“Shit.” His forehead dropped to that amazing place between her hip bones.

“What?” Jen lifted her head. “Oh, God!”

Now it wasn’t just headlights hitting the truck, it was a bona fide spotlight, filling the whole area like noon sun. Jen bolted upright and scrambled backward on hands and knees, stopping only when her back hit the long metal box, making her wince.

Behind them, a car door opened and closed. Leith moved right in front of Jen, using his body to throw her nakedness in shadow. She frantically redid her bra and smoothed down her tank top, but it was still crooked, and a bit of lace peeked over the top. He reached out and tucked the lace back in. Leaning back, she yanked up her underwear and then her jeans, and he let out a gravelly sigh of pained regret to see her clothed again.

“Damn it, Olsen,” Leith growled over his shoulder. “Mind giving us some privacy so Jen here can get decent?”

Jen glared at him as she drew up her zipper, but the footsteps coming up behind them did stop. Good. Leith wouldn’t have to kick a cop’s ass.

“What?” Leith whispered to her. “Not like he didn’t know what we were doing anyway. He would’ve kept coming if I hadn’t said anything.”

Covered now, but still pretty disheveled, she came to her knees and peered around his body. With a great eye roll, she said, “We did not just get busted by the cops.”

Her hair was a messy drape covering one of her jeweled eyes, and Leith reached out and nudged it aside. “Yeah. I’m sorry to say that we did.”

“Don’t laugh.”

“Who’s laughing? Believe me, there’s nothing funny about being cockblocked by the sheriff.”

With Jen all put together, the two of them clambered off the truck, into the spotlight beaming off the top of the sheriff’s green-and-white car. Hands stuffed into her back jeans pockets, Jen directly faced Olsen without any outward embarrassment.

Sheriff Olsen looked more annoyed than pissed off, his chin nearly disappearing into the bulge of his neck. “Got a call about two people carrying a caber through town, and making an awful lot of noise doing it. So I went to the park and saw that that one was gone. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” He looked right at the caber lying in the truck’s headlights.

Leith scratched at his neck. “No?”

“We’re going to put it back,” Jen said.

Olsen sighed. “This is private property.”

Jen pushed forward. “Oh, I’m renting the land for the games. Technically it’s mine—well, Gleann’s—for the next two weeks.”

“I heard,” Olsen said. “I like the new location. Better than the old one. That barn blaze might’ve been a blessing in disguise.”

The sheriff was watching Jen intently, but Jen, to her credit, just rolled her eyes in the face of the not-so-subtle intimation that she’d had something to do with the fire.

“That’s why I brought Leith out here, Sheriff”—she patted Leith’s arm—“to help me figure out the new layout. To determine if the athletic field is big enough.”

Olsen pursed his lips and nodded dramatically. “Makes perfect sense. At midnight.”

“Actually,” Jen added, “Leith lost a bet. He’s supposed to throw for me.”

Olsen’s eyebrows shot into his forehead as he looked at Leith with renewed interest. He crossed his thick arms over his even thicker chest. They’d gone to school together, with Olsen three grades ahead. He’d always been on the portly side.

“That so?” the sheriff said. He shifted his weight back and forth. “Tell you what, Dougall. You throw that thing right now, show me you still got it, and I’ll let this theft and vandalism thing pass. And you’ve got to put it back in the park.”

Jen was staring at him with that lovely smeared mouth and big eyes, enjoying this way too much.

Tell you what, he wanted to tell Olsen. Why don’t I take the damn stick back to the park right now and I can pick up where I left off with Jen?

Leith glared at the sheriff. “You serious?”

Olsen clapped his hands once. “Absolutely.”

Leith turned his head to look at the caber. He could do this. Just one throw. It didn’t even have to be good. No one was around. No audience to impress. No competition. No personal records to reach for.

No Da.

“Going into next week without a police record would be really, really great.” Jen smiled.

Leith turned, heading over to the caber. As Olsen got back in his car and swung it around so its headlights and spotlight mixed with that coming from Leith’s truck, Leith dragged the caber farther into the field.

He stood next to it, staring at it for a moment before circling his arms and bending his torso, warming himself up, stretching. He cracked his neck. Then he went to the thicker end, picked it up, and walked forward, pushing it up so it balanced on the narrower tip. Years later and the motion came back to him easily. Too easily. He set the long, heavy weight against his shoulder, laced his fingers tight around the front of the wood, and glanced up.

Olsen stood to the side of his cruiser, his shape a thick shadow against the night. But Jen stood right in front of a headlight, her body outlined perfectly. He couldn’t see her face.

“You throwing or not, Dougall?” she called. Hearing his nickname, spoken in her voice, calmed him a bit.

He gave the two onlookers his back, swiveling around the stick so that when he picked up the thing, he could run in the opposite direction. On the grass before him stretched the long, long shadow of his own body, the great caber looking like it was shooting out of his shoulder, fading far in the distance.

Memories came back to him with a jolt. Good memories. Training with Duncan. The days in the sun. The good-natured ribbing between competitors, and sometimes back and forth with the audience. The applause and cheers. The tinny, echoing sound of the announcer’s voice reverberating across the field, calling each throw.

Fingers laced, he crouched a few inches, adjusted the caber’s weight against his body. Then he slid his hands down a good foot, repositioning.

Oh, man, he’d missed this. There was an energy to it, to lifting the heavy stuff and heaving it with all your power. It was cathartic in a strange way, to use everything you had to flip this great object far away from your body and up in the air. You could put anything you wanted into that huge thing. Any bad issues or arguments or frustrations. As long as you kept your focus. As long as you kept your form.

Another crouch, feet planted, thighs strong. The caber pressed harder against his shoulder in the increasingly difficult angle, its thick end thrust into the sky. He shimmied his hands even lower.

In that moment, he’d forgotten why he’d stopped competing, especially because he’d once loved it so much. The reasons were there, somewhere in the dimness just beyond the headlights, but he couldn’t see them. Couldn’t make them out.

He lowered himself into the deepest position, knees bent far, and let the caber fit nice and snug against his neck and shoulder. He inserted his fingers underneath the narrow end, the grass and dirt cool against his knuckles. He was ready. He would do this. All he had to do was straighten his legs, find his center and capture balance, take off on his run, then throw.

It’s been a while, boy. You can do it. You’ve always been able to do it.

Da’s brogue, wheeling down from heaven, caused Leith to sag and break form. The caber tilted and Leith caught it, brought it back.

Da wasn’t speaking to him. It was all in his head, Leith knew. Then Da’s low chuckle, skewed and endearing from where his lips had always been curled around that pipe, sailed over the field and twined around Leith’s body.

I’ve never left ye, his old man said.

Yes. You did. You were all I had, and you left.

At the very edge of Leith’s periphery, he could see Da scooting forward on the edge of that old aluminum lawn chair with the woven, green-striped seat. He could see the twinkle in Da’s eyes just under the brim of his gray cap, and the confident nod—the same nod he’d given Leith before every football game or track meet or Highland Games.