Read Online Heaven Sent Rain by Lauraine Snelling - Free Book Online

minimum and here I am fixated on a woman who bothers and intrigues me and a boy who …Pondering did not help. Drawing did not help.
    While Jonah thought he was taking care of his dog, Garret knew better. DM, alias Mutt, had one purpose in life—Jonah.
    All the while his mind roamed, his hand flew with the marker pens. Finally! He stood and walked back, always a good test when painting, drawing, or whatever. Get a new perspective. He nodded. At last the eyes matched, Jonah’s and Mutt’s. The rest was framework.
    Haunted. Was that the word he wanted?
    He ripped the page off the easel—Jonah and Mutt version three—and pinned it to the wall. Other people would say the first two versions were typically Garret Miller, but this one? Maybe he should give Jonah one of the others and keep this one here. Why? So it could drive him crazy?
    Instead of leaving it on the wall until he took it to the clinic, he unpinned it and rolled it up carefully, sliding it into a protective cylinder. He’d post one of the others on a wall at the clinic. Unlike this version, the boy and dog in the first two attempts had ordinary eyes. He only posted the ones he loved seeing on a regular basis.
    The clock reminded him that he should consider going to bed. But instead he moved to a drafting table where he worked on his comic strip. In spite of considerable pressure to go daily, he kept to his one strip a week. He did not want to be an artist full time; he was a veterinarian who got a kick out of drawing. Not the other way around.
    This was the first he’d had trouble coming up with a concept. Sometimes keeping away from political innuendo was not only difficult but impossible. He stared at the drawing of a howitzer cannon. That was it. “The day I ran the world, I played with guns. Oops. Sorry, God.”
    Sorry indeed. Playing with guns, with people’s lives. But what if? He drew furiously and leaned back, laughing. That worked. He rose and stretched, nodding and smiling all the while. He figured he’d fallen asleep smiling, because too few hours later he woke, still smiling.
    “Thank You, Lord God, for this new day. I missed Your glory sighting, but from the look of outside, I wouldn’t have seen it anyway.” Although sometimes God managed to sneak a fiery peek through a veil of rain.
    A whimper and a paw under soulful brown eyes found his arm. “Good morning, SoandSo. I know you were waiting patiently.” He scrubbed his yellow Lab’s soft ears with one hand while rubbing his own eyes with the other. For some odd reason, his eyes felt not sandy but gravelly. “I sure hope you put the coffee on, since someone we know forgot again.” The thuds of two tails assured him they had.
    SoandSo and her brother Sam sat glued shoulder to shoulder, both quivering, ready to explode ahead of him toward the kitchen. TC, their tiger cat, yawned and stretched from his place of honor at the foot of the bed, unrolling her pink tongue and eyeing her best friends as only a superior feline can.
    “I get it. I get it. I…” They froze, waiting for his next move. “Am.” Four front feet padded the rug. “Coming.” As he leaped to his feet, the dogs exploded out the door and down the hall, in full barking cry. The cat rolled his eyes and yawned again.
    He laughed at the morning ritual. How could one ever wake up grumpy around here? Garret followed the thundering horde to his kitchen. The birds screamed and trilled from the aviary.
    Humming while the coffee brewed, he filled dog dishes and opened a tin of real salmon for TC, who was just padding through the doorway. Garret was sure the haughty feline waited until the scent of an open can wafted his way. One time Garret had not followed the routine and he had paid royally. No one knew how to get even like a cat.
    All the other residents of the house cared for, he carried his mug of perfect coffee with just the right amount of half-and-half back up the stairs, and within fifteen minutes he’d showered and