Then she looked closer at the poster.

Leith. His brown hair longer than when she’d last seen him, wet and clinging to his forehead and cheek. His rugged face contorted in exertion, his body even bigger and more muscular than she remembered. He clutched a hammer in his great fists, thick arms sweeping the thing high around his head. The hammer wasn’t an actual hammer at all, but a large metal ball on the end of a long handle. The thrower twisted it around his body several times, then released it backward over one shoulder.

In the picture, Leith looked powerful and focused. Badass. And he wore a kilt.

Good God, a kilt.

She’d seen him wear his family’s tartan before, back in high school when the whole town had turned out for the annual games. But a kilt on a boy was a much different thing than a kilt on a man. In the photo the wind had kicked up the hem, displaying the hard lines of his thigh muscles set in a wide stance. Black kilt hose—knee socks, she’d once called them and had been quickly corrected by Leith’s dad—showed off bowling balls for calves.

None of the men in New York were that kind of gorgeous.

The pseudoshrine out on Route 6 declared he’d last won the heavy athletics competition five years ago, the same date on the poster, which would age him in that photo at twenty-three. What did Leith look like now? Seeing how much he’d improved from age eighteen to twenty-three, the curve for hotness progression over time indicated he should be approaching godhood right about now, at twenty-eight.

Her phone blared a warning heralding the time, and at first she didn’t recognize the sound. She was never late. Ever. She hurried down the street, past the half-filled Kafe, to the small brick house that served as Town Hall. Ringing the doorbell to the locked front door, she couldn’t help but feel like an underappreciated teenager all over again—as though she’d accomplished nothing in the past decade and had nothing to show for herself. It was an odd feeling and one she annoyingly couldn’t attribute, until the door finally opened and a silver-haired woman in braids, jeans, and a gigantic Syracuse T-shirt frowned down at her.

That expression Jen remembered with painful clarity.

“Hi, Mrs. McCurdy.” Jen pasted on a smile.

Mrs. McCurdy, Jen’s old manager at the ice cream parlor and also a former steady dog-walking client, looked Jen over with awkward appraisal. The mayor stepped back and opened the door wider, her fleshy arm jiggling. “Here. Let me show you the mess you’ve inherited.”

Jen took a deep breath. “Um, great. Thank you, Mrs. McCurdy. It’s great to see you, too.”

“It’s Mayor Sue now,” the other woman threw over her shoulder as she headed down the hall.

“You . . . you want me to call you that?”

“Everyone else does.”

“I’m glad Aimee called me,” Jen said. “I would hate to see the games die.”

“Well, you agreed to work for free and Aimee said you know what you’re doing.”

The thing was, Jen knew Sue must have had some form of confidence in her, otherwise why would the older woman have continued to hire her in the past, job after job, summer after summer? Still, would it have killed her to say, just once, “Nice job, Jen. Thanks so much”?

Sue turned in to what must have been a bedroom at one time, but was now a tiny corner conference room with a giant box fan whipping warm air around. A laptop sat on the table. Sue hooked loose strands of wiry hair behind each ear and spun the laptop around so its screen was visible.

Jen bent over and squinted at the spreadsheet, specifically at the tiny number in the bottom right rectangle. “That’s what’s left? Where’d DeeDee run off to again?”

“France, we’re told.” Sue snorted, and Jen wasn’t sure if the disgust came from the fact that the longtime organizer of the Highland Games had run off with a sizable chunk of the town’s money, or that she’d run away to a place that wasn’t Scotland with a man who didn’t have a drop of Scottish blood in him.

Jen wasn’t remotely Scottish either, which might have accounted for some of Sue’s snobbery over the years. In Gleann, there were the descendants of the original founders . . . and everyone else. Sue McCurdy was the former. Years ago, the joke had been that Aimee and Jen Haverhurst were Irish twins in a Scottish town. Also, there was the fact that Aimee had been a hellion during her summers here, and Jen had had to skip out of work on more than one occasion to bail her out. Maybe Sue had never gotten over that joke or Jen’s sister-related absences.

Jen tapped the spreadsheet on the screen. The amount left in the games’ account wouldn’t even have covered her fee back in the city, but she wasn’t here for the money. A part of her got way too excited at this challenge. It was, quite simply, a matter of pride. Aimee’s income, Aunt Bev’s legacy, and Jen’s own childhood memories were at stake.

“I read that the other games across the state are doing amazingly well.”

Sue narrowed her eyes. “Did your research, did you?”

“Always.”

Sue nodded, braids swinging. “They get bigger every year, more commercial, more notoriety, pro athletes. We get smaller. The society doesn’t like giving resources to something that doesn’t even really compete. But we have more history. Better atmosphere.”

Jen hadn’t been to the other games, but she nodded with Sue’s assessment about Gleann’s. It was too bad, however, that they seemed to have lost that history.

“Think you can do it?” Sue crossed her arms under her generous boobs. The Syracuse printed on the front looked like yracus.

Jen pulled her hair back into a ponytail and took a seat. “I think so. Yes.”

Sue frowned at her before leaving, as though she’d had hundreds of other event planners lined up around the block to take this gig for free, and Jen still had to prove herself.

The thing was, she would prove herself. To Aimee, who’d been so clearly disappointed in Jen’s absence the past decade. To dear Aunt Bev, whose love and encouragement had brought her to Gleann and changed her life for the better. To Leith, who’d been so hurt and angry when she’d left. And to her mom, who’d laughed when Jen said she wanted to go to college.

Jen spent the next two hours flipping through old files and memorizing spreadsheets, committing totals and rearranging numbers in her head. There were very few resources, even less money, and practically no organization or innovation. No wonder the society was about to pull out. The timeline to pull this thing off—and to make it better than in years past—would be extremely tough. She couldn’t turn the games into the grand affair she’d like to, but there were lots of small, special things she could add to or improve in the time allotted that would make a nice difference.

She needed to take inventory. She needed to contact vendors and perhaps wrangle some short-notice sponsors. She needed to learn how the hell to run a heavy athletic competition or get someone to do it for her, and, in looking at the scant number of entrants, attract more athletes. She needed—

Her phone rang. Aimee.

“Hel—”

Screeching and sobbing filled her ear.

“Calm down, Aim, I can’t hear a thing you’re saying.”

“Oh my God, the whole place, Jen!” There was splashing and squishing in the background. “The toilet or the bathtub or something up in your room. Something must have burst. Water everywhere. Totally flooded.” A sob, a sniffle. “It’s dripping through the floorboards, into the main room downstairs. Oh my God! I don’t know what to do!”

Despite her earlier vow to give this thing her all for the next two weeks, Jen’s first instinct at hearing Aimee’s panic was to run. To swim like hell far, far away from her sister’s mess. Why the hell was her sister calling her now? Ah, of course. Because Jen was here, and when Jen was here, she took care of things.

All her clothes and toiletries were in that room, sitting right outside the bathroom. Probably floating down the hall by now. Crap.

She ground fingers into her temple. “Maybe you should, I don’t know, turn off the water at the source and then call a plumber?”

“What? No.” More crying, more splashing.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I can’t call him.” It came out like hiiiiiiiim, and Jen finally got it. Aimee had probably slept with whoever hiiiiiiiim was and they hadn’t moved past the After-Sex Awkwardness.

Lovely. Jen Haverhurst to the rescue.

“Just hold on, Aim. Be there in a second. Can you at least find the water shutoff?”

“Okay. Yes. I think so.”

Jen hung up and sighed. She pushed back from the table and poked her head out of the conference room door. “Mrs. McCurdy?”—because she could never, ever bring herself to call her Mayor Sue—“Know of any places in town I can rent? Like, today?”

Chapter

2