Page 25 of Ruff and Tumble

In the past, he’d always been a legendary figurehead, like Alexander the Great or Hercules, a man revered by the masses. To be near him was to be near greatness, to bask in the presence of a god. Now that she’d met his family and discovered them to be the nicest, most welcoming, most trulyluckypeople in the world, Hailey could marvel at how foolish she’d been.

His powers weren’t mythical. His strength wasn’t pretend. This was his actual existence, the life he got to live every single day.

“It’s not going to be heads,” Hailey said as the camera moved past Cole to the coin toss taking place in the middle of the field. She took a large swig of her beer—too large, considering how close she came to choking on it—and pointed at the screen. “It’s going to be tails, and the Lumberjacks are going to defer.”

It was nothing more than an educated guess. The team often made the choice to defer when playing an away game, especially one as important as this, and her odds were fifty-fifty about the coin.

That didn’t seem to matter as her prediction played out word for word on the screen. Cole’s mother and the Wegmores gasped. Sam and her wife cackled with glee. Regina looked at Hailey sideways. Even Cole’s dad turned to her with renewed respect.

“Well, shit,” he said, ignoring the repeated outcries on his language. “Maybe we do have a chance at making it to the Kickoff Cup this year. I think I’m starting to like this girl.”

Chapter 7

Cole stepped through the back door of the dog shelter onto a patch of damp lawn littered with toys. Most of them were well used and well loved, with frayed ropes and chewed ends. One of them—a football—appeared to have been ravaged more than the rest. The faux leather was almost completely torn apart.

“In my world, this is sacrilege,” he said, picking up the ball and spinning it lightly in the air.

“Oh. You’re here.” Hailey had been playing tug-of-war with a compact, muscular puppy whose gray fur was so thin that his skin showed through. She turned toward Cole, no sign of surprise on her face. The rope—with the puppy attached—dangled from one of her hands. “Your plane was supposed to get in hours ago.”

“It did.”

He angled the ball and threw it, allowing it to skim past the puppy. It was close enough to draw the animal’s interest but not so close it made contact. As he’d hoped, the puppy pounced off after it.

Hailey’s gaze followed the line of the ball. “That was a good throw.”

He knew it was. He could feel it burning in his ligaments. Yesterday’s game had been a success, but like most of his successes, it had come with a cost. Not even Regina and an entire freezer full of produce could touch the pain. This was a grin-and-bear-it day.

Weirdly enough, the grinning part was easier now that he’d seen Hailey.

“I would have come straight here, but I had to wade through my family’s extravagant praise of you first.” Cole shifted his weight to one leg and stood watching her. “I have no idea what you did to them, but you have some serious explaining to do. My dad is ready to divorce my mom and make you an offer in her place.”

This speech was calculated to get a blush out of Hailey—and blush she did. She was already flushed with exercise and the cold, but the blossoming pink across her cheeks indicated that she had plenty more where that came from. Wisps of her hair played about her face, not unlike the puppy frolicking in the grass around her feet. Her freckles were especially visible in the outdoors, and her eyes matched the heavy gray clouds overhead. Whether to counteract the gloom and doom of a Seattle January sky or because it was the only pair of shoes she owned, she was once again wearing the bright-red Converse.

Cute. She’s cute.

Cole was almost startled to realize it. The women in his life had a tendency to boast much more dramatic adjectives than that. They were graceful. They were gorgeous. They were glamorous. Even his own sister, who he rarely saw as anything but the playmate and protector of his youth, was always well put together. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in anything but full body armor.

In a pair of faded jeans and a clunky fisherman’s sweater, her hair in a loose braid over one shoulder, Hailey looked, well, cute. There was no other word for it.

“That was some game you played yesterday,” she said. She was still blushing furiously, but her discomfort—if that was what it could be called—did nothing to deter her. “My ears are still ringing from the sound of your family’s cheers.”

“I should have warned you,” he apologized. “They can be a bit…effusive.”

She pushed the wayward strands from her face. Her hands were dirty from playing with the puppy, leaving a streak of mud along one cheekbone. “That’s one way to put it. I would have said they were nice.”

Nice?Puppies were nice. Hailey was nice. His family was a behemoth of enthusiasm and aggression. He couldn’t remember a time in his life, even as a kid, when they just stood quietly and let the world unfold around them. They pushed and pulled and demanded, and there was no escaping their reach.

“They liked you,” he said.

“Yes, because you told them they had to.”

It was true. Hehadtold them to be on their best behavior, and—if it was at all possible—to tone down their glory-be-to-Cole routine, but that didn’t account for the plate of snickerdoodles currently sitting on the front seat of his Lexus. His mom only baked cookies for people she genuinely liked.

“Sam wanted me to thank you for sending her the link to that website of Cole Bennett GIFs,” he said by way of answer.

Hailey’s blush deepened. “She didn’t believe it existed.”

“And the Wegmores have the recipe for spaghetti Bolognese you asked for.”