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“Only the best for my favorite reporter,” he teased, making them both blush.
“Wherever did you score all this?” she gushed. She stood from the stadium bench seat where she’d been waiting to help him with the awkwardly heaping tray.
“There’s a hot dog stand outside the stadium to catch all of us broke athletes on the way out after practice each day,” Shane explained, setting the soda cans down on the bench in front of her. “I caught him just as he was closing up shop for the afternoon.”
“Lucky me,” Tatum enthused, stomach growling even as she said the words. “I just remembered I hadn’t eaten all day.”
“Same here.” He huffed, sinking down across from her as she struggled to ignore the way the afternoon sun bathed his lean, athletic face in sexy shadows. His thin fingers, lean and athletic to match the rest of his jock aesthetic, unwrapped a hot dog from a foil wrapper and handed it her way. “Dig in,” he offered.
She took it, wondering—and not for the first time—if his good old country boy gentlemanly shtick was all just an act or if he was really just a sweet boy who hadn’t been tarnished by the big, bad ways of college life yet. He caught her thinking, scratching under the brim of his Sycamore State ball cap. “What’cha thinkin’ over there, missy?”
“Nothing, it’s just … I honestly can’t remember the last time a guy bought me dinner, that’s all.”
Geez, Tatum,she thought to herself, almost shaking her head at the audacity of it all.Pathetic much?
She shouldn’t have been so honest with him. Not so soon, and not at all. She had no cause to be. He was two years younger, just a pup really, and lived in a different world than hers. Yet, those soft green eyes and his gentle, unlined face just begged her to confess everything, anything, whenever it crossed her dumb, desperate mind.
“Well, that’s a damn shame,” he blurted before shoving half a hot dog in his craw in one bite.
She couldn’t have agreed more, inhaling the hot dog in record time, and washing it down with the cheap grape soda he’d brought for them both. “God, that’s good.” She held out the can to see its name: Goober Grape.
“Sorry, it’s all he had left.”
“I mean it. I … I can’t remember the last time I’ve had grape soda, either.”
“Dang, girl, your man got you chained up in a basement somewhere or somethin’?”
Tatum snorted laughter at the observation, finding it not far from the truth. “There’s no man, God knows, but I do grind pretty hard these days trying to keep my academic scholarship up and a roof over my head.”
“No man? That’s a damn shame, too.”
“Says who?” she chuffed, thoughts of her sleazy ex making her shiver despite the unsavory September heat.
Shane heard the reproach in her voice, holding up his second hot dog in surrender. “Sorry, sore subject?”
She nudged his foot playfully with her own, hardly believing how flirty she was being with Shane—and so soon! “Will you stop interviewing me already? That’smyjob, remember?”
Shane chuckled, a soft and friendly sound, polishing off his second hot dog before wadding up his foil wrapper and placing it almost gently atop the growing pile on the cardboard tray. “Okay, but if you don’t mind me saying, for a big-time news reporter you’re not asking very many questions so far.”
“That’s all part of my devious plan,” she bluffed. She added her own hot dog foil to the pile but refrained from grabbing a second. “Lull you with boiled meat and grape soda until you don’t even realize you’re confessing your deepest, darkest secrets to me.”
Shane gave her an all-too-natural eye roll and waved a big, veiny hand. “Shit, girl, gonna take more than a few hot dogs and grape soda to pry any secrets out of little old me.”
“That right? You more of a whiskey and steak man, Shane Dixon?”
Shane glanced back at her almost shyly. “Hardly, there’re just no secrets to pry, that’s all.”
“That’s what they all say, Shane.” Tatum leaned back slightly on the bench seat behind her. She hadn’t sat in a sports stadium since high school, and only then because they let classes out early every Friday for the weekly pep rally, which had been mandatory to attend.
Shane screwed up his furrowed brow and gave her another good study. God, she loved it when he looked at her like that, soft and slow and sly all at the same time. “All? Thought you said this was your first big interview, remember?”
“I remember.” She snorted, realizing the almost glacial pace of Shane’s speech didn’t mean his brain wasn’t smart as a whip, clearly thinking twice as fast as her own! “I was just hoping you wouldn’t, that’s all.”
“Not all jocks are dumb, Tatum.”
“I never said they were.”
“Maybe not, but most girls think it, I guess. Least of all Emily.”
