Page 2 of Falling Into You

They were interrupted by another sale. Rory rang the bell.

“Gooooo, Lumberjacks!”

“What?” she asked, picking up the conversation and trying not to sound defensive. “He’s my boyfriend. And all the money is going to the same place.” Rory shrugged, pushing her thick hair back behind her shoulder. The bake sale raised money for the sports scholarship fund, which applied to all the teams.

“Yeah, but we need to win those tickets for Stuart,” Gwen reminded her, clasping her hands together in a plea.

“I know, Gwen.” Rory sighed. The prize for raising the most money at the bake sale was a free pair of tickets to the homecoming dance in two weeks. Rory’s base, Stuart, who had been throwing and catching her safely for the past two seasons, needed those tickets—so they needed to win. Hisfamily had fallen on hard times, and his parents had said they all had to cut back on frivolous purchases. If Stuart didn’t get the free tickets, he wasn’t going to go to homecoming, and as one of Rory’s best friends and a crucial member of the squad, hehadto.

“Even if they get here right now and somehow get their booth set up in the next five minutes, there’s only an hour left in the sale,” Rory pointed out. “There’s no way they can catch up with us.”

Rory breathed in the heady fall scent again and held it inside her lungs. Everything was going to be fine. She’d made a plan. She’d executed the plan perfectly. Everything was going to befine.

Just then, a blaring car horn interrupted them. Gwen yelped, and they all looked over to the road leading to the school. A battered red pickup truck, its unbelievably loud engine rattling, swung into the student parking lot. Six boys were riding illegally in the truck bed, cheering and waving.

Rory’s eyes narrowed. She knew that truck. That was Jacob Reilly’s truck. And that was her boyfriend grinning handsomely in the front seat, his blond hair perfectly tousled. Tucker Panagopoulos’s teeth were so perfect and white, Rory would be able to recognize that grin from space.

Jacob screeched his truck into a parking spot, and the boys jumped over the side of the truck’s flatbed. Then they reached in, grabbing a folding table out of the back. Two of them tucked it under their arms, toting it like a canoe as theyjogged over to the bake sale. Tucker and Jacob unloaded a dozen paper grocery bags filled with...

“Are those...Girl Scout cookies?” Layla asked.

Kai and Jax, the two juniors holding the table, approached the cheer team sweaty and out of breath. “Where’s our spot?” they asked.

“It’s the one that says ‘varsity boys soccer’ on it?” Rory said, gesturing at the duct-taped square across from the cheerleaders’ table.

“Sweet! Thanks, Ror,” Kai said, proceeding to noisily open up the folding table and slam it down onto the blacktop. Cody Beckwidth, the senior goalkeeper, slapped a sign to the front of the table that readBEST COOKIES EVER!!!!!in a messy blue scrawl. They hadn’t even used school colors. Finally, the rest of the guys dumped out dozens and dozens of boxes of Do-si-dos, Samoas, and Thin Mints. And that was it—no canopy, no tablecloth. Not even a napkin decorated their booth.

Rory fought the urge to roll her eyes. She wanted to win, but come on. Shouldn’t the boys at leasttry?

“Hey! There’s my Lorelai,” Tucker said, sauntering over in his red Woodmont Soccer hoodie and gold athletic shorts.

Gilmore Girlshad, in fact, inspired Rory’s name, but while Rory Gilmore’s name was short for Lorelai, Rory was just Rory. It drove her nuts that she was named after such a popular TV character—she was always getting questionsabout it—and Tucker calling her Lorelai only twisted the screws tighter. But he thought it was cute, so she tolerated it.

“Whaddaya think?” Tucker jutted his chin toward the soccer table as he slung his strong arm over her shoulders.

“What happened to the snickerdoodles?” she asked.

“Oh, we ate all the ones you made,” he said, lifting his arms over his head and letting out a yawn, before hugging her to his side again. “And then we thought about making more but, pfffft. That looked like a lotta work.”

“But you can’t just sell packaged cookies,” Rory said. “That’s against the rules.”

“Is it?” Tucker said, tilting his head adorably.

Honestly, Rory didn’t even know if therewererules. But clearly there should be. This was abakesale, not a sell-whatever-you’ve-got-in-your-house sale. She’d wasted so much time trying to teach these guys to bake! Time she could have been at home helping her brother, Owen, with his history project or studying for her bio test or cleaning out her closet...

“Where did you get all of them?” Gwen asked in awe.

“Oh, Jacob bought them off his little sister last spring to help her win the cookie badge, and they’ve just been sitting in his basement. Those thingsnevergo stale, so.” Tucker paused to give them all a winning smile. “Score.”

Jacob Reilly, a fellow junior and one of Tucker’s best friends on the team, had long been known as the class clown of Rory’s year. It had all started in kindergarten,when he’d smuggled a live frog into the classroom in his lunch box and let it out just when everyone was settling in for snack time. The chaos had spiraled so out of control that Mrs. Pickett pulled the fire alarm just to get everyone in order, which forced an evacuation of the entire school. Since then, there had been bubble bath in the town center fountain on Easter, a strategically placed whoopee cushion when the county sheriff came to school to warn them off drugs, and a Christmas parade where Jacob had figured out how to replace the festive music with a particularly screamy Slipknot album.

Rory knew that Jacob was just being Jacob, but somehow, his pranks always seemed to mess with her personally. The day of the frog incident, she’d spilled chocolate pudding onto her favorite white sweater. She’d been the junior chair of the town Easter egg hunt the year of the bubble bath explosion, and she’d spent hours painstakingly curating the playlist for the Christmas parade the season of Slipknot. The whoopee cushion, well... that had just been embarrassing. For everybody.

She guessed he couldn’t mess up a bake sale, at least. But as soon as that thought occurred to her, she glanced over to see Jacob whipping off his sweatpants and hoodie to expose—Rory couldn’t quite believe it—a Girl Scout uniform made for a six-foot-tall, broad-chested, very calf-muscly male—and popped a little green beanie onto his head. Somehowwith his reddish-brown hair and bright green eyes, the whole look actually... kind of worked.

Of course.

“Okay, is it just me, or is Jacob even hotter dressed as a Girl Scout?” Layla whispered.