Playing By Her Rules (Sydney Smoke Rugby Series)

by Amy Andrews

  Matilda opened her mouth to tell her grandmother that it was beside the point, but shut it again as Hannah held up her hand and said, “No. Just think about it for a moment. Forget the emotions of that time, what are the facts?” Despite her affront, the question sunk its claws into Matilda’s brain. “And be honest,” her grandmother added, capturing Matilda’s gaze.

  Peering back to that time eight years ago had always been a painful experience. Now it was uncomfortable as well, being forced to take out the feelings and step back and look at it with objectivity.

  There was only one person on the entire planet she’d do it for.

  What were the facts? Matilda wished she could shy from them but the truth was, she had been deadly serious about her intention to knock back that scholarship. Tanner had urged—begged—her not to, but she’d been adamant. She’d loved him so much, she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of being away from him for even a day, let alone three years.

  Matilda dropped her gaze to her coffee. “Yes.”

  “Right, well,” Hannah said, plonking her mug down on the table between them. “I, for one, am glad he did.” Her tone was brisk and no-nonsense. “If I’d have known you were even considering giving up on your dream, I’d have kicked your backside all the way to Stanford. It seems like I have a lot to thank Tanner Stone for.”

  If Matilda thought she was going to get sympathy from her grandmother, she thought wrong. Hannah Kent had never been one of those over-indulgent grandmothers. Sure, she had Matilda’s back, but she wasn’t so one-eyed that she couldn’t see both sides of a story.

  “Can you honestly sit here and tell me,” her grandmother continued, clearly on a roll, “that if you had your time over again that you’d not want to do Stanford? That you’d take back all those experiences you had, and all those people you’ve met, and all the contacts you made, and all the fun you had over there, and all those dreams you dreamed…to follow a boy around?”

  Hannah made her sound incredibly flaky and naive, but it hadn’t just been some guy she’d had a crush on. It hadn’t just been any boy. It had been Tanner. And she’d been in love with him.

  “He did you a huge favour there, girlie.”

  It was Matilda’s turn to snort. “By smashing my heart into a million pieces?” she demanded. “By publically humiliating me?”

  “Oh, for goodness sake,” Hannah said snippily, rising to her feet to frown down at her granddaughter. “He was eighteen. A teenager. A teenage boy. Everybody knows ninety percent of their thinking is carried out by their peckers. So, he made a hash of it.” She shrugged. “He hurt you and I’m sorry. But I seem to remember you making a hash out of quite a few things when you were a teenager. You’re twenty-six years old, Matilda. Should you still have to pay for them?”

  Matilda remembered a few of those incidents, and her cheeks warmed. Her grandmother had the uncanny knack of getting right to the heart of the matter. She’d always hated that about the old biddy. Matilda had never thought of herself as petty or judgemental, but that was exactly the way Hannah was making her feel.

  “I suppose not.”

  “And correct me if I’m wrong,” Hannah went on, pressing her advantage, “but Tanner’s spent an awful lot of his time these last weeks trying to show you he’s not that kid anymore, yes? Maybe you could cut him a little slack?”

  Matilda should have known not to come to her grandmother’s for pity. She should have known she’d only get honesty. Maybe that was why she was here. For honesty.

  “You think I’ve been too harsh on him.”

  “I think the only question that really matters is why? Why are you so het up about it all still? Surely after eight years you’ve moved on from all that, and if so, then why does it matter so much? Unless you still love him? Do you?”

  Matilda hadn’t been feeling particularly emotional. She’d mostly been annoyed by her grandmother’s deep streak of fairness that had weighted the scales in Tanner’s favour. But the question hit her hard, cracking the denial she’d been holding in check since Tanner had walked back into her life.

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly, her face was crumpling, and her grandmother was beside her, sliding an arm around her shoulder, drawing Matilda’s head to her waist, patting her arm, and making soothing noises.

  “Well, go and get him, girlie. Life’s too short to hold on to old grudges. Time to let go of the past.”

  Matilda shut her eyes as the tears streamed down her face. It sounded so easy. But had she blown it for good?

  …

  When Matilda finally made it home, she walked through her door with absolute purpose. She loved Tanner, and she wanted him back. Her talk with Gran, and some thinking time on her drive home, had crystallised it all.

  Gran, with her usual cut-through-the-bullshit style of diplomacy, had been right. They’d been teenagers, and yes, Tanner had made a hash of it. But his intentions had been good, and they were adults now. If she wanted to have a future with him—and God help her, she did—she had to get over the past. She had to let all that shit go to move on.

  She had to forgive him for the hurt and understand that it hadn’t been intentional, that he’d done what he’d done for all the right reasons.

  He’d forced her to follow her dreams because she wouldn’t have. And that was the truth of it.

  Gran was right—she did have him to thank for that. Now, she had to get him back.

  And she knew how to go about it.

  If there was one thing Matilda was good at, it was words. On paper, anyway. Her oral communication with him had clearly, thus far, sucked. So that was how she would reach him. She had one more piece to write, and she had to make it count.

  Whether he’d fall for it, of course, after her rejection of him at the art collective on Monday—the last in a string of rejections—was a completely different matter.

  But she was going to give it her best damn shot.

  She went straight to her computer. The words, which had been stubbornly absent before, flew from her fingers. The piece was an utterly personal perspective of the man. Tanner through her eyes. It talked about growth and change and the passage of time. It talked about the boy she’d known versus the legend of today. It talked about sacrifice and courage and forgiveness.

  About a man bigger than the myth.

  She wrote for two hours without looking up, tinkering and editing, deleting and adding, until she had it perfect. But it needed one more thing.

  Something to take it from a slightly personal feature article to a…love letter.

  A public declaration.

  A couple of weeks ago, Tanner Stone famously kicked three field goals for my favour. But past hurts and insecurities are hard beasts to master, and I sent him on his way. I was wrong. The truth is, I’m older, and I’m wiser, and I know the difference between reckless and real. So now here I am, standing in front of all of you and a set of metaphorical goal posts, with a ball and ten seconds before the final hooter, asking him for his favour. Asking for his forgiveness. Giving him mine in return.

  You said once you wanted to marry me. I still do. #definitelylove

  Matilda’s cheeks were wet as she typed THE END, desperately hoping it wasn’t their end, but a beginning.

  Whether Imelda Herron and the paper would indulge her with this final piece, particularly with that ending, she had no idea. But she had to try.

  Asking him to marry her? Cheesy, yes. Desperate, hell yes. But perfect. She wanted forever from him, and she wanted him to know it in no uncertain terms.

  Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.

  …

  As it turned out, Imelda and the powers that be, already high on the outstanding sales numbers generated by the intense media speculation over Tanner and Matilda, were more than thrilled to print Matilda’s piece with absolutely no changes.

  It was the first time she’d ever seen Imelda in raptures. “And in a leap year, too,” she’d enthused.

  But when Friday ro
lled around, Matilda was like a cat on a hot tin roof. The article was an instant hit—her proposal, it seemed, going viral—but she felt ill sitting at her desk, screening hundreds of “can we please get a comment” phone calls for the one that really mattered.

  Tanner’s call.

  Which never came.

  Twitter—his social media platform of choice—was going off. His followers must have been wearing their thumbs to the bone in their tweeting frenzy.

  One of the many tweets from rugbybunny1 read:

  #holysmoke @MatildaK you go girlfriend #TannMat #justsayyes

  And from slickstonesmistress:

  #holysmoke Looks like someone hasn’t been wearing her #kryptonitepanties!! Its ok

  @MatildaK, am prepared to share my man with you.

  Hell, #TannMat and #justsayyes trended for hours. But Tanner was eerily silent.

  By the end of the day, after stalking Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, and checking her phone about a hundred times, Matilda had to admit she really had blown it. Had he read the article, or was he still too mad at her to even do that? But how could someone so active on social media miss the viral response to it?

  Which meant he’d seen it and was ignoring it, or he was too embarrassed or too furious to speak.

  By the time she got home on Friday night, she had to face facts. He wasn’t going to reply. She’d screwed up that day at the art collective. Telling him she’d stopped loving him, not telling him that she’d started again, actively denying her love to both of them—she’d pushed him away for good.

  She went straight to the fridge, cracked open the lid on the bottle of white wine that had been sitting there since Christmas because it had been a cheap and nasty freebie from a stingy secret Santa, and swigged it straight from the bottle. She winced and screwed up her face at the vinegar edge to it but took another swig as she reached for a silver-foiled family block of fruit-and-nut chocolate and gnawed off the corner.

  The sweetness—especially after gnawing off the other corner—overrode the sourness of the wine. Not that she cared. It was one of those nights. She was going to take her contacts out, put on her baggy pants, eat chocolate, and watch The Sound of Music—an era where a nun could fall in love with a naval captain without the aid of freaking Twitter—all while getting resoundingly drunk.

  Three hours later, with still no word from Tanner, she staggered to bed having accomplished everything she’d set out to do. Lying in the dark, with no singing nun for distraction, the tears came and she didn’t bother to stop them. In the morning, she’d get her shit sorted and figure out another way to reach Tanner. Something bigger and grander.

  A skywriter maybe.

  Or a blimp.

  But right now, she wanted to continue her pity party. So she cried. And she cried some more. In fact, she cried herself to sleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tanner was running late for the Smoke’s Saturday morning training session as the Uber he was in pulled away from the air field and headed for Henley stadium. They didn’t usually train on Saturdays because, more often than not it was game day, but this week they had a Sunday game and, given it was against their toughest opponents to date, Griff had insisted on the session.

  Knowing Griff, he probably wouldn’t stop until the will to live had been wrung out of every single one of them.

  Tanner drummed his fingers on his jeans, feeling naked without his phone. He’d accidentally left it behind in his locker on Thursday and hadn’t realised it until he was almost at the airport for his trip west. But, given there was no mobile reception way out where he’d been heading, and the retreat for young male offenders was completely unplugged anyway—no phones, no computers, no television—it had been pointless going back for it.

  Still, he felt like he’d been away from civilisation for a month, despite it only being a day and a half. He was desperate to check his messages and his Twitter stream and extra desperate to read Tilly’s last feature article, even though the crushing sense that there truly was no hope left for them had been on his mind since Monday.

  Still…he couldn’t help himself where she was concerned.

  Being seven hundred kilometres away, in the middle of nowhere, mentoring a bunch of guys who’d done it really tough had been a good distraction. They had given Tanner something to focus on other than obsessing about Tilly’s last words.

  Yeah, but I stopped loving you.

  Except now he was back again, in civilisation, and the words were back, playing over and over in his head.

  If it was true—and she’d said it with such convincing sincerity—then he only had himself to blame. But he wasn’t giving up, either. He loved her, and he couldn’t just switch those feelings off.

  He needed to give her some time, however. Give them both some time. Then start as friends. And take it slow.

  She’d fallen for him once. Surely she could again.

  All the guys were in the locker room when he burst through the door almost an hour later. Traffic had been a nightmare, and he had five minutes to spare before Griff would be in the room and have his ass if he wasn’t kitted up and ready to go.

  “Well, look who the cat dragged in,” Dex said with a grin. “So glad you could make it.”

  “The man of the moment,” Linc announced.

  “Nah,” Bodie added, “The man bigger than the myth.”

  Tanner frowned, ignoring them. He didn’t have time to try and decipher their bullshit right now. He had to get dressed and get his head in the game. He hurried to his locker, yanking his shirt over his head as he went, pulling up short at the newspaper article stuck to the front with electrical tape. It was Matilda’s last feature. The headline read Tanner Stone, A Man Bigger Than The Myth. And, lower down, there was a ring of bright red Nikko around the very last sentence.

  You said once you wanted to marry me, Tanner. I still do. #definitelylove

  What the fuck? Tanner’s pulse spiked, and his hands trembled as he tore it off the locker to read it. He devoured the article, not looking up until “The End.” It was then he realised there was absolute silence in the room, and he glanced over his shoulder.

  All the guys were grinning like loons, and Dex and Donovan took two paces forward and tossed handfuls of confetti at Tanner’s stunned face. Linc hummed the wedding march. “Da dum da da. Da dum da da. Da dum da da da da da da da da.”

  “I bag best men,” Bodie said.

  “In your fucking dreams,” Dex said good-naturedly.

  Tanner, his head spinning, glanced back at the article. She’d really just proposed to him in a national newspaper?

  “What are you waiting for?” Dex demanded. “Don’t keep the lady waiting. We like her better than you.”

  “Yeah,” Linc agreed. “She’s hella prettier to look at than you, too.”

  Tanner grinned, his heart suddenly light as a freaking balloon. The heavy weight he’d carried all week suddenly lifted. He stuffed the newspaper article in his pocket and shoved his shirt back on over his head, displacing a bunch of confetti.

  He reached into his locker, grabbed his phone, and was heading for the door when Griff sauntered in. He took one look at Tanner, dressed in civvies and folded his arms across his chest. His gaze skimmed Tanner’s confetti-strewn hair before coming to a halt on his face.

  “And where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

  “Sorry, Griff. There’s a personal matter I have to attend to.”

  Griff was unmoved. “You already missed yesterday’s training.”

  Tanner reefed the crumpled up article out his pocket. “Gotta go accept a proposal of marriage, boss.”

  “It can’t wait?” he demanded.

  “I’ve already waited eight years.”

  Griff rolled his eyes. “This is the kind of shit I expect from Linc.”

  “Hey,” Linc protested not looking remotely insulted.

  Griff pinned Tanner with a steely gaze. “You going to bring your A game tomorrow?”


  He nodded. “Yes, sir.” Tilly and rugby were all he needed.

  Griff stood aside. “Go.”

  A cacophony of male hooting followed him out of the locker room.

  …

  Matilda woke with a start at ten in the morning. Her head throbbed, her eyes were gritty in the way only hours of crying produced, and it tasted like a small, furry animal had died in her mouth overnight. She groaned as she rolled on her back.

  Drinking the entire bottle of wine last night hadn’t been very smart.

  She searched blindly in her bedside table drawer for a box of breath mints she knew was in there somewhere, finally locating them and throwing three in her mouth. Next she groped for her phone and found her glasses, shoving them on her face as she struggled to her elbows, half-sitting.

  Maybe there’d been some news from Tanner overnight?

  She peered blearily at the phone screen, tapping in her passcode. A hot well of disappointment fountained in her chest to find no missed phone calls. No texts.

  The urge to cry returned, but she beat it back. Crying was for last night.

  No more bloody crying.

  She quickly navigated to Twitter. As there were yesterday, several hundred notifications awaited her. But were any from Tanner? Rather than searching through them all she cut to the chase and went straight to his profile.

  She almost dropped the phone when she saw his one and only tweet in days sent out about an hour ago.

  Yes @MatildaK #Istilldotoo #definitelylove

  There were hundreds of retweets and responses beneath, none of which she cared about as the news took long seconds to set in. Yes? Her heart raced, her breath caught around a giant lump in her throat threatening to choke her.

  He said yes?

  A low buzz of excitement that seemed to originate from the phone spread from the tips of her fingers, down her arms to her chest and belly, then down her legs, all the way to her toes.

  He said yes. Definitely love!

  She grinned at the phone like a madwoman, her heart practically floating in her chest, then promptly burst into tears.

  So much for that!