Page 16 of Ruff and Tumble

“I think you can tell where I’m heading with this,” he said.

She had an idea, but she wasn’t going to put it into words. She didn’t dare.

“Ms. Lincoln, with your permission, I’d like to be that other poor PA grunt.” When she didn’t respond right away, he laughed, obviously mistaking her silence for something other than what it was: shock, disbelief.Delight.“Cole Bennett takes on the Puppy Cup against longtime champion Hailey Lincoln. Imagine how the press would eat it up. Imagine how yourbosswould.”

He wasn’t wrong. All Hailey had to do was call Jasmine and even hint that Cole wanted to participate in their show, and she’d have a helicopter sent over to collect him within minutes. And they didn’t even own a helicopter.

“I don’t understand,” she said—and she really didn’t. Cole Bennett wanted to play puppy football? Withher, of all people? “You want my job? What’s wrong with the one you have?”

“I know it’ll mean more work for you in the long run, but I think you’ll like what I have to offer.” He pulled out the dimple once again. “Please? I don’t have a lot of experience with dogs, and it’ll require quite a bit of coordination with my manager and my team, but it would mean a lot to me.”

Hailey could only blink at him. It would mean a lot tohim? He was asking to lend his cachet and influence to the Puppy Cup, wanted to make their show the highlight of this year’s football season, and he was phrasing it as a personal favor?

Every one of Hailey’s protective instincts rose in an instant. It wasn’t the appropriate reaction to a request like this one—and Jasmine would fire her on the spot if she knew—but Hailey could no more help it than she could stop breathing. Nothing in life came without strings attached, especially where she was concerned. She’d had to fight for every opportunity, every kind word, sometimes for the very roof over her head.

“Why?” she asked, unable to keep the sharp note of suspicion out of her voice.

“Uh, for the good of the world?”

She was unable and unwilling to accept such an easy explanation. “If you wanted to do good in the world, you could donate your salary to the charity of your choosing and keep them operational for the next thousand years. What else?”

“Because I like puppies?”

“Lots of people like puppies,” she countered. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“Because I like you?”

Shedefinitelywasn’t buying that one. She wasn’t the sort of person who dazzled and awed upon first glance. She rarely even dazzled and awed after twelve glances. Most of her relationships—professional and otherwise—were the result of forced and repeated interaction.

She shook her head. “You want something else, something you’re not divulging. What is it?”

Instead of answering, he flung a question back at her. “How can you tell?”

The same way she knew that Penny didn’t really want to receive a call every time she had a puppy-related favor to ask and that Cole Bennett hadn’t shown up in her office or her home out of the blue. When it came to people worth knowing, Hailey Lincoln wasn’t the answer. She never was.

“Call it a hunch,” she said. “What do you really want?”

He watched her for a long, drawn-out moment. She fought the urge to burrow herself in the chair and succeeded only by reciting the alphabet inside her head.

“Okay, you win. There might be aslightulterior motive to my plans.”

Her heart sank just as she reached the letter J. Of course there was. If this had been as good as it seemed, he would have gone through the usual channels, wooed Jasmine with an upscale restaurant and an expense account. Not sought out a low-level employee whose name most people couldn’t remember.

“What kind of ulterior motive?” she asked.

“The truth is, there’s a news story that may or may not break sometime here in the next few weeks, and it would be great if I could get ahead of it.”

Every muscle in her body tensed. “Define what you mean bynews story.”

“It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

His brow came up. “Yes, I do. You have the most expressive face of any woman I’ve ever met—none of whom, by the way, I’ve taken sexual advantage of.”

A wave of heat overtook her, making it even easier for him to read what she was thinking.

“The puppy is gone again,” a small voice interrupted. Hailey’s first reaction upon hearing that Rufus had once again wriggled away shouldn’t have been relief, but it was. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could sit there without breathing into a paper bag.