Honor by Janet Dailey

windshield and a dog’s eager face popped up next to her. It had wide pricked ears brushed with black and a black muzzle, with golden brown everywhere else.
    “Hello, Bogie.”
    Before she could roll down her window to pet him, a distant whistle summoned him and the dog ran off, its tail high, a flash of enthusiasm against the dull asphalt of the parking lot.
    Kenzie’s spirits lifted a little. She opened the door and got out, breathing the country air. The nip to it invigorated her—and took her back. She leaned against the car, remembering the day she’d started working here.
    Jim Biggers had hired her sight unseen, on the basis of a recommendation from the kennel master of a military police detachment based at Darmstadt in Germany, where she’d been a Specialist 1st Class.
    With an active social life at first, she thought wistfully. Unlike now. Back then she hadn’t wanted to bother with a serious relationship, and most of the men she’d met were raw recruits or career army.
    She honestly hadn’t wanted to get involved with someone likely to deploy at any time. Her parents had lived with that worry hanging over them from the day they’d married, and Kenzie knew how glad both of them were when that stage of her father’s career was over.
    But there had been that one soldier. Dan Fuller.
    Dan fully expected to be tapped for a Special Ops team. There seemed to be no fighting skill he couldn’t master. He was smart and rugged and too brave for his own good. Her kind of man. She’d known that right away. Hadn’t told anyone but him, though.
    And then—only five weeks after she’d met him—Dan had died in combat, unable to escape the cab of an up-armored vehicle when it had rolled over a roadside bomb.
    She’d kept her feelings for him private in the first place and skipped the sympathy, counting the days until she was sent home.
    The Darmstadt base had been on the verge of closing, per government orders, after going strong for something like sixty years. She’d only been there for two. The last two, as it turned out. Her friends there had begun to scatter to other postings and new lives all over the world, but she’d hung on to the end.
    Burying herself in work was as good a way as any to forget. Kenzie had taken on the complex training of bomb-sniffing dogs and guard animals. Their unique abilities could never be equaled by machines. War dogs were increasingly important in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
    Not every dog completed the rigorous program. But they could move on to other responsibilities if they didn’t.
    She’d also served as liaison to stateside kennel masters who came through Darmstadt on occasion, looking for high-quality animals for specialized army missions. There simply weren’t enough to go everywhere they were needed. She had learned not to get too attached to the dogs she worked with. Or to anyone else.
    Losing Dan had underscored that.
    Once she was stateside again, she’d done the same thing, kept a protective distance from just about everyone. And then she’d met Linc. A true-blue guy who made her want to change her mind.
    She reminded herself that he wasn’t likely to be deployed. Not if he was needed at Fort Meade and Langley.
    But ... one thing she’d learned was that there were no guarantees. She straightened away from the car with a sigh. Kenzie headed through the parking lot and past the kennels, empty for the moment. The dogs wouldn’t return to them until around noon, exhausted in a good way from their play and training sessions. She looked around for Truck, who had the run of the place.
    So named because Jim had found him chained to an abandoned pickup as a half-starved puppy, Truck was huge now, a shaggy black-and-white ball of energy and canine smarts. Jim Biggers insisted Truck was the best damn dog he’d ever had.
    The mutt was nowhere to be seen, but she knew he’d show up soon.
    Sometimes he trotted over to the kennels by himself from the Biggers farm a mile away,