Playing for Keeps Read online

  Okay, so she didn’t get over herself, not even close. But she could keep that close to the vest. In fact, she could hold a grudge until the end of time if she wanted, and she’d come by that ability naturally from her mother, but even she wasn’t bitchy enough to do so against a woman who was genuinely a pretty great person.

  Turned out, Lollipop had been born with only three legs, so she didn’t know anything else and she had no idea that she was disabled. She was a bit undernourished, but otherwise healthy. She didn’t have a microchip. Dr. Consuela got her up to date on her vaccinations and administered a deworming treatment among a few other things, each making Sadie more panicked than the last because . . . The Cost.

  But watching Caleb with Lollipop, clearly enjoying his first real connection with a dog, was oddly . . . intense, and not in a negative way, much as she’d like it to be so.

  “You really should microchip,” Dr. Consuela said and looked between Caleb and Sadie. “Who’s adopting her?”

  “Me,” Sadie said at the very same time that Caleb said, “I am.”

  Chapter 6

  #BlindFaith

  Shocked to the core, Sadie stared at Caleb. “What? No. You can’t adopt. You’re allergic. Look, I appreciate the ride here, very much. And I’ll pay you back for everything, I promise, but—”

  “You could co-parent,” Dr. Consuela suggested.

  “But we’re not together,” Sadie said for the second time that morning.

  Dr. Consuela shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. Co-petting’s a new craze, actually, making it easier for people who work and have very full lives to have a pet. Sharing alleviates half of the day-to-day responsibility.”

  Sadie turned to see Caleb’s reaction to this ridiculousness, positive she’d see a smile curving his mouth at the thought of them sharing the dog.

  No smile. Just a thoughtful, inward expression. He was actually considering this.

  “Are you off your rocker?” she asked.

  “No more than you, I imagine. Do you want to keep her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too,” he said. Quiet steel. “I don’t know what I’m doing obviously, but I’m drawn to her, very much. So . . . we doing this?”

  She blew out a shaky breath. “You don’t have time in your life for a dog.”

  “That’s my call. Yes or no, Sadie?”

  She already loved Lollipop with all her black heart and couldn’t imagine being without her. But if she said yes, she was tying herself to Caleb as well as the dog. Say no. “Yes.” Dammit.

  Dr. Consuela smiled. “It’s official then. Welcome to parenthood. You can check out at the front desk.”

  Sadie looked at Caleb, whose gaze was warm and did something funny to her belly. Oh boy . . .

  Two minutes later they were at the front desk. They’d been offered a custom tag for Lollipop’s collar and had come up against their first joint decision—whose address to use on the tag.

  “I’d like it to be mine,” she said, her need for control coming over her.

  Caleb shook his head and her warm fuzzies vanished.

  “Why?” she asked. “I had her first.”

  He didn’t dispute that, even though she knew he certainly could’ve made the argument that he’d had her first. He just looked at her with those fathomless caramel eyes.

  “What?” she asked a little temperamentally. She couldn’t help it. When he looked at her like that, like he could see all of her, the good, the bad, and the ugly, she had the urge to bury her head in the sand because again, no one had ever seen all of her. “Give me one good reason why it shouldn’t be my address on the tag.”

  “Okay,” he said quietly, apparently refusing to engage her temper with his. “You don’t appear to actually be living at your place.”

  She held up a hand as a surge of something ugly went through her. Pride, she knew, and ego. Both were a bitch. “Where I live and why is none of your business.”

  “We’re going to have to agree to disagree there,” he said. “But for now, my point is that if Lollipop goes missing, it needs to be an address where one of us is actually living.” He reached out and covered her hand with his. “We also need a phone number listed and that can be yours. It should be yours, because as you said, she was yours first and I know how much you care about her and would want to hear right away if someone found her.”

  Her anger abruptly drained for something else entirely and left her feeling off-balance and exposed and uncomfortable. She didn’t understand it, but when she was with him, she felt like she was in a lightning storm over open water. Aka, possibly in mortal danger.

  “Aw,” the vet tech behind the front counter said with a smile. “This is one lucky dog. You guys are so great together.”

  Sadie opened her mouth to say for the third time that day that they weren’t together, but Caleb beat her to it.

  “We’re not together,” he said easily as he handed over his fancy credit card.

  She stared at him and he ignored her staring at him.

  Five minutes later they were back in Caleb’s car. He’d quickly settled the bill and neither of them spoke another word as he belted Lollipop into her Hello Kitty dog harness seatbelt.

  “You guys are so great together . . .”

  Sadie knew why that had freaked her out more than a little bit, but she had no idea why Caleb had suddenly backed off. All she knew was that the more she thought about it, the more it chapped her ass. She was a damn catch!

  Well, she would be a damn catch once she got her life together. Not that she wanted to be a catch . . .

  Good Lord. She was so messed up in the head.

  Caleb, who hadn’t yet started the car, was watching her think too hard, one hand at the back of her headrest, the other on the steering wheel. “Okay, spill it,” he said. “First you were annoyed when I suggested we were a team for Lollipop, and now you’re annoyed when I don’t say it. Help me out here. What’s going on?”

  What was going on was that in the close, intimate interior of the car, the scent of him came to her. Sexy smelling soap, something citrusy and outdoorsy, and the man himself, which—dammit—was even better than the muffins he’d fed her for breakfast.

  “Talk to me, Sadie.”

  “Arf!” Lollipop said.

  Caleb smiled and his gaze flicked to the rearview mirror. “Not you.” He turned back to Sadie. “You. You talk to me.”

  “Aren’t you late for your morning world domination or something?”

  His fingers left the headrest and wrapped around a stray strand of her hair. “World domination’s on hold at the moment. Right now I’m doing this.”

  “This?”

  “Yes, this. With you. Whatever the hell it is. I don’t understand why you so carefully weigh everything you say to me. Don’t hold back, Sadie. It’s not like you. Just say your piece.”

  “Alright,” she said. “I don’t understand why you’d want to share a dog with me.”

  “Because I’m willing to take what I can get.”

  “Of Lollipop?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer that, just held her gaze, and her heart flip-flopped. He was willing to take whatever he could get of her? She had no idea what that even meant, or how to feel about it. “So why then were you so quick to tell the vet tech we weren’t together?” she asked.

  He raised a brow. “Should I have said otherwise?”

  “Of course not,” she said, though he sure as hell could’ve hesitated at least a little bit. “But just so you know, I’m a catch.”

  His mouth quirked, but his eyes stayed serious. “I have no doubt, Tough Girl.”

  Was that sarcasm? “Not that you’ll ever find out. I don’t date guys like you.”

  “You mean nice?”

  “I mean gazillionaires.” Though she hadn’t made nice all that much of a priority either. Another reason she’d given up men. She had no nice meter, at all.

  He let his smile through. “But you’re thinking about it no