Page 36 of Knot Baked Out For This
"People change," I say carefully.
"Do they?" Her voice has an edge sharp enough to cut. "Or do they just get better at pretending?"
Before I can respond, chaos incarnate arrives in the form of seventy pounds of golden retriever puppy.
"BISCUIT! NO!"
The shout comes too late. The dog—because calling it a puppy is generous when it's the size of a small pony—barrels through the fairground like a furry missile. Hay flies in its wake. A kid drops his candy apple. Someone's craft display goes airborne.
And the dog's trajectory?
Straight for Hazel's perfectly arranged table.
Fuck.
I move before thinking, but I'm three seconds and ten feet too late.
Biscuit hits Hazel's display like a wrecking ball made of enthusiasm and bad decisions. The table rocks. Pies slide with the slow-motion inevitability of disaster. Hazel lunges to save them, her feet hit the straw-covered ground, and?—
No.
She's falling.
I catch her just before she hits the ground, my hands finding her upper arms, hauling her back against my chest. The impact rocks through me—soft curves against hard muscle, her back pressed to my front, the perfect fit of her in my arms that my body remembers even if we're both pretending it doesn't.
Time stops.
Or maybe that's just my heart.
She's breathing hard, little puffs of air that I can feel through my shirt. Her scent explodes around us—vanilla and cinnamon and that smoke-sweet undertone that meansaroused-frightened-safeall at once. My own scent responds without permission, cedar smoke and bourbon wrapping around her like I'm trying to mark her through proximity alone.
Let go. You need to let go.
My hands won't cooperate.
She's warm and real and here, fitting against me like she was carved from my missing pieces. Her heart hammers against her ribs—I can feel it through our clothes, rabbit-quick and wild. Her hair smells like vanilla extract and dawn baking, and I want to bury my face in it and breathe until I die.
This is how you went wrong before. This is exactly how?—
Camera flashes explode around us like fireworks.
"IT'S LOVE AT FIRST SPILL!"
Dottie James pushes through the suddenly-gathered crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea, if Moses was seventy-three and armed with a bedazzled phone case.
"Did everyone see that?" She's practically vibrating with gossip euphoria. "He caught her! Just like in those romance novels at the library! The ones in the back corner that we don't talk about but everyone reads!"
Jesus Christ.
Hazel stiffens in my arms—going from soft to stone in half a heartbeat. She pulls away, and I let her because the alternative is holding on and never letting go, and that's not an option. Never was.
"I'm fine," she says to no one in particular, her face the color of the pies currently decorating the ground. "Totally fine. Just... gravity and dogs and..."
"And Alpha heroes!" Dottie crows. "Someone call the newspaper! This is front-page material! 'Local Firefighter Saves Baker from Puppy Peril!'"
"No one's calling anyone," I growl, but Dottie's already got her phone out, probably live-tweeting the whole thing.
Hazel turns on me, and there's murder in those hazel eyes. "You're everywhere I turn lately," she says, brushing flour from her apron with violent efficiency. "Like some kind of Alpha stalker GPS."
