Long Shot (13 page)

“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.”