It Was My Dog...

Chapter 3

My head bobbed to the rhythm of You are the Sunshine of My Life currently blasting from my speaker next to my elbow. Diana, my own personal ray of sunshine might be cooling off in her new pool, but the actual sun was really beating down on my back. I was lying on my stomach, on a blanket reading The Two Towers while Diana was busy splashing around in the pool, bobbing for her endless number of pool toys. Somehow I got lucky and inherited my mother's ability to get tan and not burn. The downside was that Rory didn't inherit that, so she couldn't take over babysitting duty.

Not that I minded. I looked up at my extremely happy dog with her lolling tongue and her usually champagne gold coat now sodden, making her look like a weird drowned mutated rat with chicken legs. She was my angel, more than anyone else could ever know.

Also, the 10 000 pool toys were my parents' doing, not me.

"Mom asked if you want some peach tea." Rory called from the back door, I turned around to see her face covered in greenish-gray clay and her hair held back from her face with a fluffy hot pink Hello Kitty headband. She and my mother were having a spa day.

"Please." I turned and pulled my sunglasses down. "Ice. A lot of it."

My sister made double finger guns at me. "Gotcha."

She disappeared back into the coolness of the house. I went back to my book and was barely reading again for another minute when I caught a glimpse of sable out of the corner of my eye.

I tensed, ready for Theo's entrance. To me, the punch was barely the beginning. Instead, to my shock, when Trevor rounded the corner, he was walking peacefully alongside a young teenager. He saw me, and though his tail wagged a lot harder, he made no attempt to lunge.

How.... odd.

The kid saw Diana and his face lit up. "Hi!" He greeted me. There was no mistaking who he was. The hair colour, the eyes. His build might've been a bit skinnier than his older brother, and his hair a neat crew cut, but there was no mistaking who he was.

It had to be Theo's brother, Stefan.

"Hello." I grinned back at him. So far, he was much better than his brother. He looked about sixteen. "You must be Stefan."

He was taken aback. Trevor, meanwhile, was cheerfully greeting Diana, who had forsaken her pool toys for him. Again, no misbehaving in sight. It was like he was a completely different dog.

"How do you know my name?"

"I met your brother."

Instantly, wariness clouded his face. "Theo doesn't tell people about me."

Curiosity tried to make her appearance but I reigned her in. Interrogating a kid whose father wasn't the best person around and probably had his life splashed across media wasn't the way to go, no matter how much of an ass his brother was.

"Well, your father is kinda famous."

"Ah." The wariness eased. "What's your name?"

I got up and shook his hand. "Rian. And this is Trevor, right?"

"He likes you." The dog butted his head against my legs, begging for a rub. Surprisingly, Diana let him ask me for attention without any hint of jealousy and contentedly went back to her pool.

"He's a good boy, isn't he." I cooed. "Although he can be a little naughty."

"Yeah, but I don't know why he doesn't behave for T."

Trevor whined a little, looking at Stefan, then back at the pool. He whined louder, making it pretty clear what he wanted.

"Does he know how to play with water?" I asked, seeing the reluctance on his owner's face.