it further physically or in any other way.
In short, Jane was a conundrum Cole hadn’t come across before, and therefore he had no idea how to act. He’d just been going with the flow, letting her call the shots, but, as he’d said last night, what happened when they wanted more? When kissing turned to touching, when light caresses turned to bold, purposeful petting and the shedding of clothes?
She’d been adamant she wouldn’t want more, and he’d agreed. As much to convince himself as to convince her. But he was calling bullshit on that—it was going to happen. He could feel it in the slow thud of his pulse, like a drumroll building in his blood.
He knew it as sure as he knew he was never playing rugby again.
“Heads up, Cole!”
Long-honed reflexes saw Cole’s hands automatically reaching for a ball as it spiraled into his chest. He made a harsh kind of oomph noise at the impact. The small-town cop might not have played football in years, but the dude still had a good arm.
So much for the clinic being a distraction. Jesus, man. Get your head in the game.
Arlo grinned at him. “You need an aspirin?”
Suppressing the urge to flip the bird to a cop in front of a bunch of impressionable kids, Cole dragged his head back in the game. Twenty-five kids—twenty-five!—had turned up at the clinic, ranging from Finn at four years old all the way to seventeen. So had quite a few parents, Drew from the funeral home, and a guy called Austin Cooper, who was one of Arlo’s junior officers.
Grimacing, Cole rubbed his chest absently and turned his attention to the different stations he’d set up in the park. Thankfully, there were plenty of trees and they’d been able to keep most of the activities in the shade. It was a little overcast today, which kept things cooler, but there was no disguising it was summer.
Most of the kids were upper-grade-school age and merely needed supervision while performing the set tasks, but there were six kids aged four to five that needed considerably more direction, which was why Cole was at their station. There were three boys and three girls, and, if he wasn’t the one trying to tame them—if he’d just been sitting in the bleachers, observing—he’d have thought it was the most hysterical thing he’d ever seen.
But he was the one down here on the field with them, and it was like trying to herd dyslexic cats.
Finn was pretty good. He’d done some ball work with Cole already these past few days, and he clearly wanted to prove to the other kids that he knew what he was doing. The other five were a mixed bunch of what-the-ever-loving-hell. He already had nicknames for them all.
There was Rambo, because he ran at everything like a bull at a gate, wielding the ball as if it was a machete. Crikey because he stopped every two seconds to stare at ants and butterflies and other similar tiny creatures busy in the grass. Qantas because her uncle apparently was an airline pilot and she’d spent most of her time lying on her back, pointing at planes flying overhead, and making animal shapes out of the clouds.
And then there were Roo and Moo, four-year-old twins. Roo because bouncing appeared to be her natural gait, which was great for covering distances but not so good when it came to the coordination required for kicking. And Moo because the kid seemed to be intent on eating as much grass as she could get her hands on.
It was the full little-league nightmare.
“Okay,” Cole said, drawing their attention. Moo paused with a blade of grass halfway to her mouth and thankfully tossed it on the ground. The last thing he wanted was to have to take the kid to the ER for a stomach pump of grass.
“What we’re going to do next is run between these traffic cones. But not in a straight line; you have to weave like this.”
Cole demonstrated for them, running in a passable fashion without his cane, conscious of the limitations of his hip and his audience. Not that the kids noticed—not when an out-of-uniform Arlo was parading around in cargo shorts that exposed the sleek metal line of his prosthesis, looking like something out of Captain America.
Which was freeing in a way Cole hadn’t expected. He was surprised how unimportant his injury seemed when nobody was paying him any attention. Everything back home had been focused on