Chapter Seven #2
Guilt gnawed at Calla’s insides. She was, wasn’t she? She didn’t want to be, though. Not anymore, anyway. Not completely . That had to count for something, didn’t it?
“Let’s do it,” she said and pasted on a smile like she’d been waiting all her life to learn how to make a diamondback ribbon braid.
Even though she didn’t have any idea what one of those even looked like.
* * *
“Come on, man. You’ve got this,” Jackson prompted. “You’ve got to keep on pushing, even when it’s hard. Champions aren’t born, they’re made.”
He was using his best, most encouraging coach voice. If the object of his little pep talk had been one of his players, he might’ve gotten some results. He wasn’t speaking to one of his students, though. He was talking to the freaking dog.
Bishop stood on the sidewalk in front of the string of quaint shops along Bulldog Avenue, refusing to budge at the end of his leash.
Jackson had cajoled and encouraged the animal for the past twenty minutes, and they’d moved all of three feet.
If the coach-speak didn’t work, he might have to resort to begging.
“Look, I don’t want to be out here after dark any more than you do.” Jackson gave the leash a gentle tug.
Still nothing.
He’d learned something about the school mascot in the past few days—something that hadn’t been mentioned at all in his employment contract, which Jackson had recently pored over with a fine-toothed comb in an effort to avoid any further surprises.
Nowhere in all that fine print—not even in the all-important mascot clause—had anyone thought it necessary to mention that Bishop suffered from separation anxiety.
It seemed like a vital nugget of information to leave out.
Had he been given a heads-up, he might not have come home from his first full school day to find a hole the size of Texas in one of his sofa cushions.
Just when he’d begun to feel somewhat decent about himself—just when he’d thought he might have what it took to be a leader in this nutty community—he’d walked in the door of his rental home to find bits of foam stuffing covering the entire living room floor.
The irony was that he hadn’t even known Bishop was capable of jumping onto the couch.
Every time he wanted to get up there when Jackson was home, the dog planted his big head on the edge of the sofa cushion and gazed up at him with sad puppy-dog eyes, imploring to be picked up.
Now Jackson knew better. He was a sucker.
Bishop already had him wrapped around his sizable paw, and contrary to what the dog-training videos on YouTube said, taking the pup on a brisk walk every day wasn’t helping his separation anxiety.
Yesterday, Jackson had come home and found every single one of his socks scattered about the house.
Today, the bulldog had somehow ripped apart a bag of flour.
Every surface of the kitchen had been covered in white powder, and it wasn’t nearly as cute and endearing as it looked in Hallmark Christmas movies.
Bishop took a reluctant step and then collapsed into a heap in front of the lone storefront that still had its lights on. Laughter and music filtered from inside. It sounded like a party.
Jackson glanced up at the striped awning, expecting the place to be some kind of pub or maybe a bar.
Weirdly, it was a florist. That explained the fresh flowers flanking the door, but it was awfully late for people to be inside a flower shop.
He wondered what was going on in there, just like he wondered if there would ever be a day when Bishop Falls failed to surprise him.
Then, as he tried to peer inside the tiny window on the front door, the door itself swung open and a giggly Calla Dunne spilled onto the sidewalk.
At least it looked like Calla. Jackson had never seen her quite so…
animated . Her cheeks were flushed as pink as a carnation, and she held some sort of flower arrangement in one of her hands—a giant white bloom with a random assortment of objects glued to its petals.
The hodgepodge was surrounded by a tangle of green and white ribbons that hung nearly all the way to the ground.
She stumbled as one of the ribbons caught beneath the sole of a red cowgirl boot, and Jackson reached out to steady her.
“Easy there,” he said, regarding her with a bemused grin.
“Oh.” Calla dropped the flower and her hands landed on his chest, splayed over his pectoral muscles. Her gaze traveled upward until their eyes met. “It’s you.”
“It’s me,” he said with a quirk of an eyebrow.
Her hands didn’t budge. She left them right where they were as a cute little furrow formed between her brows. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just out taking Bishop for a walk.” He tipped his head toward the dog, who’d scrambled to his feet to sniff the dropped flower. Funny how he’d been too lazy to budge a second ago, and now he seemed as perky as ever.
“At this time of night?” She glanced at the full moon overhead, and when her gaze shifted back toward him, it landed on her fingertips, still pressed against the front of his Chicago Cyclones T-shirt.
She cleared her throat and promptly snatched her hands back, folding her arms across her chest as she schooled her expression to one of carefully guarded professionalism. Too bad. He’d enjoyed the brief glimpse he’d gotten of her finally letting her hair down.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked as the color in her cheeks deepened a shade or two closer to the cherry red leather of her chosen footwear.
Good question. He’d wondered the same thing every time he found himself watching her banging away on her laptop or taking notes in the stands at practice when he should’ve been paying attention to what was happening on the field.
“I’m not sure, actually. For some reason, I just find you hard to look away from,” he said in a rare moment of unguarded honesty.
“Stop.” She held up a hand mere inches from his face, and Jackson had the ridiculous urge to reach up and weave his fingers through hers.
This town was doing strange things to him. That’s what Jackson told himself, anyway, because it was a far less dangerous theory than believing she was the one responsible for his recent earnest streak.
“Stop what?” he asked.
“Stop flirting or whatever it is that you’re doing right now.” Her eyes glittered in the moonlight, as blue and brilliant as the rarest of sapphires.
“Calla, if I was flirting with you, you’d know it,” he said evenly.
She let out a little cough. “Okay, well. It’s just that I’m a reporter and you’re—”
“The object of every single one of your articles.” He nodded. “Got it.”
Her mouth dropped open for a beat, and then she collected herself. “Arrogant, much? I write about the Bulldogs, not you.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” he teased.
He’d read all her columns, because of course he had.
He’d been dying to know what she scribbled in that notepad of hers.
Given his most recent newsworthy occurrences, he’d expected her to rip him to shreds.
Color him surprised when she’d called him a natural at coaching, even if that compliment had been tempered by a line in today’s column that called his offensive strategy “unimaginative.”
She’d been right. The offensive plays the team was working on weren’t anything to write home about.
But they were the ones the kids had been practicing all summer under Coach Simmons’s leadership.
There hadn’t been time to reinvent the wheel—not when everyone expected the team to win big on Friday night.
“It’s awfully late, Coach Knight,” she said, deftly changing the subject. “Shouldn’t you be at home, resting up for kickoff?”
He was coaching the game, not playing. Still, this week had been just about as exhausting as if he was expected to suit up and carry the ball himself.
“Bishop needs to be walked. It’s a whole thing, and this is the only time I can do it without people stopping me to ask about the team.”
Calla glanced up and down the street at all the football-themed businesses. “That tracks.”
Jackson couldn’t really go anywhere in broad daylight.
He’d learned that lesson real quick. Everyone had an opinion or a game plan that they couldn’t wait to share with him.
Other than his morning trips to Huddle Up with Cade, he’d become a hermit in his modest flour-covered house off the town green.
“It’s late for you, too. You’re covering the game tomorrow.” He slid his gaze toward the door to the flower shop. “What exactly is going on in there?”
“It’s my friend Marigold’s annual mum party.
I was having a good time, believe it or not, but it turns out I’m sort of terrible at making mums, so I decided to call it a night.
” She bent to pick up the dropped flower and gave Bishop a scratch behind the ears before standing back up and letting the limp blossom dangle from her fingertips. “I present this disaster as evidence.”
Jackson shook his head. “I have so many questions.”
She laughed. “You don’t even know what a homecoming mum is, do you?”
“Guilty.” He winced. “You’re not going to tell SportsSphere, are you?”
“It’s a Texas thing. SportsSphere wouldn’t care, I promise.” She laughed again, and the way it lit up her whole face made Jackson want to hang on to the moment as long as he could. Would that really be so bad? It didn’t mean they had to cross any invisible professional boundary line.
“Thank goodness for that.” He grinned, then he gave Bishop’s leash a tug, fully intent on walking away.
No fast cars, no fast women.
But Calla hardly fit into that category, did she?
She was different. There was an authenticity about her that drew Jackson in, like gravity.
She was unapologetically herself and never hesitated to speak her mind.
From the start, she’d been thoroughly unimpressed with him, even before he’d stuck his foot in his mouth at the press conference.
Perhaps that’s why the complimentary tone of her column and moments like this one—moments when he felt an undeniable connection between them—meant so much. They were real .
Football had given Jackson a lot of things, but meaningful relationships weren’t chief among them.
And he liked it that way. Aside from a few select teammates, Jackson didn’t let people get too close.
It was for their own good, not his. Time and again, he’d screwed up a good thing.
Everyone knew that. Heck, there’d been entire television documentaries chronicling his mistakes.
That’s how he’d wound up in Bishop Falls to begin with.
He’d never hurt Calla Dunne, though. He knew this for two solid reasons. First, like she’d said, they couldn’t fool around. If they did, it would probably put her job in jeopardy, and Jackson would likely get dumped by his agent.
Second, just the thought of anyone causing her any pain whatsoever made him want to put a fist through a wall.
There goes that earnestness again.
Jackson averted his eyes to the flower shop window where his gaze landed on his reflection. For a bewildering second, he didn’t recognize the guy with the bulldog panting at his feet. He swallowed and swung his gaze back toward Calla.
“Let Bishop and me walk you home. I need to hear about this mum business.”