14. Sophie
SOPHIE
By ten thirty this morning, I was officially suspicious.
The kind of suspicious normally reserved for miracle diets, people who claimed they enjoyed assembling IKEA furniture, and emails that started with Congratulations! Something about all this competence felt… statistically unlikely.
Because the festival had been open for a few hours and nothing had exploded.
No animals had escaped or kicked a kid in the face. Nobody had called the fire department, the health inspector hadn’t fainted, and as far as I knew, no one had attempted to sue anyone over a hot dog.
Bandit had remained inside the petting zoo, Theo had adopted approximately seventeen different children as temporary best friends, and Daisy continued judging everyone from a respectful distance. And the donkey? Well, he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
It all felt… strangely wrong. Not bad. Just wrong. Like the universe had forgotten about me for a few hours and would eventually remember with alarming enthusiasm. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So far, it hadn’t.
I turned just in time to catch a volunteer hurrying toward me.
She looked to be in her early forties with rosy cheeks that gave her face a permanently cheerful roundness, long, curly brown hair, and a faded black Star Wars T-shirt stretched beneath an unzipped festival volunteer hoodie.
An ID badge bounced against her chest with every hurried step, and she clutched a clipboard like it was the only thing preventing complete organizational collapse.
Here it comes.
“Yes?” I asked her, my heart thumping in my chest.
“We’re almost out of ketchup,” she panted.
I blinked. “That’s it?”
She frowned. “Should there be something else?”
“No.” I smiled a little too brightly. “Ketchup. Great. I can absolutely handle ketchup.” I nodded with far more confidence than the subject of condiments deserved.
She wrinkled her face in confusion. “Should I go buy more?”
“Yes. Great idea. Thanks.”
She gave me an uncertain smile, as though she wasn’t entirely convinced she’d just witnessed a normal human reaction to a ketchup shortage, and then turned and hurried back toward the food trucks, her hair bouncing behind her.
I watched her leave, and my pulse slowly returned to something resembling normal. Normal for today, that is.
I jerked as something tugged on my sleeve.
Glancing down, a little boy of about nine or ten looked up at me, still clutching the fabric.
Freckles were scattered generously across his nose, a shock of sandy-blond hair stuck up in three different directions beneath a tiny blue baseball cap, and his oversized festival T-shirt hung almost to his knees.
He looked up at me with wide brown eyes full of complete seriousness, as though he was about to report an international emergency.
“Miss Sophie?” he said.
“Yes?”
“A goat sneezed on my dad.”
I looked over toward the petting zoo. Sure enough, a very amused Bandit stood beside a thoroughly unimpressed man whose entire jacket now sported what appeared to be fresh goat mucus.
Nice.
It wasn’t even a little sneeze either. Several impressive globs of goat snot still clung to the front of the man’s shirt, one of them slowly inching its way toward his belt.
The little boy looked delighted. Like he’d just witnessed the greatest event of his young life and couldn’t wait to tell his friends that his dad got slimed by a goat.
His father… not so much. He stood there holding his arms slightly away from his body while staring down at the damage with quiet disbelief, like he’d probably left the house expecting hot dogs and games, not biological warfare.
A month ago, I would’ve been grossed out. Today, I was trying very hard not to laugh.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, already grabbing a handful of paper towels and hurrying toward him. “He’s still working on his social skills.”
Bandit wagged his tail. The traitor looked proud of himself. If anything, he seemed to think he’d successfully welcomed another visitor to the festival. Somewhere deep inside that tiny goat brain, he was probably expecting a participation ribbon.
Five minutes later, the situation had been resolved with apologies, paper towels, and two complimentary festival drink vouchers. Fortunately, the father had a good sense of humor once the initial shock wore off and enough paper towels had entered the conversation.
He laughed. The little boy declared Bandit his favorite goat. Ever. Which of course, Bandit accepted this praise with entirely too much confidence. He puffed himself up and trotted around the pen like he’d just won Best in Show instead of Best in Unexpected Nasal Discharge.
The morning rolled on.
Children laughed. The food trucks stayed busy.
Happy chatter drifted from all the different vendors.
Volunteers smiled instead of panicking. People wandered from booth to booth carrying lemonade, hot dogs, and oversized stuffed animals that looked larger than some of the children dragging them around.
Still no explosion. No great collapse. Everything was actually going… well.
And people actually thanked me.
Me. Sophie the disaster was a disaster no more. At least for the moment. I wasn’t na?ve enough to think the universe had suddenly changed its opinion of me forever. It was probably just taking a coffee break.
Still, I’d take it as a win.
My stomach, my nerves, had spent the last forty-eight hours preparing for a complete catastrophe. All that anxiety had trained for this moment.
But so far, things were moving along smoothly.
And through it all, I was looking for Captain Competent.
I wouldn’t lie and pretend I wasn’t. Damn Lola and Dottie for putting ideas in my head. Ideas I’d already been thinking myself, but still. Before breakfast they’d just been thoughts. Now they refused to leave me alone.
I tried not to seem like I was looking for him, in case he was watching me.
So how does a woman spy on a man without him knowing?
She goes into full-on stealth mode, that’s what.
Which meant I’d casually glance around the square for the hot sheriff, and then I’d suddenly become deeply fascinated by absolutely everything else. Flower baskets. Garbage cans. The ticket booth. I even nodded thoughtfully at a recycling bin.
I was scanning the area with what I hoped was the relaxed curiosity of an event planner surveying her festival.
Not a crazy-ass stalker.
Which, admittedly, I kind of was at the moment.
What the hell was wrong with me? Hormones? Maybe. A sexy sheriff—a single, sexy sheriff—who’d happened to glance at my lips? Possibly. Very possibly.
Yes, I might have been a complete mess for the past few months. But I was still a warm-blooded female. And I had eyes.
But he wasn’t here.
Too bad since I’d memorized the way one corner of his mouth lifted when he almost smiled.
Yup. Total stalker.
And just when I’d finally convinced myself he probably hadn’t come by yet and my brain could kindly move on to something productive… like ketchup inventories, emergency exit routes, or literally any thought that didn’t involve Captain Competent…
I spotted him.
He stood near the information booth talking to one of his deputies, his dark sheriff’s uniform crisp despite the growing warmth of the morning. His sunglasses rested on top of his head, pushing back a few strands of dark hair the breeze had already managed to undo.
One hand rested casually on his duty belt while the other moved as he spoke, calm and unhurried, with the kind of quiet confidence that somehow made everyone around him relax without realizing why.
And I was still staring at him.
People drifted toward him naturally. A volunteer stopped to ask him something. An elderly couple smiled as they passed. A little girl proudly showed him the blue ribbon she’d won at one of the games, and he crouched just enough to admire it like it was the most important thing he’d see all day.
That made my heart squeeze a little.
I kept staring.
He had this irritating habit of making whoever he was talking to feel like they were the only person in the crowd, which was both incredibly admirable and spectacularly inconvenient for my ability to remain emotionally uninvolved.
Could the man be any more… sheriff?
Then, as though he could actually feel someone staring at him, he turned his head.
Our eyes met.
“Shit!”
I ducked behind the pretzel booth.
Smooth, Sophie. Very subtle.
Nothing says I wasn’t staring at you quite like hiding behind carbohydrates.
Then, because I had learned absolutely nothing from the previous five seconds, and my self-preservation instincts had gone home for the day, I risked another quick glance.
He was still looking at me.
And unless my sleep deprivation had reached full hallucination territory, one corner of his mouth lifted. Just a little.
Oh, yeah. Sheriff face. With the tiniest crack in it.
Heat rushed to my cheeks and up into my head until I swear even my scalp was sweating. And now my stomach was doing gymnastics. Super.
“Sophie!”
I winced and turned in time to see Helen weaving through the crowd faster than I’d seen anyone move without technically running.
She apologized to three people without actually slowing down, sidestepped a stroller with surprising agility, and nearly collided with a man carrying three lemonades.
One somehow survived in his cup. The other two, less so.
She walked like her brain had already sprinted five minutes ahead of her body.
The clipboard she’d been carrying was tucked under one arm, her red reading glasses were perched crookedly on top of her head, and she looked… panicked. Really panicked. Her usual neat silver hair had escaped its clip in several places, and her brow was drawn so low it nearly shadowed her eyes.
Oh crap.
There it was. I knew it. The universe had simply been building suspense. Of course it had. It couldn’t possibly let me enjoy an uneventful morning. That would’ve set a dangerous precedent.