Page 23 of Sweet Devotion

The band hit the fight song at full volume and the home team came charging through a paper banner held up by the cheerleaders. The crowd surged to its feet, clapping and shouting, and before she could think better of it, Colleen found herself grabbing Aiden’s arm.

First quarter went to the Hawks and the bleachers vibrated with stomping feet. She joined in without thinking about it. Aiden joined in a half second later, the delayed response of a man whose instincts had arrived before his self-consciousness caught up.

Second quarter tightened. She could feel the mood shifting in the crowd the way you could always feel it—that collective inhale when something wasn’t going right, the held breath, the muttered commentary from the rows around them.

Then the flag came down.

The crowd reacted before she fully registered what had happened—a unified sound somewhere between a groan and an outrage that bounced off the metal bleachers and the open Texas air. She was on her feet.

“That was not holding.” The words came out before she’d decided to say them.

Beside her Aiden stood up. “His hands never left the frame.”

“That was a clean block.” She had her hands out toward the field in the universal gesture of complete disbelief.

“Textbook.” He looked genuinely offended on behalf of a teenager he’d never met. “Textbook.”

“Blind,” she said. “That referee is completely blind.”

“Or bought.” Flat. Dry. Utterly certain.

The laugh that came out of her was louder than she intended and completely beyond her control. Several people around them turned. She didn’t care even slightly. Aiden caught her eye and the corner of his mouth moved and that was somehow funnier than the comment itself.

They sat back down and she realized her shoulder was against his and neither of them adjusted.

The Hawks recovered. The crowd recovered with them, building back through the third quarter with the particular stubbornness of people who had been coming to these bleachers their whole lives and were not going home unhappy.

The visiting team answered with a methodical drive down the field, helped along by a pass interference call that had half the stadium booing before the referee even finished his signal. Colleen surged forward on the bench. “Oh, come on!”

At that exact moment Aiden barked, “Are you kidding me?”

She whipped her head toward him.

He looked just as offended as she felt.

“That was uncatchable.”

“That’s exactly what I was about to say.”

Aiden sat back, still staring at the field. “Terrible call.”

“Awful.” Her gaze narrowed and her lips pressed tightly together.

He glanced at her. “You get this worked up every game?”

One shoulder hefted high in a casual shrug. “Only when the ref is blind.”

“For the record, I’m with you.” His gaze returned to the action on the field.

Why did she find this man so incredibly fascinating? He worked through pain, she knew that, she’d seen it before. Nothing unusual for a military man, and yet, this one seemed different. “Who’s your favorite team?”

“Right now, the Hawks.”

That made her smile. So did that mean he was loyal to this town and his friends, or disloyal to his favorite pro team. “I mean professional team.”

“That would be the Giants.”

“Of course.”