by Teri Wilson
Probably because she knew he was about to give her a lecture on responsible pet ownership and tell her that adopting a dog was a serious matter that required serious thought—all things she agreed with, actually.
Violet was used to thinking with her heart, though. Not so much with her head. And yes, it tended to get her in trouble from time to time. But nothing he could say would ever convince her that adopting Sprinkles had been a mistake.
The bookshelves in the March family beach house overflowed with leather-bound photo albums filled with snapshots of Violet’s mom. When she’d been a little girl, she’d sometimes take one of the thick volumes to bed with her at night and reverently turn the pages like it was a treasured bedtime story. The more recent albums were practically bursting. Pages upon pages showed Adeline March as a doting mother—building sandcastles with Joe and Josh, fishing with them on the pier in a wide-brimmed hat, standing in the shallows at the crest in a red halter-top swimsuit while the boys chased a beach ball across the sand. An album covered in ivory raw silk contained her parents’ wedding photos. They’d gotten married under a breezy canopy on the beach. Her mother had worn a delicate white tulle gown and flowers in her hair. Her dad looked happier in those old pictures than Violet had ever seen him in real life.
Her favorite album was the slimmest one of all, dedicated to Adeline’s life before she’d married Ed March. Violet liked it best because it showed what her mother had been like before she’d been a wife and mom. She’d just been Adeline—a girl not much different than Violet herself. She’d grown up in Turtle Beach, gone to the same schools as Violet, and spent her Friday nights roller skating above the post office with every other teenager on the island. At some point, though, she’d gotten a Dalmatian. Violet was mesmerized by the photos of her mother with her beloved dog. In one of them, she wrapped her slim arms around the dog’s neck while she grinned at the camera. Another picture showed red lipstick kisses on the Dalmatian’s head, mixed among the striking black spots. Violet had been positively enamored of the photographs, and her father’s reluctance to talk about the canine only increased her fascination with the striking animal. All she knew was the Dalmatian had been named Polkadot, and one day Violet had hoped to have a dog just like her.
Violet had never seen an actual living, breathing Dalmatian until that day she’d come across Sprinkles at the adoption fair in Wilmington’s charming historic district. She’d made the short trip to the mainland for baking supplies and had come home with her very own snuggly bundle of black-and-white spots and tiny pink paws. Violet had expected her dad to blow a gasket, but instead he’d gone all soft and wistful on her, eyes shiny with unshed tears.
And that was that. If Sam thought it made her irresponsible, so be it.
Surprisingly enough, he didn’t lecture her at all. Instead, his dreamy blue eyes turned tender and he said the one thing in the world Violet least expected. “Sounds like a good reason to me. Lovely, actually.”
She waited for him to roll his eyes. Or shake his head. Or give some other indication that he was simply humoring her—or worse, mocking her. But he didn’t. He just stood there looking at her with blue eyes that somehow seemed as if they were seeing her, the real her, for the very first time.
Warmth flooded Violet from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. Everything in the periphery faded away, and she forgot all about the softball game, the line outside her cupcake truck, and the wide-eyed stares of the nosy bystanders. All of her awareness was centered on Sam’s crooked smile and the crinkles near the corners of his startling blue eyes that hinted at a time before he’d come to Turtle Beach—a time when he laughed more than he scowled. And suddenly she wondered if it might not be so bad to be Sam Nash’s friend. Maybe it was what she’d really wanted all along.
Maybe, just maybe, she wanted even more.
But then Sam’s gaze shifted toward Sprinkles, and he bestowed the full power of his charm on the excited Dalmatian, smiling at her as if she was every bit as perfect as his own brilliant dog. Sprinkles panted her excitement, and Sam responded with a wink and an affectionate clicking sound.
That’s all the prompting it took for poor Sprinkles to burst out of her cupcake truck confinement. Violet could see the mischievous spark in her Dalmatian’s eye, but it was too late to prevent the mayhem that followed. Just as she screamed a panicked noooooooo, Sprinkles jumped over the pet gate in a single bound.
Then she bounded on top of the counter, flattening Sam’s box of special spotted cupcakes before leaping to freedom in a streak of boisterous black-and-white.
Chapter 8
“Interference. You’re a genius, my dude. A genius.” The firefighter sitting across the table from Sam at Island Pizza shook his head and shoved a slice of pepperoni in his mouth.
Another of Sam’s teammates nodded. “Seriously, who knows if we would have won that game? It was close, but it could have gone either way.”
The game had not gone either way. Once Sprinkles flew out of the cupcake truck, she kept on going, dashing onto the softball field and throwing the game into disarray. The batter hit a grounder just as she neared the pitcher’s mound, and the Dalmatian pounced on the ball before any of the players could get to it. A prolonged game of keep-away followed, with players from both teams chasing Sprinkles around the diamond. The excitable Dalmatian ate it up. Sam wasn’t sure he’d ever seen such a happy dog.
Violet, on the other hand, had been decidedly unhappy—especially when the referee had declared that Sprinkles’s maniacal run around the bases constituted interference and called an immediate end to the game. The real kicker had been the moment the referee declared the fire department the official winners of the opening game of Guns & Hoses, given Violet’s numerous familial ties to the police department. That’s when Violet had broken down and cried. The tears streaming down her pretty face had been a punch to Sam’s gut.
They’d shared a moment before all hell had broken loose, hadn’t they? Sam had certainly felt it—like tiny fires skittering across his skin. The molten look in Violet’s eyes told him she’d sensed it too. For a second there, he’d felt even more alive than the handful of times they’d been at each other’s throats. He’d felt like the old Sam, the man he’d lost sight of and didn’t think he’d ever be again.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right. He’d felt better than his old self. Standing in the shadow of the giant spinning cupcake atop Violet’s truck while she opened up to him about why she’d adopted Sprinkles, he’d almost felt like a new man. A better man. A whole man. Hope had stirred deep inside his chest, and for a brief, shining moment, he’d allowed himself to wonder what it might be like to be on Violet March’s good side.
They could be great together…
If only he and Violet weren’t rivals in multiple nonsensical skirmishes—and if Sam had been looking to get into a relationship, which he absolutely wasn’t. He’d come to Turtle Beach in search of a quiet, uneventful, safe life. Violet was none of those things, and neither was her canine partner in crime.
“It wasn’t intentional. The whole ordeal was nothing but a freak accident,” Sam said, glancing around the table of his teammates. This seemed like important information to get out there, since the other firefighters kept congratulating him on goading Sprinkles into interfering with the game.
That hadn’t been Sam’s intention. At all. After hearing about Violet and Emmett, he’d simply had enough. He wanted to put old feuds and softball aside and get to know her a little bit. Really know her.
Because what he found most intriguing about her ill-fated relationship with Emmett was that she’d been willing to cross the silly line that had been drawn in the sand between the Turtle Beach fire and police departments. She’d allowed herself to be vulnerable, knowing all the while that she was venturing into enemy territory. Some might consider that naive, but Sam found it to be brave.
If the past few months
had taught Sam anything, it was that there were two types of bravery. The noble type that allowed some people to run toward danger while others fled was the kind everyone always praised. Somewhere in his new beach house, Sam had a cardboard box full of medals he’d yet to unpack that he’d been awarded for such bravery.
He’d never been good at the other type, though—the raw vulnerability of opening yourself up to emotional pain. The adjective his fellow firefighters in Chicago had most often used to describe him was stoic. Sam had always taken it as a compliment. But then he’d seen three of those same firefighters perish beneath a collapsed roof, engulfed in flames, and he’d known the truth. He wasn’t stoic in the slightest. He’d gone back to the station and cried like a baby, hot tears spilling down his ash-covered face.
Since then, he’d rebuilt his life entirely, specially designing his new existence to avoid such pain and misery. Not just avoid it, but prevent it. Catastrophic fires like the last one he’d fought wouldn’t happen here on the Carolina coast. He wouldn’t let them.
Nor would he let himself be broken like that again. He couldn’t handle it. His new life revolved around his work and his dog. That much he could handle.
So maybe on some level he admired Violet’s willingness to wear her heart on her pretty sleeve. She was opposite him in every possible way, which Sam found maddening the vast majority of the time. But somewhere beneath the frustration was a magnetic pull he didn’t understand, and sometimes it was almost too much to resist. He was duty and rules and neatly made beds. Violet led with her heart, not her head. She was chaos and cupcakes, and right there, at the top of the fourth inning, he’d wanted nothing more than to take a rich, sugary bite.
“Does Violet realize it was an accident?” Griff said, shooting a furtive glance toward a table where Violet sat with three older ladies from the senior living center. “Because she seems to see things differently.”
Of course she does. Sam tossed his slice of pizza onto his plate. He didn’t have much of an appetite anymore.
“She’s staring daggers at you, bro,” another of the firefighters said.
“I realize that,” Sam said.
He could feel the fury of her gaze on him all the way across the crowded pizza joint.
Lunch at Island Pizza—Turtle Beach’s one and only Italian restaurant, complete with red-checkered tablecloths and repurposed Chianti bottles used to hold drippy candles—was apparently a post-game Guns and Hoses tradition. Given the over-the-top competitiveness of the softball league, Sam had been surprised to find out that both teams headed to the same place after every game. Like so much else about the tiny beach town, it made little sense, but he didn’t bother questioning it. Traditions were sacred around here, and he figured it would give him a chance to talk to Violet again and dispel the ridiculous notion that he’d somehow orchestrated Sprinkles’s latest antics.
Sam stared down at his pepperoni. “I’m going to go talk to her.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Griff said. “Just take the win.”
And let everyone think he’d cheated? Heck no.
“I’m doing it.” Sam stood, ignoring the collective sigh that rose up from his colleagues.
The chatter in the room hushed as he approached Violet’s table.
“Hi, Sam,” one of Violet’s friends said. She smiled and arranged the checked napkin she’d tucked into her shirt collar so it completely covered the #FreeCinder message printed across her chest.
“Would you like to join us?” The woman who never seemed to go anywhere without the Chihuahua in the basket of her walker nodded to the lone empty chair. Even inside the restaurant, the tiny dog trembled atop its blanket.
Being an official working dog meant Cinder had accompanied Sam inside as well. She waited quietly at his side while he greeted Violet’s friends. Sprinkles was notably absent, but Sam wasn’t about to ask where the little monster might be.
“I don’t think we’ve formally met. I’m Mavis.” The older woman gestured toward the other two retirees at the table. “And this is Opal and Ethel. We’re friends of Violet’s.”
“Nice to meet you, ladies. Thanks for the offer. I’d love to join you for a few minutes,” Sam said, winking at Violet as he took a seat.
Her stormy eyes, the same shade of blue-green as the deepest, most mysterious part of the ocean, met his. “What could you possibly want now? Your team already won, remember?”
Sam sat back in his chair, making himself at home, despite the fact that he could see both of Violet’s brothers rising from their chairs and heading his way. “Don’t tell me you actually believe I tried to lure Sprinkles out of the cupcake truck.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” her trio of elder friends said in unison.
“Absolutely,” Violet said at the same time.
“No, you don’t,” Sam countered.
He didn’t believe her for a minute. They’d shared a connection in the moments before Sprinkles had busted loose. She might not want to admit it, but they had. And as he narrowed his gaze at her, he could see the memory of it flickering in her mermaid eyes. In the boom of her pulse at the base of her throat. In the way she couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with her hands…
Her fingertips fluttered around her collarbones like fragile little birds looking for a place to land. “You made a clicking sound. I heard it. Clearly it was some secret Dalmatian code.”
“I’ve made that sound a thousand times before. So have a lot of animal lovers. It was just a greeting, and it was hardly a secret.”
Sam thought about telling her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—that he’d simply wanted to bestow a little affection on the sweet dog. Sprinkles could be a mess at times, but she’d clearly filled an important void in Violet’s life. He’d spent more nights than he cared to admit lying in bed wondering why on earth she’d adopted a Dalmatian. He’d just never expected her reason to put an ache in his impenetrable heart.
He couldn’t tell Violet those things, though. Not now. They were in a pizza parlor, not a court of law. Besides, Joe and Josh had shuffled over in their blue softball jerseys and cleats and were currently regarding him through narrowed eyes.
“Is everything okay over here?” Josh said.
“Everything’s wonderful,” Mavis said.
Joe and Josh weren’t buying it.
“Vi?” Joe peered at his sister.
“I’m fine,” Violet said. “Sam here was just mansplaining to me that he didn’t cause Sprinkles to interfere with the game.”
“Mansplaining?” Sam laughed, good and loud. “We were having a conversation. I’m simply trying to tell you that what happened was nothing but an accident. I don’t cheat.”
“If you say so.” Violet shrugged.
“And I’ll let you in on a little secret.” Sam leaned forward, and a forbidden thrill skittered through him when her cheeks flared pink. “I don’t care who wins this asinine softball tournament.”
Mavis, Opal, and Ethel gasped. Joe and Josh both stared at him as if he’d just sprouted an additional head.
Violet looked as though she was doing her best not to roll her eyes. “I don’t believe that for a second, and if you truly don’t care, maybe I can help you change that.”
Sam cocked his head, and Cinder mirrored him, tilting her little doggy head until one of her ears dangled. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
“Nothing.” Joe shook his head. “Violet, stay out of this.”
“Stop telling me what to do. This is between Sam and me,” Violet said. There was that sweet smile of hers again—the one that dripped equal parts sugar and trouble.
Sam’s head told him to get up and walk away before he did something he’d regret, but his body stayed put.
He arched a brow. “It sounds like you’re proposing a wager.”
“Viol
et,” Joe warned again.
She kept her attention focused squarely on Sam. “Indeed, I am.”
“Well, now.” Ethel clapped her hands. “Things are finally getting interesting around here.”
“I’ll say.” Mavis’s eyes danced, and her Chihuahua panted with excitement.
Josh and Joe heaved twin sighs.
“What are the terms?” Sam asked, as if he was actually considering a bet. Which he definitely wasn’t.
Probably not, anyway.
“Winner takes all, obviously. If the police department takes home the softball trophy, I win. If the firefighters end up as champions, you win.” She shrugged. “Easy peasy.”
Sam chuckled under his breath. Nothing about this woman was easy. “But you’re already one game down.”
“So?” She shrugged again. “We were winning before Sprinkles ran onto the field. I guess you’re not quite the ringer everyone thought you were.”
Sam’s mouth went dry, and he suppressed the urge to remind her that he’d spent half an inning at her cupcake truck instead of on the diamond. Why was he suddenly feeling all prickly and defensive? He’d been telling the truth when he’d said he didn’t care who won the tournament.
Clearly, he was beginning to feel more invested.
He narrowed his gaze at Violet. “What happens if you win?”
“If I win, you and Cinder have to spend four Saturday afternoons during the height of tourist season on Seashell Drive passing out flyers for Sweetness on Wheels…”
That was it? Somehow, he’d expected the founder of the #FreeCinder movement to come up with something more humiliating.
Violet fluttered her eyelashes at him, all sweetness and charm. “…dressed as cupcakes.”
