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Olivia lifted one fist into the air as she hauled on the handlebar with the other, helping Colt pull Daisy to a stop. “Victory!” she gasped. “Is. Ours!”
    “That’s what I’m talking about!” A panting Colt swept her up into his arms, twirling her around with a growl as he hugged her hard enough to make her spine crack. “You’re amazing.”
    Olivia laughed, so happy and high on victory that she didn’t think to be self-conscious when Colt kissed her on the lips. It was a quick kiss—they were both breathing too hard for anything else—and a second later, Colt had Daisy swept up in an equally fierce hug.
    But still. He’d kissed her. In front of half the town.
    That meant something. It meant that “seeing where things go” had become “public displays of affection in front of their friends and family.”
    So maybe, just maybe, by the time Colt was cleared to return to duty, he would have decided there was something in Lover’s Leap worth staying for. Look how far they’d come in just a few days.
    At this rate, by February they’d be engaged.
    The thought made Olivia’s face flush even hotter as Colt drew her under one arm and Daisy under another, posing for a picture as Hal read their names over the loudspeaker, congratulating them on breaking the LLPD’s five-year winning streak.

CHAPTER NINE
    Olivia
    Engaged to Colt.
    It was the stuff of her girlhood fantasies, but it was quickly starting to feel like an inevitable eventuality.
    That’s what you did when you fell in love like this. You promised to spend your life together and did your damnedest to live happily ever after.
    “This is fucking bullshit!” an angry male voice growled from near the starting line, breaking through her rosy, post-race, love-induced glow.
    Olivia turned in time to see the frat boy who had pointed out Colt’s prosthetic shoving one of his teammates. The blond man’s pale face was bright red and his eyes swollen from the run, but instead of taking a rest he was taking his frustration out on his friends.
    “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he continued. “How can you even call yourself a brother?”
    “Relax, man.” His friend lifted his hands into the air, a shocked, embarrassed expression on his face. “It’s just a race.”
    “A race we lost because you drank too much last night,” the red-faced man continued. “We got beat by a gimp with one fucking leg and two little girls, Dawson. How is anything about that okay?”
    Before Olivia could think twice, she was storming across the pavement, quickly closing the distance between her and the man-child with the anger management issues.
    “You should leave,” she said, stopping directly in front of him and pointing a finger back toward the highway. “Now. We don’t like men without manners in this town and anyone who would call a hero who lost his leg in service to his country a gimp doesn’t belong in decent company.”
    The man had the nerve to roll his eyes. “Whatever, bitch.”
    “You should leave.” Colt’s deep voice came from behind her a second before his arm went around her waist, pulling her back against him. “I’m not inclined to fight you for my own sake, but if you call my girl any more ugly names, we’re going to have a problem.”
    “Come on, Chris. Let’s get out of here.” The boy’s friend touched Angry Jerk’s elbow, but the other man pulled away with a rough jerk of his arm.
    “Joining the military doesn’t make you a hero,” Angry Jerk said, swiping the back of his hand across his nose. “It makes you an idiot too dumb to go to college. So what if you lost your leg? It’s your own damned fault.”
    Colt’s arm tightened around her, lifting her off her feet before she could lunge for the idiot.
    And she had been in mid-lunge, there was no doubt about it.
    The violence of her response shocked her.
    She had never physically attacked another person in her life, but the urge to get her claws into this punk was like