Both my father and brother appeared to be madly in love with Polly, so even if she was willing to take care of the animals, who would protect Polly?
As if that wasn’t enough, John and I had put trying to have our own baby on the backburner until we finished renovating our new old house. My father had moved into his fancy man cave which took over the old garage as well as the former secret room above it. John and I were settled into our new private sanctuary on the second floor of the main house, and we even had a locked door that protected us from the shared space below. We were waiting for a frost-free stretch so my sister Christine’s husband Joe could break ground on the new garage addition with a second private entrance for us.
A thaw in February in Marshbury, Massachusetts seemed about as likely as John letting go of his ridiculous wedding fantasies. I mean, what part of I don’t want to get married and risk screwing up our lives did he not understand?
Life was just too damn complicated.
John and I stared each other down.
“And now,” I said. “I’m officially late for school.”
* * *
Twelve minutes later, I hit my blinker. If my commute to Bayberry Preschool was a minute or two longer, the heat on my trusty old Honda Civic probably would have kicked in. I shivered as I hung a right off the main road, peered through the porthole I’d managed to scrape in the February frost, gazed up at the gray bruise of a sky.
The trees flanking the long uphill drive bowed under the weight of the heavy wet snow. “I feel ya,” I said. “February is no picnic for teachers either.”
“Love Stinks” was playing on the Marshbury classic rock radio station. Of course it was. I sang along with J. Geils at the top of my lungs, really belted out the part about how till the day that you die, love is going to make you cry.
I passed a totem pole made of brightly colored clay fish that now looked like they were dotted with huge fluffy white cotton balls. A row of painted plywood cutouts of teddy bears appeared to be wearing snow helmets.
Fortunately, the pavement had been well-sanded to protect our precious students and their designated drivers from any potential black ice lurking beneath. I managed to whip into one of the last remaining parking spaces in the upper level parking lot without taking out one of my colleagues’ cars.
I stayed put until the song was finished. You can never be too careful, so I liked to make sure I turned off my radio on a positive note. When the Turtles started singing, “Happy Together,” I breathed a sigh of relief. If fortune telling by radio wasn’t a thing, it should be.
“I’m not really late-late,” I said as I climbed out of my car. “More like fashionably late-ish.” I threw my teacher bag over my shoulder, skated across the parking lot in my purple UGG knock-offs.
Even in winter, Bayberry Preschool was that perfect combination of artsy fartsy and impeccably groomed landscaping that kept the students happy while allowing their parents to justify the exorbitant tuition they paid. Snow-covered boxwood sheared in the shape of ducks edged the walkway to the Cape Cod-shingled building. Someone had whimsically tied camel-and-red plaid scarves, possibly real Burberry, around their topiary necks and rested child-sized metal snow shovels with red handles against their topiary bodies.
“You quack me up,” I said as I boot-shuffled past the ducks. My breath fogged out in front of me, creating a flimsy pocket of warmth.
Any day now, my bitch of a boss Kate Stone would hire a chainsaw-wielding ice sculptor, like she did every year, to turn a massive block of ice into a perky penguin or polar bear, while our students looked on. The kids would be moderately impressed by the ice sculpture. Mostly they’d beg for a turn with the chainsaw.
Polly was standing in the hallway, staring at our closed classroom door. A fringed burgundy blanket-like poncho skimmed her seven-month baby bump. Her black maternity leggings were tucked into cozy gray slip-on shearling ankle boots with buttons on the sides. Strands of silver sparkled like tinsel in her auburn hair, and her freckles popped against her pink cheeks. She looked like a ripe pomegranate, only cuter.
If I ever managed to get pregnant, I’d probably end up looking slightly cuter than a sumo wrestler. A flash of envy came out of nowhere and caught me by surprise. I liked Polly. I was happy for her. But I wanted what Polly had. To be pregnant, even pseudo-sumo wrestler pregnant. Unfortunately, my biological clock was barely ticking anymore, so it probably wasn’t going to happen.
I slid out of my long black puffy down-filled coat, which John had recently found for me in one of the boxes I’d been getting around to unpacking.
“You beat me,” I said. “Imagine that.”
Polly ignored my feeble attempt at late-to-work humor and kept staring. A tiny pink candy conversation heart was attached to the door with clear plastic tape at grown-up eye level. I squinted, pulled my reading glasses out of my bag so I could actually read it:
CRAZY 4 U
“Ooh,” I said. “Looks like you’ve got a secret admirer, as opposed to your usual bevy of not-so-secret ones.”
Polly’s cheeks went from pink to pinker. It was kind of heartening the way available and unavailable men flocked around Polly like so many knights in shining armor. Maybe that thing about men needing to feel needed, to have a purpose, was actually true. I wondered if John would dust off his coat of armor if I ever got pregnant. He was just dorky enough to literally have a coat of armor. In high school, I probably wouldn’t have given him a second look, but I’d matured enough to think that John’s residual dorkiness was a part of his charm.
A picture of John parading around our new master suite in his shining armor and nothing else popped into my head. I wasn’t much of an armor expert, but in my version the suit of metal was open in the back like a hospital johnny. I had to admit John looked pretty fetching from that angle.
I shook my head to dislodge the image, checked the time on my big analog teacher’s watch. Then I slid out of my faux UGGs so I wouldn’t track slush into our classroom while I hunted down my teacher slippers.
The outside doors opened, and the first of the students blew in with a cold blast of air.
Polly ripped the tiny heart off the door.
“Good reflexes,” I said. “If anybody sees that, we could be brought up on Valentine’s Day candy charges.”
“I have to get up every hour to pee anyway, so if one of us has to go to prison, I’ll go.” Polly held up the miniscule pink heart. “Shall I put this in the teachers’ room with the rest of the contraband?”
“No way.” I held out my hand. Polly gave me the heart.
I tossed it up in the air. We both opened our mouths. Polly caught it, possibly because she was eating for two now.
Four-year-old Juliette kicked a Gucci Kids boot toward her cubby. “Is that candy?”
Polly giggled. She started to choke, which made her giggle harder.
“It’s just a vitamin, honey,” I said to Juliette while I thumped Polly on the back.
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