Long Shot

Chapter 11

Leith watched Duncan Ferguson do a killer hang power snatch with a massively weighted bar. After heaving the bar from its resting place on the mat, then jumping into a squat and thrusting the bar high over his head for the second time, Duncan let the bar drop. The guy with the shaved dome and neck rolls blew out breaths in big puffs and stepped back, looking incredibly pleased with himself, as he should be. That was some serious weight.

“Shit, man,” Leith said from where he sat on the edge of the incline press, shaking his head in a half laugh. “You’re in sick shape. Want to come over here and spot me on this twenty-pounder?”

Duncan ran a towel around the back of his thick neck. “Only ’cause I kept it up. Why’d you stop training?”

Leith consistently worked out, but he wasn’t following the insane lifting regimen he used to and that Duncan still subscribed to. Duncan was shorter than him, but thicker and more compact. Back in the day, Leith spanked him on the field, consistently out-threw him. Looking at Duncan today, Leith was pretty sure Duncan would wipe the grass with him. All right, he’d admit it. It bothered him. It bothered him a lot. He’d thought that competitive edge had died when he’d stopped throwing—had tried to convince himself it no longer existed, at least—but it was still there, burning just under the surface. A low pulse of a whisper that said, You can take him.

Leith just shrugged. “You pro yet?”

“Nah. Still amateur class A. Some great competition out there. Pushes me, you know?”

Leith rose, loving how his thighs felt tight, his arms a little shaky. Using the weights he kept in Mildred’s garage didn’t match an honest workout with someone stronger.

“Hey, thanks for the call this morning.” Duncan held out his hand and Leith slapped it, turning it into a hearty handshake. “Good to hear from you. Been a while.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

Duncan held up his taped fingers. “’S’okay, man, I understand. Sorry to hear about your dad. I know that sounds shitty a few years after the fact.”

Leith waved off his friend, as he’d gotten so good at doing.

Duncan began to pick off the tape, unwinding the battered pieces in long white ribbons. “You really not going to throw this year? I bet you’d do well. Still have the strength for the most part. The form comes back to you. Muscle memory. All you need is a little refresher.” He shot Leith a good-natured grin. “And it’s just Gleann. It’s not like it’s the New Hampshire games.”

Leith understood, but the little jab niggled at him. It was just Gleann. He knew if Jen had heard Duncan say that, it would have lit a firecracker under her ass.

“I hear you’re going to be AD for Gleann?” Leith whipped off his wet T-shirt and traded it for a dry one, then pulled on light warm-up pants over his shorts.

Tape gone and stuffed in the garbage, Duncan started to take apart the weight bar, sliding off the clamps and lifting the circular weights onto their stands. The guy had a pretty sweet setup here in his basement in Westbury, across the lake from Gleann. Complete with rubbery, sweaty guy smell and everything. Leith had always wanted his own gym. When he found his house, his perfect house, there’d be a room just like this.

“Yeah,” Duncan answered his earlier question. “Should be a piece of cake. A bit surprised they called me, though. You gave them my name?”

Leith nodded as he picked up Duncan’s bar and tilted it against the wall. “Hope you didn’t mind. Jen seemed pretty desperate for the help.”

“So you know her?”

Leith ignored Duncan’s side-eyed look.

“We go way back. She used to spend every summer in Gleann from when she was about, oh, eight or so. Been friends forever.”

“Aha. She was, um, intense.”

Leith had to laugh. “You could say that. You didn’t try to say no to her, did you?”

“‘Try’ is the operative word there. I did try to pass it off on you, but she said you’d already turned it down.”

Leith stuffed his weight-lifting gloves in his gym bag and slung it over his shoulder. His stomach rumbled. After a good workout, he wanted to eat a house. And drink a whole six-pack of beer.

“Fuck, I was supposed to call her back earlier today,” Duncan said.

At first Leith doubted Jen would have noticed, being buried under the fire nonsense, but this was Jen they were talking about. If she needed to get a hold of Duncan, she’d probably call at ten p.m. if need be.

“Want to go back across the lake and meet her?” Leith asked. “Maybe I can drag her away from that computer and phone of hers for an hour and we can all go grab a burger and a beer.”

Duncan glanced at the clock on the wall, which showed 6:23.

“She needs more allies,” Leith added.

A small smile quirked Duncan’s mouth.

“What?” Leith said.

Duncan’s eyebrows arched into his forehead. “Nothing, nothing.”

He let Duncan shower and they climbed into Leith’s truck, pulling out of the historical neighborhood lining the lakefront and rolling through the downtown. While not bustling by any means, it didn’t look like it had lain down on its deathbed like Gleann.

“No way,” Leith said, jerking the wheel to the right and swerving into an empty parking spot in front of an all-season Christmas shop.

“What the—” Duncan began, as Leith threw the truck into park.

There, coming out of the Christmas shop, was Jen, wearing some sort of short, yellow, swishy dress and high heels, and holding a box of papers.

Duncan chuckled, following Leith’s stare out the windshield. “Damn. I might have caused a five-car pileup for that, too.”

“That’s Jen,” Leith said, his gym shoes already hitting the pavement. Duncan followed him onto the sidewalk.

Leith called to her, and she turned, all movielike, with the wind pushing her hair over her shoulders, her dress clinging to her legs. The moment of surprise as she realized who he was was priceless. They walked toward each other.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Might ask you the same thing.”

He pointed to Duncan, who raised a hand. “This is Duncan. Your AD. I was just bringing him across the lake to meet you.”

Immediately she assumed her “business stance,” that thing she did—probably unconsciously—when her body went into this straight line and her neck stretched, lifting her head higher. She smiled, however, and it was still genuine. That’s how she got you, Leith thought. She may be all business, but she wasn’t fake. Her presence pulled you in. You couldn’t help but be affected by how much she cared. You couldn’t help but be ensnared by her intelligence.

She thrust a hand at Duncan, and even though Leith had never shaken her hand in a business manner, he could tell she had a good, strong grip.

“I did the recruiting you asked for,” Duncan told her. “Made a ton of phone calls and got a bunch of guys from all over New England to come to Gleann at the last minute. Not any pros, but they’ll throw, and I’ll make damn sure they have a killer time. I may owe some sexual favors after this.”

She sighed in thanks. “So great to hear. The roster was so thin before.”

Leith gestured to the box she carried. “What’s all that?”

She grinned. “A little recruiting of my own. Ads for Westbury-to-Gleann bus service across the lake during the games, so no one has to drive drunk or worry about parking.”

“Huh,” Leith said, staring at her. And staring. He couldn’t look away. Had to be her brain. Yeah, that was it.

“So were you just hanging out here?” she asked him.

“Came over to see Duncan. Haven’t touched base in a while.”

“He’s just using me for my gym,” Duncan said.

Jen took in Leith’s grubby T-shirt and workout pants. “Thought you said you weren’t training.”

“I’m not. It was just a workout.”

“But he should be,” Duncan added.

“That’s what I say!” Jen said.

“Well. Um.” Duncan coughed. “It was great to meet you, Jen. I’ll be in touch with an equipment report, and you call me if you need anything.”

Leith turned to him. “Thought we were going to grab a beer.”

“Yeah, you know. I’ll let you two go. Just remembered some shit I have to take care of. Don’t worry about a ride; I’ll walk back.”

Then the big guy with the shaved head was gone, jogging back down the street toward his house as though he hadn’t just kicked his own ass in the gym.

“So,” Leith said to Jen. “What do you say? A pint at the Stone?”

Despite telling himself not to—despite the fact that he’d been going to the Stone since birth and knew exactly what to look out for—Leith still clonked his forehead on the ceiling crossbeam dividing the dining room from the bar.

“Mother—” He pressed the heel of one hand to the smarting place, and ducked even farther down to make it into the bar without losing his head at the neck. Had the Stone shrunk since he’d last been in here? Maybe. He hadn’t come in since, what, before Memorial Day? As he made his way through the crowded, chunky-legged tables to the bar at the back of the room, he wondered why he hadn’t dropped by. He wondered if, subconsciously, he’d slowly been severing all his ties to the valley.

Da had never brought him back to Scotland—too expensive—but the old man had loved the Stone as much as he loved anything in Gleann. Cozy, cramped, warm. Not a TV in sight. People you knew, always a conversation at hand. The whole place had maintained a remarkably authentic feel without succumbing to the kitsch DeeDee had embraced for the games. The menu remained basic and hearty, the beers pulled from great brass taps lined up on the bar, the nook by the cold fireplace prepared for folk musicians that used to play every Sunday afternoon, but had since stopped when half the band had died from old age. It was another world in here—a world Leith already missed.

He lowered himself onto a stool, his back to the bar, and waited for Jen to arrive.

She’d had to finish up her promotion stuff over in Westbury, and then had to do a bunch of other things she was wonderfully cagey in mentioning. He loved how excited she was getting, how she was planning this big to-do right under all their noses, and it was starting to make him feel guilty for not being able to be there, when he hadn’t felt anything of the sort since Da’s death.

Meanwhile, he’d gone back to Mildred’s, showered and changed, and ate an appetizer of a frozen pizza. It was full-size but one of those thin-crust ones, so it didn’t completely fill his appetite.

When Jen walked in, the incongruous digital clock sitting on top of the cash register glowed 8:05. She wore tight jeans with perfect hems, a tank top with straining seams, and flip-flops. The outfit itself was far from flashy, but she drew the eye of everyone in the Stone.

And Leith himself, of course, who was virtually knocked over by the way her hips glided side to side as she skirted around the tables. It was that sway that had smacked him upside the head that one night in this very same room, ten years ago. The movement that had changed everything.

Now, tonight, it struck him dumb and motionless, so when she finally reached him and said something or other in greeting, he said, “Great. And you?”

She wrinkled her nose in a way that reminded him of a particular nine-year-old girl who lived here in town. “I asked how long you’d been here.”

The constricted barroom suddenly shrank even more. “Oh. Uh, ten or so minutes.” As she threw him a sly, knowing look, his hands felt empty. “I need a beer.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Where’s Rafe?”

Leith pointed to the round table in the darkest corner, where Rafe, the Stone’s aging owner, and the farmer Loughlin sat hunched over pints. Leith raised an arm to catch Rafe’s attention. “Two red ales. Two fish and chips,” Leith said when the old guy caught sight of him and gave him a nod of acknowledgement.

“Two fish and chips,” called a hoarse Rafe in the general direction of the kitchen.

“Two fish and chips!” came the shouted, unseen response from beyond the swinging doors.

Then, to Leith, Rafe waved toward the bar. “Get ’em yerself. You know where they’re at.”

Leith slid off the stool under Jen’s amusement. “Wow,” she said. “They just open up the whole town for you, don’t they?”

“I pay for it.” Stopping shoulder to shoulder with her, he added. “And I’ll pay for yours, too.”

In the corner, Rafe was talking with his gnarled hands. Loughlin was listening, but staring at Jen as though he really did think she’d burned down his barn. It didn’t help when Jen’s phone went off and, by the sound of the one-sided conversation, it was the Hemmertex landowners, settling the new location bid.

Leith went behind the bar and pulled down two thick glasses, then filled them with his favorite ale.

“You know,” Jen said to him, pocketing her phone. “The last time the two of us were in here together, we weren’t even old enough to drink.”

He glanced up at her, but her eyes were sweeping through the dim interior.

“We’ve never had drinks together. Isn’t that weird? It’s so . . . adult.” She sighed deeply. “I love it here. It’s like another world.”

Those words, echoing the exact same thought he’d had earlier, caused him to massively overflow one glass. The cold beer poured over his hand and he shook it off.

“Hurry up with those beers,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the dartboard.”

He looked up in surprise, but she was already moving toward the black, white, and red circle mounted between the brick fireplace and a giant Scottish flag. An old white line had been drawn on the floor, but a few tables stood between that and the board, and she began to shove the tables to the side.

“Is it okay if we play, Rafe?” she called over to their old boss.

The owner gave her the same do-whatever-you-like-I’m-busy wave he’d given Leith, and in return she gifted him a brilliant smile.

When Jen was done clearing the area, Leith handed her the beer. “Darts, huh?”

She shrugged. “Are you scared?”

“Should I be? You look very serious.”

“Oh, I am. You can throw around the big stuff. Let me handle the little things.”

She opened the wood flaps on the scoreboard and took out the small piece of chalk resting inside. Some kid had scribbled a pair of dragons on the scoreboard—after he’d had his mac and cheese, by the looks of the orange handprint on the side—and Jen used a towel to wipe the slate clean. She wrote Dougall on the left and Haverhurst on the right.

Removing a handful of darts from a small basket nailed to the wall, she inspected the tips, handed him three, and kept three for herself.

“You know how to score without electronic bells and whistles?” he asked.

She threw him a look somewhere between pissed off and exasperated. “Please.” She pointed to the white line. “Get over there, big boy. You’re about to go down.”

“Do I hear a challenge, Haverhurst?”

She flicked the flights of her darts. “Yep.”

“Stakes?”

She said, “Loser has to do anything the winner wants. Until midnight tonight.”

The grin that spread slowly across her face said that she’d walked into the Stone with the stakes already in mind. Why was he surprised? She never did anything without a plan. Only this time he was her plan, and it unhinged something in him. Solidified something else. He was scared, but that good kind of scared, the kind that made him all excited and tended to get him hard when he least expected it.

Immediately he zeroed in on her mouth. Anything? “You already know what you want me to do, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Absolutely.”

He stepped closer, because if there was one thing he never backed down from, it was a challenge he was sure and desperate to win. As expected, she didn’t back away, didn’t even have the decency to appear off balance. He had to get to her, to move inside her brain, throw her off.

“Good.” Leaning down, he whispered in her ear. “Because I know what I want from you, too.”

Abruptly, he stepped back, turned toward the board and aimed. “Closest to bull’s-eye starts off. Three-oh-one?”

She drew a breath that sounded beautifully ragged. “I prefer cricket.”

He bobbled his head side to side, pretending to consider. “All right.”

With a barely disguised smile, she lined up, aimed, and threw. It dug in at the narrowest part of sixteen. She brushed past him as she made room for him to throw—her ass grazing his thighs, much in the same way they’d touched that first night way back when, when everything had changed.

If she thought that was going to distract him enough to throw badly, she was sorely mistaken. But he’d let her keep trying that if she felt it was doing some good.

He hit twenty, two inches from bull’s-eye.

Jen took his place and hit a triple seventeen and a fifteen. Ouch. But two more turns each, and he had the slight edge. The woman was going down. And “going down” would just be the beginning.

A wide shadow blocked his light, and he turned, ready to give her fake hell for trying to throw him, but it wasn’t Jen’s shadow. Owen had left his table and come over.

Leith watched the plumber, who had always been a confident guy, look a little unsure about going up to the sister of the woman he was sleeping with.

“Hey,” Owen said to Jen. Clutching his baseball cap in both hands, he nodded at Leith.

“Hi, Owen,” she said, then glanced pointedly over his shoulder at the group of men he’d left sitting at the table, rubbing their bellies. “Out with the guys tonight?”

He let out an uneasy laugh. “Yeah. Aimee’s cool with it this time.”

That seemed to relax Jen, for some reason. “Okay.”

“Listen”—he edged closer—“I just wanted to say thanks for helping Aimee out. And for all you’re doing.” Jen’s mouth opened. “There’s a rumor going around you pretty much saved the games today?”

Jen nodded demurely then took a sip of her beer.

Owen gave her a tight-lipped smile. “I don’t know if anyone else will actually say it, but they’re glad you’re here. Especially after what they saw today.”

“Thank you.”

“Everyone knows in their hearts that you didn’t set that fire. You changed people’s minds today, even if they don’t know it yet. I just wanted you to hear that.”

Then he was gone, back to gather his buddies and head out, probably over to the sports bar in Westbury with the TVs and noise and sensory overload.

Jen watched him go, and Leith waited for the gloating. It never came. Instead this strange look passed over her face—sort of dreamy, a tiny kick of a smile. Happiness, if he had to name it. Then it was gone with an invisible wipe as she swiveled to him. “My throw,” she said.

Damn it. She closed out fifteen.

“So.”

The tone in her voice filled him with dread. There was a question coming, dragging down that single word. This was why he’d suggested Duncan coming with them earlier, to act as some sort of a buffer so he wouldn’t have to address the thing with Da’s house. He wasn’t ready. Not yet.

“Yeah?” He set his toe on the line and aimed.

She waited for him to throw and then asked, “How was Connecticut?”

“Great. Really great. Want another beer?” When she nodded, he ambled around the bar, making a show of motioning to Rafe that he was taking two more. He marked off the tally by the cash register.

“It’s scary, you know,” he said, when he saw she was watching him, waiting for him to go on. He held the pint glass with one hand, the brass pull with the other. “To start over somewhere else. I mean, completely start over. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.”

That had just fallen out, and when he glanced up, he saw Jen watching him with complete understanding. “Sometimes,” she said, “being scared is the best thing for you.”

He nodded at the head on the ale rising up over the lip of the glass. “It’s a challenge. I’ve never had a challenge before.” That was a strange realization. “Wow. No, I haven’t.”

“Tell me about you after I left for college.” She’d switched her darts to one hand and leaned into a chair, all her focus on him.

“That’s what I’m talking about. You left. Hemmertex opened later that year. The next two years I exploded with lawn maintenance jobs. Enough to buy equipment and hire help. Then I realized that I had just enough interest and talent to start suggesting landscape changes, but I didn’t know enough about the actual land and the plants, so the next summer I went after my associate online. The first class, the first book I cracked open, I knew I’d found it, what I was meant to be. All those days with Da in the yard, and me staying in the valley, it all clicked. I had the knowledge. The focus. I didn’t even have to go after clients; they came to me. I was booked solid. And now . . .”

“And now you’re going to start something even better.”

It was still scary as fuck, but she was absolutely right. Connecticut would change him, and he couldn’t wait.

When he came around the bar and handed her the beer, she asked, “Why didn’t you go out and look for it?”

“‘It’?”

She sipped. “What you needed.”

Of course she would say that. She, who had left everything behind to go after her own “it.”

He put down his glass, a little more forcefully than intended, and red ale splashed to the wood. “Because of Da,” he answered, then turned his back on her to throw.

The muffled thunk of the darts hitting the board, one two three, released the sharp, sudden tension that had built inside him. He exhaled, pleased at closing out twenty.

He knew she was waiting for him to expand, to explain. His reason for staying in Gleann was Da, and he’d leave it at that, until the words felt comfortable on his tongue.

“I have to go back,” he told her. “To Connecticut.”

“When?” There was a telltale sag to her shoulders, a little hitch in her voice. Her disappointment made his chest expand with something other than breath.

“Not sure. Soon, though. I can do some work here, some design and planning, but I’ll need to be on-site more and more. Definitely need to find an apartment and arrange transport and storage of my equipment.”

“Right. Absolutely,” she replied, way too quickly. “Hey, did you know there’s an actual town in Connecticut called Scotland?”

Then she threw, hitting two bull’s-eyes to win the game.

“Two out of three,” he offered, and she clinked his glass in agreement.

Four more beers on his side—because you only got better the more you drank, is what Da always said—and no more on hers, he won the second game.

Then she won the third.

“Fuck.” He stood two feet from the dartboard, hands on hips, glaring at where the metal tip of her dart had juuuust slipped inside the triple sixteen for the win. He was just buzzed enough to turn and give her a wildly, purposely flirtatious smile. “So what do you want from me? I’m all yours.”

The look in her eyes said it wasn’t kissing, but then again, he could be wrong.

Please, please be wrong.

“Come with me.”

Then she reached out and took his hand, and it tripped a live wire in his system. That strange, simple touch. His fingers closed tightly around hers, like a reflex. Like one of those patient, silent plants that sat open, waiting for food to wander in, and when it did, the plant closed around it. Never letting go until that unsuspecting creature was inside the plant forever, part of its being.

He held on to her, feeling the little roots she didn’t know she’d planted burrow under his skin. He’d lost and had no idea what she wanted from him, but he followed willingly. She was giggling in a way that suggested she’d either reverted back to childhood or that she was drunk—which he knew she wasn’t, not on two beers—or that she was about to make him do something horribly embarrassing.

She dragged him down the street and across the little bridge into the park with the gazebo and the playground and the . . . Oh shit.

Releasing his hand, she opened her arms and spun around to him. “You and me, Leith MacDougall, are going to relocate this caber.”

Relocating is what they’d used to call their teenage habit of taking things from someone’s yard and placing them somewhere else in town. Never destructive, never malicious, always got a laugh.

He eyed her. “Where?”

The exaggerated way she shrugged and rolled her eyes toward the sky in a faux-innocent way scared the crap out of him. In a good way.

“What do you have up your sleeve?” he asked.

“Just get over there and pick up that heavy end.” She gestured to the thicker part of the caber, the tip that first struck the ground after it was thrown.

“This is vandalism, you know,” he said as he unclamped the metal ring holding the caber.

“Yeah, and you’re the one who taught me how to do it and laugh about it.”

He had, hadn’t he? All those years ago, he’d been the one to suggest taking the Thistle’s outdoor furniture and relocating it to the parking lot of the market. Bev hadn’t been happy, but after the town had got a good chuckle and Leith and Jen had moved all the furniture back, he’d caught Bev smiling.

Jen had a bit of trouble getting the narrowed end of the caber down from the metal cradle, having to push up onto her tiptoes. Once she steadied it in her hands, her tongue stuck out in concentration, there was such a fantastic glimmer in her eyes, all he could do was stare.

“I never get to do this anymore,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Have fun.”

She said it all casual in the way you might say, “Have a sandwich.”

He saw it then: an emptiness that decorated the edges of her soul. A sadness that he couldn’t remember having seen before. Maybe with age her resolve to hide it had cracked. Or maybe it was him. Maybe it was that part of her he thought he knew, but didn’t.

The way she clutched the caber twisted her tank top. The moonlight settled into the lines of her arm and chest muscles, and made her dark hair gleam in a way that seemed almost magical. Moonlight had always been her friend.

Moonlight and a sky full of stars, sprayed over the open top of a Cadillac.

He cleared his throat, trying to clear his head in the process. “So now what, genius?”

She nudged her chin back toward town, the sparkle returning. When she smiled, there was the tiniest of crinkles along one side of her nose. “To your truck.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

He blew out a breath, but he could feel his smile getting bigger and bigger. “Lead the way.”

So she did. Together they balanced the caber between them, jostling its weight, shifting between their hands, bursting into laughter as they tried to negotiate the nineteen-foot stick around the park hedgerows, then laughing so hard they had to rest when a car full of people rolled down the street, their eyes wide and fingers pointed.

Finally they managed to hobble and wobble the thing to where he’d parallel parked his truck in front of the closed and dark gas station.

“My God,” she said as he shifted the caber to one shoulder. “It’s huge.”

“What is?” He lofted his end over the side of the truck bed, making the thing bounce. “My truck? Or my caber?”

She let out a really unfeminine snort that did decidedly masculine things to his body. “Get up in there and hold the thing. I’m driving.”

“No. No. No one drives my truck except me.”

“You had, like, six beers.”

“And I’m two hundred and forty pounds.”

She patted the side of the truck. “I can’t hold that over the cab. Get up in there and hold it while I drive. I’ll go slow and careful. I promise.”

“This is eight million kinds of illegal, you know, driving around with big stuff not strapped down.”

She made a dramatic glance up and down the empty streets, then peered down the long stretch of Route 6, where there were no lights. No cars. “Who’s going to see? And besides, you’re Leith MacDougall. Come on, big guy. Pretty soon you’ll be in Connecticut and you won’t be able to go five miles over the limit before you’re thrown in the slammer. Enjoy your freedom, my friend.”

Though he rolled his eyes, he hopped up into the cab and gripped the caber, swinging it up so the narrow tip rested on the truck cab and the thicker end was wedged well into a corner. He crouched, holding the whole thing in place. “Where to now, boss? Where are we relocating this thing?”

He didn’t like the way she smiled at him, so full of secrets. “Keys?”

After a slight pause, he dug into his pocket and tossed them down to her.

“Just up the road,” she said. “Hemmertex. You’re going to throw that big stick for me.”