Page 3 of Falling Into You

Rory refused to answer as he climbed up onto the soccer team’s table—not safe—cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted:

“Girl Scout cookies! Four dollars a box! Get ’em out of seasonandat a discount!”

Customers swarmed the boys’ table. Rory watched the couple who was about to buy her incredible homemade muffins exchange a thoughtful glance and then slowly but surely slink away. Within minutes, people were whipping out wads of cash and piling boxes of cookies into their arms. Some of them even took selfies with Jacob, who was, of course, more than happy to mug for the cameras.

Stuart and Carlos, the two senior guys on the cheer squad, stood across from Jacob, giant arms folded across their broad chests.

“Dude! You can’t do that!” Stuart shouted, his voice loud and strong like any good cheerleader’s.

Jacob looked around at his teammates rushing to pocket the cash the excited customers were shoving at them. “It definitely looks like I can.”

“Ugh! I hate him,” Rory said, slipping out from underTucker’s arm to get back behind her table. “Squad! Go round up some more customers!” she ordered, making her friends scatter.

“All’s fair in love and bake sales!” Tucker called, walking backward toward the cookie mayhem and high-fiving his teammates. Jacob winked at Rory from atop the table.

This time, when Rory inhaled, all she could smell was her hopes of winning going up in smoke.

Jacob

Jacob sat at the kitchen table, trying and failing to do his precalc homework. Failing because A) he had no freaking clue what a binomial was and B) his little brother, Chad, was torturing his little sister Lindsay by turning his eyelids inside out and making zombie noises.

“Will you two please quit it?” Jacob snapped, picking up a random squeaky toy off the table in front of him and throwing it in their direction. It bounced off Chad’s shoulder and took out an open bottle of orange juice on the tiny kitchen island, spilling it all over the floor. Chad booked it out of the room to ensure he would escape the blame while Chewie, the family’s scruffy rescue dog and owner of said squeaky toy, began dutifully licking up the mess.

“Damn it,” Jacob said wearily as he snatched the roll of paper towels off the counter.

“You said a curse word!” Lindsay gasped, covering her mouth. At age six, Lindsay was obsessed with bad language and the rules against it. She was also missing her two front teeth, so the wordcursecame out ascurth.Jacob looked up at her and noticed she had approximately twenty-seven plastic barrettes hanging from her curly blond hair, plus ruby-red lips from a Ring Pop she probably wasn’t supposed to have. It was hard to be irritated with someone that adorable.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said with a secret smile.

“Don’t tell anyone what, dipwad?”

Ford, the eldest Reilly sibling currently living in the house, walked past and whacked Jacob hard on the back of his head, as was Ford’s standard greeting. At a muscly six foot four, Ford, a senior at Woodmont High, already had D1 offers in football and the attitude to match.

“He curthed!” Lindsay said, giggling.

“Traitor.” Jacob sighed and tore off more towels from the roll.

Ford picked up their sister, turned her upside down, and shook her, making a few of her barrettes rain to the kitchen floor. “No change? Again?” he said in mock disappointment. “What good are ya?” Ignoring her shrieking giggles, he set her right side up and smacked her little butt as she ran cackling into the backyard. “Ooooh,” he said, turning around. “What’s this?”

Ford snatched the pair of homecoming tickets Jacob had won at the bake sale off the counter and held them up. “Mylittle bro is going to homecoming! Awwww! That’s so sweet! Are you bringing an actualgirl?”

Rolling his eyes, Jacob dumped the soaked, bright-orange paper towels into the garbage can, grabbed the tickets, and shoved them into his backpack.

“No seriously, though,” Ford said. “How’d you afford those? I thought all your pizza delivery money was going directly into your college fund.” Ford picked up the orange juice bottle, which still had some liquid in the bottom, and drank right from it.

“It is. We can’t all get full scholarships like you,” Jacob said. “I won those tickets. At the bake sale. Which I didn’t see you attending. Aren’t you the captain of the football team?”

“Who the hell works a bake sale?” Ford demanded, then burped. “I’ll tell you who. JV.” Then he cackled, sounding just like their little sister. Come to think of it, the football tablehadbeen manned mostly by freshmen and sophomores.

“Well, I sold all Willow’s extra cookiesandwe won, so I got the tickets,” Jacob told his brother, feeling suddenly exhausted.

“All right, that’s notnotcool,” Ford said, putting the now empty bottle back down on the counter. “So? Who ya gonna bring? You still pining after that Rory chick?”

“See, thisis why youdon’t have a girlfriend. You can’t call girlschicks.”

“Way to deflect,” Ford shot back. “That means youloooooveher.”

Jacob’s face burned. All afternoon he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how Rory had looked at him in his borrowed Girl Scout costume. She’d been appalled, definitely, but also impressed. He could tell. Rory might have disapproved of their secondhand cookie sales, but he knew she appreciated a genius idea when she saw one.