Ruff and Tumble

by Lucy Gilmore

  She giggled again, this time quelling it with a hand slapped over her mouth. “Ignore me,” she said between her fingers. “I can’t react to situations like a normal person. I speak my mind at the worst possible moments and turn to stone for everything else.”

  “Does this mean the dreams were about me?”

  Her eyes snapped up to his. Despite this direct approach, her long lashes fluttered shyly, and her voice dropped to an embarrassed choke. “Don’t be stupid, Cole,” she said. “Of course they were about you.”

  His grip on her arms tightened. He didn’t want to hurt her, but it was an automatic response, the curl of his fingers tied to the jolt that rocketed his groin. “I lied before. You don’t look nice. You look—”

  He didn’t have a chance to finish his remark—which was for the best, since he didn’t have adequate words to describe how he was feeling. She looked tempting and beautiful and cute. She also looked as though those things meant as little to her as a football player who was rapidly passing his prime.

  As if to prove it, she glanced at the wall of draft picks and sighed. “I’ll have to beg Penny to clean all this up for us,” she said. “It’s the only way we’ll make it on time.”

  “Forget my sister,” Cole said—begged, really, his voice strained and his hold on Hailey remaining firm. He knew that letting her go would mean letting this moment go, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet. “Forget all things football-related. Let’s go find an office-supply closet instead. Isn’t that how it works in places like this?”

  She laughed, and just like that, he lost her. He could have tried his usual tricks—a knowing smile, a low-voiced innuendo, a hand placed low on her back—but it didn’t feel right. Those were seduction tools, ways to show his interest and stake his claim.

  He was interested, and he did want to stake a claim, but he wanted a lot more than that, too.

  “I’ve never had a fling with anyone at work before, so I can’t answer that,” Hailey said, stepping away. Cole felt the gap between them like a blast of cold air, but all she did was shake her head and sigh. “I don’t have flings at all, actually. Did you want me to call down and have them bring your car around?”

  “Fuck the car,” Cole said with more heat than the situation warranted. He couldn’t help it. How she could stand there, looking prim and untouchable and so appealing at the same time, was beyond him.

  She stood her ground. “I’d rather not, thanks. You might be able to get away with showing up late to social engagements, but I’m not so lucky.” She smiled ruefully. “Just be sure not to tell anyone, okay? My luck is supposed to be the reason behind all this in the first place.”

  This time, he took the rebuff as it was intended. Hailey was obviously unwilling to take their flirtation any further than it had already gone. She’d been more than happy to laugh and challenge him while the cameras were rolling—and while the puppies were the main event—but now that it was just the two of them, he was back at the starting line.

  Alone. Uncertain. Useless.

  “Hailey Lincoln is no luckier than your average three-leaf clover,” he said and made the sign of an X over his chest. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  She sighed. “If you guys don’t make it into the Kickoff Cup after all this, the city is going to demand my head on a platter. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  He didn’t. Not even a little. He woke up every day wondering if this would be the one that broke him.

  “You’re the one who watches every game with the eye of a detective and the soul of a critic,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “Oh, you’ll make it, all right,” she said with such confidence that Cole couldn’t help but believe her. “And you’ll win once you get there. They’ll renew your contract for double the pay, and you’ll spend the next decade of your life showing everyone how the game of football was meant to be played.”

  Cole reared back, the speech that had started so promisingly dashing over his head like cold water. The next decade? Ten more years?

  “Don’t look so worried,” she said, but even the warm smile she bestowed on him wasn’t enough to stop the chill from seeping into his spine. “If there’s one thing I know in this world, it’s football. And you, my friend, have a long and prosperous career ahead of you.”

  Chapter 10

  If Cole had possessed any decency, he would have made up an errand to give Hailey a chance to gather herself before he descended upon her house in all his six-foot-two glory. Since they’d spent the better part of the day together, she’d had no time to do more than glance at herself in the rearview mirror—and what she’d found had horrified her.

  She looked like a rebellious teenager trying out a noir phase for the first time. Worse than that, she looked like a woman who was trying way too hard to impress a man.

  “Thank you for driving me home,” Hailey said as she stepped out of Cole’s car. He owned several, but the hybrid Lexus was one of his favorites. She liked to think it was because he was worried about the environment, but mostly she suspected he liked how shiny it was.

  Rather, it had been shiny. Philip and his thin, gray hairs left quite a trail on that glossy black interior.

  “To be honest, I thought about following behind the city bus while you got home that way, but I don’t think Philip is enough to allow me in the car-pool lanes.”

  Recognizing his name, the puppy poked his nose out of the car door and began tentatively sniffing the environment, his stuffed football clutched protectively in his mouth. Most puppies would have happily bounded out and started exploring, but not Philip. For every fun new smell her yard afforded, he cast an equally anxious look back up at Cole.

  Hailey understood his sentiments perfectly. Philip had been shuffled around so many times that he viewed each new place—and each new person—as an opportunity to be left behind.

  From the looks of it, Cole understood, too. He put a reassuring hand on the puppy’s head and nodded down at him. “Go for it,” he told the animal. “This is a happy place.”

  Hailey wasn’t sure how happy her house had been in recent years, but the epithet had once held true. She’d learned to throw a football exactly where Cole stood. She’d learned to ride a bike there, too, though she’d never mastered either skill. Moving around on two rickety wheels seemed to be asking for trouble.

  “You’re sure he won’t be a bother?” Cole asked, watching the puppy as he sniffed at the damp grass and half-frozen ferns. “Bess won’t get upset if there’s an intruder threatening her family?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Hailey said as she trotted up her front steps to unlock the door. Over her shoulder, she added, “And don’t worry—if they don’t get along, I have lots of ways to keep them separated. I often have multiple dogs living here, and no matter how hard I try, not all of them end up as best friends.”

  Cole didn’t respond right away. Hailey assumed he was once again acclimating to the bizarre decor of her home, but he had paused on the threshold, watching as Philip began sniffing his way around the living room. The animal’s nose was pressed to the floor as though on an important hunt, though he had yet to relinquish his grip on the football in the slightest.

  “Don’t you ever want to adopt one?” Cole asked as Philip picked up on the scent of the entire pack living in her kitchen. “Doesn’t it hurt to keep giving them away?”

  Hailey’s chest gave a sudden, lurching pang. She’d said so many goodbyes in her lifetime that she should have grown accustomed to it by now, but that clench came every time she got the call.

  “Of course it hurts,” she admitted. “I cry every time—usually for days. It’s embarrassing. They’ve had to buy so many tissues for the supply closet at work that they get a bulk discount now.”

  Since she didn’t want Philip to frighten Bess into a defensive position, she rushed to head the animal off at t
he gate.

  She needn’t have worried. Bess lifted her head at the intrusion of another dog into her sphere and might have even growled a warning, but she caught sight of Cole standing behind Hailey and gave her tail an eager thump.

  “Good girl,” Cole said, his mouth so close to Hailey’s ear that it caused a wave of goose bumps to move over her. “You know a friend when you see one, don’t you? Such a smart dog.”

  “She got knocked up by the first handsome scoundrel to come her way,” Hailey retorted as she lifted a leg to step over the gate. “I wouldn’t put my faith in her abilities as a judge of character.”

  As was the case the last time the pair of them stood in this position, Cole’s hand was ready and waiting to assist her into the kitchen. And as was the case the last time he did it, Hailey felt her whole body flutter into uselessness. Matters weren’t helped any when he held her hand much longer than a step over a gate necessitated.

  “Maybe their affair was brief but passionate. Maybe it was worth it. Maybe she’d do it again in a heartbeat.” He gave her fingers a meaningful squeeze. “Something smells delicious, by the way. When did you have time to cook?”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she’d been up at four in the morning—that her entire day had been spent catering to his schedule—but something in her held back. She was trying to look less like a woman who had nothing in her life except work and football, not more.

  “It’s just some stuff in the slow cooker,” she said, blushing when he still refused to let her fingers go. “I thought it would be easiest.”

  She busied herself by checking on Bess and the puppies, counting the little heads to ensure that Rufus hadn’t wandered off again. He was huddled close to Bess’s hind legs, but it wasn’t a cause for celebration.

  “Oh, you poor honey,” she said, scooping up the tiny bundle and examining him closely. “I was afraid of this.”

  “What is it? What’s the matter with him?” Cole remained on the other side of the gate—mostly to keep Philip from barging in after him—but there was a sharp note of worry in his voice.

  Hailey nestled Rufus closer to her neck so he could absorb some of her body warmth. His small body was so delicate, his skin so much like paper, that she could feel each of his bones. “He’s not taking well to the family dynamic,” she said. “He’s always the last to eat and the first to wander away.”

  “Bess is rejecting him?”

  Hailey nuzzled the puppy closer, fearful of him overhearing the words and taking them to heart. Which was ridiculous for a lot of reasons, but she couldn’t help it. Rufus needed all the love he could get his tiny paws on.

  “Not rejecting, exactly,” she said. “She seems to like him just fine when he’s around, but with so many other, stronger, more insistent puppies to look after, he kind of gets lost.”

  Overlooked. Forgotten. It was no one’s fault, but that didn’t make it any less awful. Sometimes, puppies—even sweet, beautiful ones like Rufus—slipped through the cracks. There just weren’t enough people in the world to care for them all.

  Despite her determination not to cry, Hailey felt emotion thickening in her throat.

  “What can I do to help?” Cole asked.

  It was the same thing he’d asked that day in her office, when he’d shown up uninvited and unannounced. There was the same matter-of-fact quality to it, but also the same authenticity. Unlike so many people, when Cole offered his help, he meant it. The fact that he was standing outside her kitchen, gently massaging Philip’s ears, was clear proof of that.

  “How are you at bottle feeding?” Hailey asked.

  “Phenomenal,” Cole said. When he saw her wide-eyed look of surprise, he laughed. “I mean it. I used to feed Mia all the time.”

  “You did?”

  He gave Philip a command to sit—which the animal ignored in favor of whimpering anxiously—and stepped over the gate to join her in the kitchen. “Of course. I changed diapers, too, so you can stop looking at me like that. All evidence to the contrary, I’m not a complete waste of space.”

  Hailey doubted that anyone could accuse Cole Bennett of wasting space. Everything he touched and everything he did was extraordinary. Even this, pulling open her cupboards and searching for the puppy milk replacement and bottles she kept on hand, was like something out of a movie.

  “I assume this stuff is similar to the human variety?” Cole read the label on the can of milk replacement and nodded. “Huh. It looks identical to baby formula, actually. Don’t tell Reggie. She used to spend a fortune on the name-brand stuff.”

  Hailey watched as if in a dream as Cole efficiently and cheerfully went to work. He hadn’t been kidding about being an old hand at this. There was something about the deft way he handled the bottle’s nipple that indicated long experience.

  “You never answered my question, by the way,” Cole said as he tested the temperature on his wrist. He must have found it satisfactory, because he lifted the puppy from Hailey’s arms and cradled him in his own.

  “Which question?” she asked, the words on autopilot. She thought she’d already experienced every kind of physical and emotional reaction possible to having this man in her kitchen and in her life, but she was wrong.

  So. Very. Wrong.

  Cole Bennett was holding Rufus like a baby. He was holding Rufus like a baby and coaxing a bottle into his mouth. Every part of her body gave one heaving, yearning pang—for all the things she would never be and for all the things she could never have.

  It’s not fair. She might have been able to stand up to Cole’s charms if he’d been a jerk or if his confidence was accompanied by cockiness, but it wasn’t. His confidence had been ingrained in him since birth and was as much a part of him as his dimples. He was an exceptional athlete. He was genuinely kind to people. He had a large family who cared about him and who showed up whenever he needed them to.

  Of course he acted like a man who had it all. He was a man who had it all.

  While she, on the other hand, was a woman with nothing except a house full of football paraphernalia and far more puppies than she knew what to do with.

  “About whether or not you ever want to adopt one.” He gave the puppy in his arms a gentle shake. Rufus had found the nipple and was greedily gulping at it, his eyes closed and his body undulating with the in-and-out movements of his sucking. The animal looked so comfortable—so natural, so happy—that Hailey found that her throat had constricted to half its size.

  “No,” she snapped.

  Cole shifted his gaze from the puppy to Hailey, an inquiring lift to one brow. “You sound awfully sure of that. Why not?”

  There were several different answers to that question. Her yard was too small. She spent too many hours at work. She was just one woman living all by herself. She could have defended any one of those responses and come out sounding perfectly rational, but they weren’t the truth.

  I can’t risk getting attached.

  It was difficult enough to say goodbye to the puppies after a few weeks—a sort of ripping-the-bandage pain that stung for a few days before settling to a more comfortable numbness. She relished that feeling, enjoyed it, even, because it was predictable. Reliable.

  The other sort of pain was the kind she couldn’t bear. Permanent loss. Death. Saying goodbye to the only person who’d ever loved her and knowing that she’d never find that kind of acceptance again. If she let herself fall in love with Bess or Rufus or Philip or any of the dozens of puppies who came through her home each year, that would be the end of it for her.

  She wasn’t strong enough to recover from that kind of thing again. She’d barely made it through the last time.

  “I can help more of them this way,” she said. It was only a part of the truth, but at least it was a large part. “Adoption is the best outcome, obviously, and the goal is for every animal to have somewhere safe
and stable to live. But fostering somewhere safe and stable is important, too. It gives the dogs a place to go when their whole world feels dark and out of control. It helps them recognize what home looks like when they finally find their own.”

  She’d said too much, as usual, but at least she’d had the sense to stop there. She could tell Cole all kinds of horror stories about the damages done by foster homes that were too crowded or poorly run, by people who let the dogs wrangle by themselves outside instead of providing the order and comfort the animals so desperately needed.

  When Cole didn’t say anything—just kept watching her with a strangely intent look in his eyes—she nodded down at Philip and added, “We’ll never know what Philip went through before he was abandoned, but we do know that it wasn’t good. He’s too skinny and too unsure of himself, too fearful of new situations. Although we can fix the skinny part, those other qualities may never leave him.”

  Unable to help herself, she reached out and ran a finger along the side of Rufus’s contentedly suckling mouth. “These guys, however, will know nothing but love. That’s six puppies that will have a good start in life, six puppies that will be able to attach to their future families with no baggage. Would I like to keep this little guy forever? Of course. But I can do a lot more good by passing him on and opening my house to the next litter of puppies that no one else wants to take care of.”

  Cole was still looking at her as though she were some kind of freak specimen at a child’s science fair, so she forced herself to step back and take a deep breath.

  “Sorry,” she said, opening the refrigerator and welcoming the blast of cool air. “I sometimes get a little soapboxy when I start talking about dogs. It’s why they usually keep me on animal duty at work. Everyone is tired of listening to my speeches.”

  “Don’t apologize,” he said. “It was something, wasn’t it? Watching them be born?”

  She could only nod. She’d assumed he’d been more horrified than delighted to be trapped in that elevator with her, but the way he was looking down at the puppy in his arms seemed to indicate otherwise.