On a bright autumn day, Flynn Marlowe lost his best friend, a beagle named Barley, while out on a hike in Seattle’s Discovery Park. On a cold winter day, Mac Bowersox found his best friend, a lost, scared, and emaciated beagle, on the streets of Seattle. Two men. One dog. When Flynn and Mac meet by chance in a park the next summer, there’s a problem -- who does Barley really belong to? Flynn wants him back, but he can see that Mac rescued him and loves him just as much as he does. Mac wants to keep the dog, and he can imagine how heartbreaking losing him would be -- but that's just what Flynn experienced. A “shared custody” compromise might be just the way to work things out. But will the arrangement be successful? Mac and Flynn are willing to try it ... and along the way, they just might fall in love.

Lost and Found

But he’d taken Barley to the lovely wooded confines of Ravenna Park too…


There was no escape. Mac guessed he’d have to rely on that old salve for all wounds—time—to help him get back to normal. Sometimes, late at night, when he was really missing Barley and his snores at the foot of his bed, he would consider getting another dog. But he couldn’t hold the idea in serious consideration for long. Right now it seemed like a betrayal, like cheating.


Mac sighed, rolled over, and forced himself to get up. It was summer. It wasn’t even four o’clock in the afternoon. He was single, thirty, and in good health, physically anyway. It was something of a crime that he should be lying around in bed, wasting his time off in this way.


Life is out there. Men are out there. Possibility is out there. Hope is out there.


Chapter 23