Why? Why would he think I was different? What had I done to give him any impression of me? And who did he think he was lecturing me about whether or not I chose to forgive someone? Wasn’t he supposed to be Declan’s best friend? What kind of friend openly maligned another like that?
“With friends like you, Cian, I’d hate to see who Declan’s enemies really are.”
“Oh, that’s an easy one,” he shot back. “It’s all the boyfriends, husbands, brothers, and fathers of the women he’s fucked and forgotten.”
His words, meant to hurt me, hit the mark.
“Oh, real nice,” I lashed out. “Why are you doing this?”
“Yes, Cian,” I heard my grandpa’s voice behind me, steady and calm. “Why are you telling my Sophie all this?”
Cian looked over my shoulder and then back to me. “He wasn’t kidding,” he laughed incredulously, addressing my gramps. “You’ve actually encouraged him? Do you even know what kind of a man Declan is?”
“I think I do,” my grandpa countered, his voice calm, as he came to stand next to me. “I’m surprised you don’t.”
“Oh, I do,” Cian answered. “Probably better than you. I’ve been there, you know—right there—and I’ve seen what he’s like. How he treats women.” He shook his head. “For someone who means so much to you, old man, you should try protecting her a little better.”
Protecting me? Because obviously I was a weak and timid thing who needed a big, strong man—like him?—to make sure I didn’t make any bad decisions. Well, fuck him!
“You obviously want me to ask, so fine, I’ll ask,” I said, pulling back the reigns on my temper. “What does my dear old gramps here need to protect fragile, little ole me from?”
Cian raised his eyebrow at my grandfather who turned red and looked away.
Uh oh. That spelled trouble. They needed to fess up, and quick!
“One of you better start talking right this second and tell me what the fuck is going on.”
I hated cursing in front of my grandpa but desperate times called for desperate measures. Besides, it seemed like the moment for subtlety was long gone.
“Fine,” Cian said, cracking his knuckles and then re-crossing buff arms over his chest. “If you’re not going to tell her, I will.”
Turning to me, he continued, “It seems your grandfather has been harboring secret dreams of you and Declan ending up together and they’ve all been manipulating you this whole time.”
“Don’t be absurd,” I scoffed as a handful of customers turned to inspect the commotion.
And yet, hadn’t I wondered why my grandparents seemed so interested in my interest in Declan? Hadn’t I thought my grandma was up to something when she sent him to pick me up? Sure, they had thrown us together and I could tell they wanted me to like him, but manipulation? That seemed a little far-fetched.
“Not here,” my grandpa whispered, grabbing my arm.
“Where are you two going?” my grandma asked as we passed through the kitchen.
“Downstairs.”
“We have customers out there Colm,” she said, glancing at the clock above the stove. “And more will be coming soon. Kickoff’s at 7:30.”
“You don’t think I know that?” he snapped, startling both of us.
In all the time I’d spent with them, I’d never once heard them raise their voices to one another. Oh, they’d snipped and scolded from time to time, and with my grandpa’s forced convalescence, he’d been more bullheaded than usual, but outright yelling? I didn’t like it, especially since he was upset with me, not her.
“Sorry,” I mouthed as we marched past.
The grim set of her brow said my gramps would be hearing about his behavior later. In very specific, very pronounced detail.
Rounding a corner, we descended a short flight of stairs and stepped into a quiet storage room. Before I could ask what was going on, my grandpa told me to stay put and then disappeared for a few moments. When he returned he looked sheepish.
“I’m sorry dear,” he said, patting my arm. “And just so you know, I also apologized to your sainted grandmother. My outburst was uncalled for.”
“That’s okay gramps, but all this nonsense between you and Cian has me annoyed. What’s going on?”
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard him mutter something about “that little jealous shit Cian Kelly” under his breath.
He fidgeted and twisted his hands. “So, it’s like this.” He paused, then swallowed, his large Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.
“So, you know Declan’s dad died when the lad was just eighteen?”
“Yes, I do know. He told me you were there for him afterwards, sort of a role model or male authority figure.”
That he’d glommed on to my grandpa—the antithesis of who a cool 18-year-old would want to spend time with—was still something of a surprise to me, but who was I to question the things people did in their grief?
“That’s right. He went through a bit of a wild patch and Colleen asked a few of us, the men she’d grown up with, you see, to steer him right. We all took turns going to his matches and just making sure he knew there were good, reliable men in his life he could turn to. After a time, it seemed like it wasn’t enough though. He and Cian …” he trailed off.
“He and Cian, what?”
“Those two boys,” he shook his head as a small smile crept over his face. “Let’s just say they broke a lot of hearts here in Ballycurra.”
I could well imagine.
“There was one girl. She got it in her head to get Declan to marry her and wasn’t quiet about her intentions.”
“But they were just teenagers,” I said in bewilderment. Where I came from, the only people who got married that young were those who’d gotten knocked up, and most times not even then.
“For some lasses that don’t matter much. Lots of those folks out there married young.” He indicated the pub above with a flick of his hand. “It’s a bit different here than in the big cities of America, Sophie. Sometimes getting married young is the only option.”
“You can be together without being married,” I pointed out.
“Not here,” he answered somberly. “That’s a sin many families don’t accept.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Oh, don’t act so surprised,” he waved me off. “This is still a catholic country, missy.”
I rolled my eyes. I’d gone to Catholic school and had seen exactly how little bearing one’s religion had on their libido. Ireland might not be a leader in women’s reproductive health rights, but condoms had been available for decades. You didn’t need to get married anymore just to have sex.
“Okay, fine. So this girl wanted to marry Declan?”
Even saying the words made me ill.
He nodded. “Word got around that Declan and she were—” he coughed “—having relations and she was wanting to … get with child, shall we say … so he’d be forced to marry her.”
Ah, so it was like that.
“Colleen tried to warn him off, but you know boys that age. They won’t hear a word their mothers say, so the fellas and I drew straws to see which of us was going to have to knock a bit’o sense into him. I drew the short one.”
He laughed. “Good lord, you should’ve seen his face when I took him aside and asked him to be more careful. He turned bright red, sputtering and saying it was none of my business what he did. When I told him what that girl had in mind for him he went pure white. He started listening to me then, and we talked about making good choices and respecting women.
“From then on, he made a point to stop in and see if I needed help with anything. He’d talk and I’d listen, and after awhile we got to talking about what he wanted for the future and I tried to steer him when I could. He was going places Sophie, important places. When he left for Dublin and got famous, I thought that’d be the end of it.”
Just then my grandma entered the storeroom to check in on us. “What would be
the end of what?”
“I’m just setting Sophie to rights.”
“Oh?” she asked meaningfully. “All of it then?”
My grandparents both looked at me, my grandma’s head tilted to the side while my grandpa stroked his whiskered chin.
“Do you think she’s ready to hear it, Colm?”
“Could be, could be not.”
“Oh for chrissakes, would one of you just tell me what you’re on about!”
My grandma sighed. “You may as well tell her the whole thing, Colm.”
“So the thing is Sophie, Declan’s had a thing for you for … well, pretty much all of his life.”
“That’s absurd,” I objected. “I’m willing to buy the stuff about when we were kids, but I left almost a decade ago.”
“You told her about that silly chit … what was her name, Killeen? And the others?”
“I told her about Killeen.”
He hadn’t said her name, but I figured that was the girl who’d tried to trap Declan into marriage.
“Okay, no more pussyfooting Sophie my girl,” my grandma said, turning to me. “It goes like this. When Declan went up to Dublin, he was better than anyone thought. He could play multiple positions and he took the team by storm. Soon enough he’d broken into the starting 15 which made the fans sit up and take notice. Female fans in particular.”
That last part was said with extra emphasis so I wouldn’t miss her point. Not that it was hard to. Having spent some time around professional athletes, I’d seen women throw themselves without shame at them, so I knew better than most where this story was heading.
“I’m familiar with that phenomena,” I answered, rubbing at a tight spot in my chest.
“Yes, dear, I’m sure you are,” she replied kindly.
My dad wasn’t an athlete himself, but with his tie to the team, he got to enjoy the same spoils.
“Well, since Colm had been so good at setting him straight with that she-devil Killeen, Colleen asked him to intervene again.”
I got the impression she wasn’t entirely on board with Declan’s mom always running to my grandpa, but knowing my grandma, she’d probably never said a word about it. Whereas the ability to bite one’s tongue had skipped my mom, my grandma and I were both experts at it.
“It’s not an easy thing, you know, telling a young man who’s flush with cash and the toast of the town that he’s walking a bad path,” my grandpa said, taking over the story. “He wasn’t too keen on me warning him off those girls.”
Of course he hadn’t been. Good looking, famous, and with more women than he’d know what to do with? I’d seen enough of Declan’s temper tantrums when we’d been kids to imagine exactly how he would have responded to my grandfather’s interference. It wouldn’t have been a pretty sight.
“He wouldn’t have any of it,” he continued, shaking his head. “Maybe it was a bad idea, but I decided that if I talked about you during our visits, maybe he’d see there were other types of women out there. Women he could be proud to be with instead of all those tarts.”
“To hear Cian tell it, Declan didn’t give up the tarts though.”
He winced and looked around the small room. “Hand me that crate, would you?”
When I passed it his way, he plopped down and my grandmother rested her hand on his shoulder. “You shouldn’t tire yourself out Colm. You know what the doctor said.”
“I’m fine Maureen. Just need to sit down a bit.”
The small, dark room descended into quiet for a few moments.
“Now, where was I?” he asked and cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Oh yes. So any time Declan came home to help his mam or visit his sister, he’d stop here too. I started to notice that after a while, he’d ask me questions about you: what you were up to, where you were, had I heard from you lately. That sort of thing. He hadn’t … ehm … curbed his activities, if you catch my meaning, but he was definitely showing a lot of interest in your activities too.”
And that’s when I realized what my grandpa had been plotting and for how just long.
“Oh my god,” I drawled. “You do realize how ridiculous this plan of yours was, don’t you?”
“I told you Sophie, I didn’t think anything would happen. I just hoped he’d realize the women he spent time with weren’t the right type of woman. I thought maybe he’d meet someone good and smart—like you—and he’d settle down with her.”
“Settle down at 27?” I scoffed and looked to my grandma.
“When he had his heart attack, did the doctors run a scan of his head too just to be sure?”
The joke was in poor taste, but it got my point across.
“No, you’re right,” he nodded, choosing to ignore my barb. “No one expected him to settle down … precisely. Maybe just go out with a respectable girl. Or girls. It didn’t really matter. He just needed to stop with those other ones.”
“Why?”
I was genuinely curious why he cared about Declan’s sex life.
“It’s disgraceful,” he answered indignantly.
“But it was his life,” I argued, surprising myself. “If he wanted to screw every woman he met, that was his business, not yours. And certainly not his mothers’.”
“Right, except I don’t think that’s what he wanted to be doing.”
I snorted. No-strings-attached-sex, and lots of it, was what every young, hot athlete wanted. Maybe even more than the money they got for playing.
“You keep telling yourself that.”
“Give your grandfather a break Sophie,” my grandma warned. “This is not a conversation he wants to be having with his granddaughter. You think it’s easy for either of us to talk about this stuff?”
If they hadn’t wanted to ever have this conversation, maybe they shouldn’t have butted their noses into Declan’s life, using me as their dangling carrot. They’d created an awkward situation for everyone involved and now they had to own up to it.
“I still don’t understand why you thought this was a good idea.”
If I was willing to buy my gramps’s story about trying to steer Declan right by using me as an example of the type of woman he should be going after, then why had he also tried to play matchmaker between us. From the sound of it, Declan hadn’t changed his ways, despite all the nice stories my grandpa had told him. Why would they want me to be with a man who’d shown little to no regard for women?
“Because I care about the lad, Sophie, and want what’s best for him. I want him to be happy.”
“And I love that about you gramps, but that has nothing to do with me.”
“You could make him happy,” he answered meaningfully.
“I thank you for thinking I have the power to magically transform a man who’s spent the entirety of his adult life sleeping his way through a country’s capital, but no.” My voice broke. “Just no.”
If all I’d wanted was something quick and meaningless, I could fuck Declan—scratch the itch we both had and be done with it—but I’d started to think there could be something more between us. Which was idiotic, I knew, since I had no plans to stick around, but somehow, he’d managed to worm his way into my heart and made me want more. My gut churned, knowing I’d fallen for someone who would never be able to give me what I needed from a relationship.
As if sensing my inner debate, my grandpa stood and placed his hand on my shoulder. Squeezing, he said, “Give the lad a chance, Sophie. I think you’ll be surprised.”
“Surprised when a self-centered athlete tries to get in my pants? Nothing surprising there, gramps.”
“That’s not what he wants from you.” Choking on his words, he added, “At least not all he wants from you.”
“Colm!”
“Well?” he said, facing my grandma. “You don’t think he’s gonna give that up entirely, do you?”
“But this is your granddaughter you’re talking about!”
Thank god my grandma was indignant on my behalf because I couldn’t bring mysel
f to speak. Some things just never needed to be talked about—like your grandpa offering you up on a platter to a known sex fiend. Good lord.
“Gramps, you know I love you, but are you sure you don’t need a scan of your brain? You told me yourself Declan’s only interested in women for one thing. So what makes you think it’d be different with me?”
Sharing a glance, my grandma nodded.
“Because he told me so,” he stated, so matter-of-fact.
He’d told him so?
What the what?
Could this get any weirder? Never mind, forget I asked.
“Let me see if I have this right. Over tea and scones one day, while discussing the weather, he said to you, ‘Colm, I’m ready to stop fucking random women and I vow to do things differently with your granddaughter. Will you please, sir, give me permission to court her properly?’ Oh, that’s rich.”
My grandma’s jaw dropped open and my grandpa’s face turned magenta, but I didn’t wait to hear their answer. I’d heard enough for one night. Taking a page out of my mom’s playbook, I stormed out of the room without another word.
As I marched back up the steps, I seriously wondered what the hell I was still doing in Ballycurra. I was no closer to my original goal of saving or selling the pub than I’d been weeks ago, and it didn’t look like things were going to change any time soon. Maybe I needed to cut my losses and get the hell out since it appeared my grandpa was on the mend. Maybe, unlike everyone in this stupid place, I just needed to mind my own damn business and let whatever was going to happen play out in its own time.
Once safely back behind the bar, I continued pouring drinks and refilling bowls of pretzels. At the other end of the copper expanse, Cian did the same, but I could feel his eyes lingering on me every couple of minutes.
Handing Siobhan the glass of cider I’d just poured, I wiped my hands and marched over to Cian.
“Stop staring at me.”
“I’m not staring at you.”
“You are. Stop it.” I crossed my arms over my chest and raised my eyebrow.
“Alright, fine. I’m staring, but only because I’m trying to figure it out.”
Trying Sophie: A Dublin Rugby Romance Page 13