Page 33

JENNA

I toss and turn all night in restless sleep, replaying the scene with Rachel over and over. Her words—some kind, others harsh, but all true—echo in my head. I doze fitfully, waking often only to begin another bout of brittle introspection. Each time, I resist the urge to check the time. Knowing how slowly the hours pass will only add to my frustration.

Finally, seeing a hint of daylight sneaking beyond the edge of a curtain, I relent and grab at my phone. It’s not the time—seven a.m. on Sunday—that jolts me from drowsy to fully alert. It’s the six missed calls from my father. All came between eight and nine last night, when I was with Geordie—oblivious to anything beyond the intoxicating touch of his strong body and the delicious smell of his cologne—while my phone languished on the seat of my car.

In the aftermath of Rachel’s unannounced visit, I’d arrived home just after midnight, tired and emotionally wrung out, and simply plugged the phone into my bedside charger before falling into bed. I curse myself for not looking at it. Even after months away from the Highlanders, checking for urgent messages remains my nightly routine before allowing myself to sleep. It’s an unhealthy habit, one I swore I’d break, but last night, of all nights, wasn’t the time to start.

I fling back the covers, grab my dressing gown, yank on slippers, and hurry down the hallway, taking the stairs two at a time. The familiar blare of weekend sports news drifting up from the radio in the kitchen tells me at least Dad is here, alive and well. The mingled smell of coffee and toast suggests a normal Sunday morning, despite his urgent need to call me last night.

I slide across the tiled kitchen floor, coming to a halt where he’s seated on a high stool at the worktop. Dad raises his head from scrolling on the new iPad I got him last week. A small victory—he’s actually using it.

“Morning, luv,” he says. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah, Dad, I did. You?”

“Like a baby—once I heard you come in. You were late.”

His eyebrow arches, the unspoken question hanging between us. I know what he’s really asking: Where were you until midnight on a Saturday in Cluanie? His implied question irritates me, even though it comes from a place of concern. At thirty-four, I shouldn’t feel obliged to explain my whereabouts to my father.

“Yeah, Rachel made a flying visit home. She was in Edinburgh for work and caught the train up last night. I met her over at Geordie’s.”

I haven’t spoken a single lie—first rule of PR: stick to the truth whenever possible.

“Ah, that’s nice,” he says with a smile that suggests he doesn’t suspect anything untoward in my explanation.

“So what’s up Dad?” I pivot away from any further questions about me. “All the calls? ”

“Well, luv, we’ve got a bit of a situation. Think I might need your help.”

“OK,” I say, grabbing a mug and pushing a button on the coffee machine. The familiar hiss and gurgle is steadying. At the Highlanders, ‘situation’ was code for a player’s mistake that needed damage control. What the hell could possibly be a ‘situation’ with an amateur small-town rugby team? I’m both concerned and intrigued. “What’s going on?”

Dad sighs. “Got a call on my way home from the club rooms to say young Brandon Smith had a bit of a fender bender. Took out half the wall of St Andrew’s kirkyard.”

“Oh my god, is he all right?” My first concern is for Skylar—she’d be devastated if anything happened to her boyfriend.

“Not a mark on him—he was in his dad’s big four-wheel-drive.”

“How did that happen? It’s right in the middle of town. How can you veer off the road and hit a wall? Surely he wasn’t drunk…”

I know the older players only pay lip service to Dad’s alcohol ban, but Brandon takes it seriously—as much from dedication to his future career as any fear of his grumpy coach.

“No, nothing like that,” Dad says. He cradles his mug between weathered hands. “He’s a good lad. Sticks to the rules. He was texting that lassie of his. I know he’s daft about her, but it was stupid. Bloody dangerous too. Took his eyes off the road and went up the kerb.”

“So you want me to go and smooth things over with Reverend Sutherland?” I offer. “I can do that.”

That shouldn’t be too difficult. We got to know Elizabeth Sutherland well in those last days before Mum passed. My mother wasn’t overly religious, but Elizabeth was more friend than pastor when Mum came home from the hospice.

“That would be a good start, but there’s a bigger problem.” Dad sighs and slides a piece of paper across the worktop towards me. “Take a look at this.”

It’s a printout of an email—from Jimmy Calder. Seeing his name, I thump down my coffee and snatch the paper. I crossed swords with the Tryline UK reporter when I was at the Highlanders. I never liked him then. He was always too friendly, his casual smile an insincere facade. He couldn’t hide the predatory gleam in his eyes. I prefer journos who are honest in their intentions even if they’re about to write something bad. At least you know where you stand.

I like Calder even less now, as I scan the email. I lean my head in my hand, kicking myself for not insisting on being involved with his visit to Cluanie. When Dad told me about the piece, it seemed a harmless bit of colour amongst all the analysis of players and matches that dominates the online magazine. The spark in Dad’s eyes as he realised his decision to leave the professional circuit hadn’t made him invisible to the rugby world had warmed my heart. And why worry? Dad is media savvy, not easy prey for someone bent on unearthing scandal, and besides, there was no point in trying to find dirt at Cluanie R.F.C.

Or so I thought. The two questions on the paper prove me wrong:

What is your response to the suggestion there is a culture where over-consumption of alcohol is the norm in amateur rugby clubs?

What is your perception of the role of local clubs in promoting healthy lifestyles and responsible behaviour amongst the young men and women in their teams ?

“What the hell is this?” I slam the paper down, teeth clenched. I know what these questions imply.

“Our bad luck. That slimy bastard Calder happens to be staying with Helen Ross.”

“At the B&B next to the church.” Where he had a front-row seat for Brandon’s unfortunate off-field display last night.

“Perfect bloody timing.”

Shit. I’ve dealt with way worse in my time—defended Dad in his role as Highlanders’ coach, fronted up for players who’ve deliberately caused trouble—but here in my hometown it feels intensely personal.

“Don’t worry Dad,” I say, putting on my cool professional smile, even though behind it I’m fuming. To take Brandon’s unfortunate accident and twist it in a way deliberately designed to cast a slur on this small club is the sort of cheap shot I should have anticipated from Jimmy Calder. “Leave it with me.”

Dad’s heard those words many times, and he knows I’ve got this.

“Thanks, love,” he says, laying his big hand over mine. “I can always count on you when the shit hits the fan.”

Warm pride blooms in my chest. Even though I know Dad’s always appreciated me coming through for him and the players, it feels good to hear him say it again. While I love my new clients, my work is mostly proactive. I admit I’ve missed the adrenaline rush of a problem like this landing on my desk. While Jimmy Calder’s attention is unwelcome, it’s the perfect opportunity to keep my skills sharp for when I return to the Highlanders in November. So, although this wasn’t how I expected to start my Sunday, I leap into action.

Two hours later, I’m standing outside St Andrew’s kirkyard. The drone of a hymn drifts from the church, the singing rising and falling like waves on the loch shore, overlaying a low rumble of male voices outside. The men pause as Angus Cameron, the team’s hooker, calls them to attention.

“Lads, see these chalk marks I’ve made?” He holds up a rough stone with a straggling white ‘4’ on it. “That’s what you need to mind, OK?”

Angus continues to order his teammates with quiet authority, as they trundle wheelbarrows loaded with stones to stack them in neat piles according to his instructions.

“Cap!” he bawls at a stunned Connor, who pauses, stone in one hand. He’s usually in charge. Not today. Angus glares and Connor scans the lines of stones and rethinks its placement.

When I’d made the call to gather the team here, I’d thought they would simply tidy things up, not embark on a full restoration—but I hadn’t expected to have the services of a fully qualified stonemason at our disposal. Apparently, Angus’s father, a master mason, has been nagging the parish council for ages to do something about the wall before it fell down of its own accord. Now, helped along by Brandon’s unorthodox demolition method, some rugby club funds, and a volunteer workforce, they’ll have it restored for free.

I busy myself setting up the drinks station. The plastic table wobbles on the uneven grass as I arrange the water bottles. At the Co-op, Maggie donated three boxes of them, as well as gave the club a big discount on the mountain of snack foods in my shopping trolley—her contribution to this morning’s community effort.

As I’m lining the bottles up in neat rows, a flash of movement catches my eye. The bright red painted door of the once tumble-down manse, now restored into a bed-and-breakfast, swings open. A disgruntled-looking Jimmy Calder stumbles down the steps, clutching a large duffle in one hand and a laptop bag over his shoulder.

“Morning Jimmy,” I call, waving with exaggerated cheerfulness. My hastily-assembled party of lads from the rugby team, doing volunteer work for the church on a Sunday morning, is part of the reason for his grumpy face. The other is the response to his questions, emailed to him just before I left the house. My carefully crafted PR reply had been polite but crystal clear: Nothing to see here, Jimmy. Get your sorry arse back to London. With satisfaction, I watch him climb into a grey Ford Fiesta.

A few onlookers have gathered, surveying the team with curiosity. The Sunday morning spectacle draws them as if the travelling fair has come to town. Some of the women use it as an unexpected chance to admire the eye candy on display, as the thirteen players I was able to muster at short notice, flex muscle. They’re an attractive bunch in t-shirts and a mixture of work jeans and shorts, beads of sweat jewelling their faces, hair with a tousled ‘just got out of bed’ look, and easy smiles as they banter back and forth over the task.

One woman gives Geordie a blatant appraisal from head to toe. It’s Kelly Latham who works on the checkout at the Co-op—Cluanie’s command centre for gossip. She had the cheek to ask me about Geordie outright the other day. Said she’d heard he’d been working at my house. It was old news, and I brushed her off, but I suspected she knew more. Today I’m sure. She watches him with a sultry smile on her face, and I feel a surge of possessiveness. Heat rises in my face, my fingers itching to reach for him. I want to march over there, wrap myself around him and claim him as mine, but I dare not.

She locks eyes with me for a moment and heads Geordie’s way. He straightens from where he’s been bent over, tugging at a reluctant piece of stone, his gorgeous arse on full display. I strain my ears but don’t catch her words. He replies, but there’s not even a polite smile, as he turns away from her, abandoning the wheelbarrow and heads straight for the drink station—and me.

“Good turn out.” Geordie takes a deep draft from the bottle of water I hand him, then wipes one hand across his mouth. A droplet clings to his lower lip, and I force myself to look away. “Thirteen of the lads on a Sunday morning.”

It’s more than I expected when I put out an SOS call for volunteers at seven-thirty a.m. Not only is there significant manpower, they all turned up with barrows and tools, including Angus with a concrete mixer. He’s determined to make a good start on the restoration today.

“Yeah, I’m really grateful. You’re all helping a lot of people out of a tight spot.”

“What about you? Feeling OK about the tight spot my sister put us in last night?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Rachel was surprisingly calm about it all. She just wants us to be happy,” I say, leaving out how she’s put me on notice. For us to be happy, I need to step up. “Guess I was overthinking it.”

“As you do,” he chuckles. The familiar crinkles bracket his eyes. “At least that’s got one problem off our backs. The other one behind you might be a little trickier.” His mouth tightens. He casts a wary eye across my shoulder before taking another swig from the bottle.

“There she is,” Dad says, loping towards me with Grant Darby in tow. “My little lass to the rescue again.”

“Lads are doing well, Jenna.” Grant runs an approving eye over the orderly workers. “Bloody good bit of team-building that. And gets young Smith off the hook. Some coaches would have benched the lad for bringing heat down on the club.”

“Not this one,” Dad rasps. “I can count on one hand the number of times I sat a player out for something that happened off-field.”

“Well, there was Webster,” Grant points out with a knowing smirk. “That made quite the stir at the time. Star player.”

Dad’s expression hardens slightly. His jaw tightens, the muscles working beneath his stubbled cheek. “That was different.”

I feel Geordie tense beside me, his water bottle pausing halfway to his lips. It mirrors the tightening of my own body as I brace myself for what’s coming.

“Different how?” Grant presses, seemingly unaware of the sudden shift in atmosphere.

Dad’s eyes flick briefly toward me before returning to Grant. “Webster thought his talent gave him special privileges. Made a move on Jenna at a team dinner. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

My cheeks burn at the memory. It was my third week with the Highlanders. At the time, I didn’t even know Dad had seen David Webster come up to me at the bar and slip his arm around my waist. Although young, he already wore the cockiness of his newfound fame, and it had taken me several attempts to brush him off. I only joined the dots the next day after the club CEO requested an urgent press release. My job was to manufacture a reason for Webster’s one-game stand down. When I confronted my father, he admitted it without an ounce of remorse. From then on, I was always extra careful around the players, never putting myself in a position for it to happen again. There was only one other slip up. That time, Dad tried to throttle the guy, and it was his arse I had to protect.

The silence stretches between us, loaded with implication.

Seeing Grant’s interest, Dad continues, his voice taking on that steel edge I know so well.

“I don’t care if you’re David Webster, headed for international glory or some bench-warmer who barely makes the practice squad. Nobody messes with my daughter. That’s a line I won’t let anyone cross.”

I dare not look at Geordie. But I can feel him—the heat of his body suddenly distant, though he hasn’t moved an inch. He tosses the empty plastic bottle into the bin and heads back to work without a single backwards glance.

My chest tightens as I watch him go. There’s more than my heart on the line here. Geordie’s rugby, the most important thing in his life right now, could disappear in an instant if my father catches wind of our relationship. I can’t bear the thought I might be the reason he loses the thing that makes him happiest.