Page 1 of One Last Try (Try for Love #1)

Mathias

The two-hundred-and-ninety-year-old cottage has been on this planet exactly ten times longer than I have.

It’s old—ancient even—but clean, and smells of fresh paint.

Everything’s made of solid wood or solider stone.

Unfortunately for my poor temporal bone, the door frame between the kitchen and dining room slash hallway slash whatever the fuck name you’d attach to this ridiculously small space is precisely twelve inches too short to fit my gargantuan self through without ducking.

I’ve already smashed my head on the beam seven times, and I’ve only brought half a dozen boxes from the rental van into my new house.

That’s at least one whack per trip to the van.

The hell had my agent been thinking?

In all fairness, it wasn’t entirely Simone’s fault.

When I’d asked her look at accommodation for me, I’d given her a list of demands longer than the River Severn, and somehow she’d checked off every item bar none.

At the time, I hadn’t realised I needed to include “property should not inflict brain injury” on that list.

My bad.

I’d requested somewhere quiet. Check. Somewhere with a garden, and parking for my cars. Check and check. Somewhere close to training. Check. One or two bedrooms—I wasn’t fussed—but it should be fully furnished, with a king-size bed, and Wi-Fi all ready and raring to go.

Check, check, check.

It should be surrounded by countryside—farms, forests, fields, whatever, I didn’t care, so long as there were minimal neighbours. A few people were fine, just a handful. I was looking for a new place in a village.

No . . . somewhere smaller than a village.

A hamlet.

And there should be a pub. That was the most important factor of them all. A pub within walking distance of my new house.

It should be a small pub. One of those gastro types that served delicious food and had quiz nights, maybe a pool table or a skittles alley, but most definitely a projector or a big screen so I could watch sports.

I’d even asked Simone to scour through the pub’s socials and determine whether it was a football kind of establishment or a rugby one.

This was crucial.

I wasn’t moving to any fucking football-loving hamlets.

She only bloody went and found the perfect place. Fernbank Cottage is nestled in a micro-village named Mudford-upon-Hooke, twenty minutes’ drive from training grounds, with a total population of ninety-eight people. Ninety-nine now, if you include me .

It has a pub: The Little Thatch. The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place my finger on why. The landlord runs an intervillage rugby sevens team or some shit. I wasn’t really listening. Simone had said the words micro-village and rugby and I was sold.

“Yep, I’ll take it,” I’d said.

“Don’t you want to hear the—” she’d started to say.

“Nope. Don’t need to know any more.”

“Okay, but there’s one thing you should—”

“Sim, it’s in budget, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“And there are fewer than a hundred people in the hamlet?”

“Oh, yes. It’s tiny.”

“And Bath is a twenty-minute drive?”

“Maybe thirty with bad traffic.”

“Pub nearby?”

“Literally across the road.”

“Then it’s a no-brainer,” I’d boomed. “Get off this phone and sign me up before someone else snatches it.”

Simone sighed. “You’re the boss,” she’d said.

Which is what she always says when I behave .

. . somewhat petulantly. But I’m a pro athlete—fly-half and kicker for Cardiff Bengals for eight years and Wales for three.

Admittedly, I’d failed to make either team this season, but haven’t I earned the right to be a little diva-inclined now and then?

In hindsight, perhaps Sim’d been trying to warn me of the extreme concussion risk Fernbank Cottage came with.

The place was cute, though. She’d sent me some photos.

The most postcard-perfect-looking cottage I think I’ve ever seen.

Thatched roof, thatched porch, plants growing up the render, pretty gardens with a spindly pink painted bench, a greenhouse, a massive gravel drive, and a top-of-the-range inbuilt BBQ grill and separate pizza oven.

I mean, come on, how’s a man supposed to resist that ?

Since the property came fully furnished, I only had to rent a short wheelbase to take my things over the bridge into Wiltshire.

Mainly clothes and shoes, my duvet, towels and bathroom shit, some books, my NutriBullet, my laptop, my PlayStation 5, and my gadgets.

A lot of gadgets, to be fair. I didn’t bring any food.

The market town of Hookborough’s nearby, and Google informs me there’s a big Waitrose on the high street. I’ll stock up tomorrow.

I only have another four or five runs to the van before all my boxes are inside—

THWACK!

My head hits the beam once again.

“FUCK YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT DOOR!” I yell, dropping my box to the ground and cradling my poor, poor cranium.

If this had been midgame, I’d’ve been stretchered off the pitch. Luckily the box hitting the deck contains only towels and not my drone or telescope.

There’s a sound like metal smashing against metal—loud, quick, and percussive—and it’s coming from the vicinity of my new micro-porch.

It takes me a few moments to figure out it’s my door knocker.

Cute. Never had a door knocker before. I guess that comes with the whole three-hundred-year-old chocolate-box charm.

I answer it, rubbing my forehead.

The girl standing on the top step is somewhere between sixteen and twenty-two—difficult to be more precise with all this frontal lobe damage. She’s young in any case, and has long strawberry-blonde hair tied up in a high ponytail. She’s wearing a pink-and-orange-striped rugby shirt.

Good sign for my new neighbours, I guess.

“Ooh, you got got by the kitchen door!” she says, flicking her ponytail back and pointing to my newly scalped head. “How many times?”

The girl has a familiar-looking face, like someone you know from a past life, or perhaps it’s just one of those generic white-girl faces. Big blue eyes, plasticky Barbie-doll skin, makeup that probably took all morning plus several hundred hours of YouTube tutorial training to apply .

“I’m Daisy,” she says, obviously assuming the whacks to my head have robbed me of the ability to speak.

“I’ve brought your keys.” She holds out her hand and opens her palm.

In the centre sits a house key with a pewter rugby ball keychain.

An eerily personal touch from an estate agent.

“And supplies.” She lifts her other hand to show me a white plastic grocery bag.

I make out the shape of a milk bottle, a box of eggs, a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and something else at the bottom I can’t be certain of.

Please be chocolate. Please be chocolate.

“Are you from Boonies Estate Agents?”

A WTF look passes over her face before she puts all the puzzle pieces together. “No, I’m from the pub.”

I lean out the door. Daisy bends back like a circus acrobat to glance at said pub.

The Little Thatch. As picture pretty as Fernbank Cottage with its matching thatched roof and climbing roses, or whatever the fuck those plants are.

They don’t have any flowers yet, but they look spiky as hell.

There’s an old red phone box near the entrance.

At some point, the phone had been replaced by a defibrillator.

“You work at the pub?” I ask. That makes so much more sense. I’ve moved around a lot in my twenty-nine years, and estate agents do not generally offer this level of personalised service. Especially the English ones, and especially, especially to tenants.

“Wow, you must have hit your head harder than I first thought. I left you a note.” With that, Daisy barges into my new house and marches through the living room into the tiny dining space.

There’s a letter on the table, nestled in the fruit bowl. On the envelope, my name is scribbled.

M. Jones.

Daisy snatches it up before I have a chance to duck into the dining room.

“Hey, give me that.” I make to grab the letter, but think better of it. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old, six-foot-five man, alone in an unfamiliar property with a very young woman. I know my gender and size can be intimidating as fuck. I shouldn’t be grabbing anything from her .

She doesn’t seem bothered, and folds the envelope, tucking it into her back pocket. “You don’t need to read it any more. All it said was welcome to Mudford, and that I’d be around about now to drop off some shopping and give you the keys. And here I am. Ta-da!”

“That’s all it said?” I ask, sceptical, but no way in hell am I making another move for it.

Daisy simply shrugs, walks into the kitchen, and begins unloading groceries onto the counter.

Yes! Maltesers and custard creams. Get in.

“My dad runs the pub,” she says, heading straight to the integrated fridge to stash the milk.

“Oh, okay.” That makes so much more sense than whatever jumbled mess was happening in my head. So her father is the pub’s landlord, which means he is also my landlord—i.e., the person who my rent money goes to each month. “He’s going to be so stoked when he finds out it’s you.”

I stay quiet. The weight of her sentence all hangs on the word you . She knows who I am.

Though I’m not sure there’s a single soul in Wales or Wiltshire who doesn’t.

She might only have been primary-school aged during that fateful Sunday evening, but her father—the guy who’ll be “so stoked” to find out it’s me—would likely have the moment tattooed on his brain for all eternity. Especially if he’s a Cents fan.

Never forget. Never forgive.

Just like everyone else.

“It only said Mr M. Jones on your forms. Not Mathias Jones, former Cardiff fly-half, now plays for Bath—or at least, will play for Bath as of next week—has a cute Welsh accent, but wears inappropriately small shorts.”

I look down at my clothes. “These are my moving shorts.”

She raises a single, highly sculpted eyebrow. “Sure.”

“So, you’re all Centurions fans?” I say, ignoring the sudden urge to find my box of joggers and tug a pair on over the top .

A smile slips over Daisy’s face, and she tilts her head to the side like a puppy dog. “You could say that.” She pushes herself away from the counter. “Everyone round here supports the Cents. Well, ’cept for Roger who lives three fields over. He’s . . .”

Apparently Daisy can’t think of a nice way to phrase whatever Roger is, so her sentence hangs unfinished.

I need to know more. Not about Roger, but about my reception here. “Do you all know about the emergency signing?”

“Oh, yeah,” Daisy said. “It’s all we’ve been talking about since the announcement. Since before then, actually, when Winter retired and we lost our kicker, and because you were unsigned we all thought how hilarious it would be if you filled the spot.”

My stomach churns. Hilarious, sure. “And . . .”

What I want to ask is, “Does everyone still hate me? Have they abandoned the Cents since they found out I’ve been signed to their precious team? Are they going to come after me with pitchforks?”

Instead I ask, “How’s it gone down?”

Eight years ago I may have caused a little upset amongst Bath players and supporters.

One rookie player in his debut Union match, with one extremely aggressive need to prove himself.

Seventy-eight minutes on the clock. A six point deficit in our favour.

Six points! One rugby vet—correction, a rugby legend—with a too-close-to-the-wire try attempt, thwarted by yours truly, the rookie, with a perfectly timed tackle.

A terrible, terrible landing. Five match-day medics, a broken fibula, and a legend’s seventeen-year career down the drain.

Thousands—thousands!—of booing fans. And years and years of being forced to relive that moment.

Apologise for it.

Even though technically I did nothing wrong.

The tackle was legal. It’s just the brutal nature of the sport.

These are the things I tell myself over and over, and these are the things every fan of rugby understands at a marrow-deep level .

And yet . . .

“You’ll see,” Daisy says cryptically, nauseatingly. She bounces back through the house towards the porch.

I remember to duck under the kitchen door frame just in time. “Are you still serving food at the pub?”

“Yep.”

“Do I need to book?”

She frowns at me like I’m asking the dumbest question to have ever been asked. “No.”

“Okay, well, what time should I come round? I’m not sure when I’ll be finished here.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she says, already out of the house.

“But what if it’s late?” I call out.

“Doesn’t matter.” She’s at the gate, looking left and right for traffic, crossing the road. “I can’t wait to tell my dad about you and your pygmy shorts.” And she’s gone.