Page 32 of A Spot of Trouble
Even so, Violet answered his question before she could stop herself. “If you’d really like to know, it’s because my mom had a Dalmatian.”
“Your mom?” Surprise splashed across Sam’s face.
“She died when I was a baby, so I never actually knew her. But I know she had a Dalmatian when she was about my age, so when I spotted Sprinkles at an adoption fair in Wilmington, it seemed like fate.” Violet shrugged as if to make light of the conversation, but her insides had gone all fluttery. She usually loved talking about her mom, but doing so with Sam made her feel acutely vulnerable.
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, therealher, 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 panickednoooooooo, 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. Agenius.” 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 hadnotgone 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 decidedlyunhappy—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.Reallyknow 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 wasstoic. 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.
