Suddenly a Bride by Kasey Michaels

I’m being an ass, and I’m sorry. And I’ve already asked her out for tomorrow night. Why did I do that, Chessie?”
    “Yes, you were, and I have no idea. Unless, of course, Elizabeth packs more of a punch than she thinks she does. Does she, Will? Is this phone call about you being worried about her or you being worried about yourself?”
    “Go back to bed, Chess,” Will said, cutting the connection. And then he sat in his car for another five minutes, trying to answer his cousin’s question. “One more day. I’ll give it one more day,” he said at the end of those five minutes, and then he went inside, feeling he’d at least begun to back away…even if Elizabeth didn’t know that yet.

Chapter Five
    S am The Dog had somehow managed to wrap his leash around Elizabeth’s bare legs in the time it took to grab a folding lawn chair from the back of the SUV, and the boys were already halfway down the hill to the field by the time she could follow them.
    She felt a small pang as she watched them so blithely desert her—and not only because they’d left their bats and mitts behind in the backseat. They were growing up. Sometimes it was as if they grew an inch or more overnight, and they didn’t seem to need her the way they once had…the way she’d always clung to them, probably too tightly, once Jamie was gone.
    They’d just finished first grade, had been away from her for nearly seven hours a day. Now they wereplaying baseball. Tomorrow they’d be leaving for college.
    “And now let’s all have a pity party for the overprotective mommy in the crowd,” Elizabeth grumbled as she struggled to hold on to chair, bats, gloves and Sam The Dog while navigating the slope down to the ball field. “Sam The Dog! Stop pulling on the leash!”
    Her mother would have told her that she was attempting a “Lazy Man’s Load,” trying to carry too much at one time in order to save herself a trip back up the slope to her car, and that the exercise was doomed to end in failure. And her mother would, as usual, have been right.
    The lawn chair slipped out from beneath her arm, cracking her hard on her ankle bone before it hit the grass. Her reaction was to reach down to grab her ankle, a move that dislodged the two bats tucked into the crook of her other arm. She made a quick, twisting grab for them, and that’s when it happened.
    Sensing the slack on his leash, Sam The Dog made a break for it, heading straight onto the field and into the midst of the players standing huddled around the coaches.
    It was like watching a bowling ball strike the pins, sending them scattering everywhere.
    Sam The Dog, being a border collie, immediately began trying to herd all the children back to where they were, even while the coaches seemed to be attempting to shoo him off the field.
    Elizabeth left everything where it had fallen andtook off down the slope. “Sam The Dog! Sam The Dog, you come here this instant! Danny, grab his leash!”
    Danny made a valiant stab at it but only ended up laid-out on his belly as Sam The Dog eluded him as he circled the children, urging them closer and closer to the pitcher’s mound.
    She saw Will standing near the players’ bench, a clipboard against his chest, watching the excitement with an amused smile on his face. She hastened to where he stood, nearly breathless from running and shouting. Well, at least now she didn’t have to worry anymore about what she was going to say to him the next time she saw him.
    “I’m so, so sorry,” she told him as Mikey finally managed to grab Sam The Dog’s leash. “He means well. He really does.”
    “Mikey or the mutt?” Will asked her, his eyes still on the ball field. “He was herding them, wasn’t he? And with much more success than we’ve been having. Amazing. If we can find him a shirt that fits, we could make him the first-base coach. What’s his name? I heard you calling something, but I couldn’t catch it.”
    “He’s Sam The Dog,” Elizabeth