Nat could do this. She totally could.

Hands on hips, she stood in front of wall number one—the scraped, stripped, sanded, prepped and primed wall of her house—and continued with her pep talk. If she could survive the most uncomfortable barbecue ever last weekend, she could survive repainting her house. Which—suck it up, buttercup—was a single-story old villa and needing only a small extension ladder for her to reach under the eaves.

House painting. Piece of cake.

Even though her shoulders were stiff from being hunched over a sewing machine all day. Even though there were only two hours of decent light left and she had to figure out dinner at some point. Even though the last thing she wanted was to pry open the can of sagebrush green at her feet and pick up a paintbrush.

But if she didn’t do it, nobody would do it for her. Which meant she and Olivia would spend another winter in a house desperately requiring some TLC. Thank God she and Jackson replaced the leaky roof the year before he died.

Nobody doing it for her wasn’t precisely true. Olivia had helped, enthusiastically at first and then with waning interest. Gracie and Vee came over one afternoon for a ‘prepping party,’ and Gracie had offered to ask Owen’s dad, who was handy where her fiancé wasn’t, to help with the job. But pride kept Nat from accepting. This was her house—her and Jackson’s home. She’d been a widow for five years, and she was used to doing the hard stuff alone.

Footsteps scuffed along the driveway. Nat glanced up to see Olivia walking toward her, hunched under the weight of her schoolbag, a frown that could sour milk on her face. She’d inherited her father’s full lips and a smile that could light up a room. She’d also been blessed with his natural athleticism. Sadly for Olivia, Natalie’s genes had contributed curly hair and hazel-green eyes, and a tendency to be mulishly stubborn.

Raising a teenage girl as a solo mum? Piece of cake. If that cake was rock hard, burned to a crisp, full of weevils, and iced with frosting made of salt instead of sugar.

“Hi,” she called, prizing up the paint lid. “How was your day?”

An unoriginal parenting question, but Nat could try to inject some positivity into her daughter’s mood. Most times Olivia only needed an opening before she’d launch into a detailed dissection of everything her teachers said, everything her friends said, everything her friends said about her other friends, and what friend had turned into the world’s worst drama queen. Another inherited trait from her dad—Olivia was an extrovert with a capital E.

“I hate today.” Olivia’s nose crinkled. “I want today to die a horrible, painful death and then I want to blow it up with dynamite and then stab it until it dies again.”

“Must’ve been a pretty awful day.”

That earned Nat a look that said she was the dumbest of all the dumb people Olivia knew, but that her daughter would humor her since she’d been raised to be kind to all creatures no matter if they only had two brain cells to rub together.

“Yup.”

“Want to tell me about it?” Nat crouched and stirred the paint.

“Meh.” Olivia gave a noncommittal roll of her shoulders and wandered over to sit on the veranda edge, shrugging off her schoolbag and dumping it on the ground.

Uh-oh. Single-word grunts were not a good sign. Experience with Olivia’s adolescent moods had taught Nat silence was often the best way to drag out whatever was bothering her. She poured a measure of paint into the smaller, handy-sized paint tin and got to work. The slap-slap-slap of paint on clapboard was soothing and she’d only covered a small section of wall before Olivia couldn’t hold her tongue any longer.

“Mrs. Crawford said there won’t be a girls’ rugby team this season if she can’t find a new coach to take over for Ms. Pierce.”

Nat’s brushing slowed, then stopped. “Honey, I thought you were planning to play hockey and netball this winter?”

“Netball’s for girlie girls—mean girls like Amanda Trotter who’d scream at getting tackled or muddy. Ms. Pierce says I’d be awesome at rugby because it’s in my genes.”

Nat had met Livvy’s physical education teacher at the parent/teacher interviews. Out of the ten-minute meeting which was supposed to be about the student’s progress in class, Ms. Pierce had spent eight of those minutes rhapsodizing about Jackson’s prowess on the rugby field. Nat physically had to pin her tongue down with her teeth to prevent herself from pointing out that while Olivia was Jackson’s daughter, she wasn’t an All Black and hadn’t shown any signs of wanting to follow in her father’s footsteps.

Up until now.

“Why can’t she continue to coach?”

“She’s preggers.” Livvy pulled a face. “And she’s taking early leave because her doctor said she had to.”

Nat loaded up the paintbrush and attacked the next section of clapboard. “So. Rugby? What changed your mind?”

Livvy drew her knees up on the veranda step and rested her chin on top. “Remember when we’d go down to the school fields with Dad and Isaac sometimes? They taught me how to throw and catch, and Dad would tuck me under one arm and the ball under the other, then Isaac would chase us both all the way down to score a try.”

Nat’s stomach rolled over at Isaac’s name. Though Jackson and Isaac had started out as teenaged rivals, they challenged and drove each other to succeed, and somehow during their early adulthood, Jackson came to consider Isaac family. Nat didn’t have any family, so she’d happily pulled up her shallow roots and moved herself and six-month-old Olivia north to Bounty Bay, where her new husband wanted to settle out of the city rat race.

“That must be a good memory,” she said diplomatically. “You were only three or four then.”

And it’d only happened a few times since Jackson’s grueling training schedule meant he was away from home for weeks at a time.

“Dad said I got too big to carry when I started school.” Olivia’s mouth kicked up in the corner. “But he taught me how to pass and catch a rugby ball. Even though I sucked.” She grinned over at Nat. “Almost as much as you did.”

Nat pointed her brush at Olivia. “Hey. You know I’m allergic to sports.”

“Yet, duh, you fell in love with a future All Black.”

“I didn’t know he was aiming to be an All Black until we’d been on three dates, and by that time it was too late.” She dipped the brush back into the paint, sucked in a deep breath, and tightened her grip on the handle. “Your dad teased me about not recognizing him for years, but I think he secretly liked that I was never one of his groupies.”

“What’s a groupie?”

Nat chuckled. “In this case, women who follow rugby teams around to ogle them and squeal like you do over some greasy-haired boy band.”

“I do not squeal over boy bands,’ Olivia said then added, “and ewww. Did women really ogle my dad? I just threw up in my mouth a little.”

Her daughter wasn’t the only one. The national rugby team was New Zealand’s equivalent to rock stars, and she knew from whispers among other women either married or involved with the squad that a lot more than ogling and squealing could take place at the less formal after-match functions. What goes on tour, stays on tour. Nat had ignored the innuendos because Jackson and Isaac always kept each other in line. Isaac was baffled by the attention, and Jackson found it hilarious.

Nat stroked paint on a fresh section of clapboard. After a moment’s pause, her daughter stood and gave two huffing breaths out of her nose—a sure signal she was about to say something Nat wouldn’t like.

“What about Isaac?” Olivia asked.

The brush stuttered along the board, forcing Nat to smooth over it a second time. She tried to keep her tone light, as if groupies and Isaac’s involvement with one hadn’t cost them everything. “He had his share of groupies back then, too, I’m sure.”

“No, Mum. I meant, what about Isaac being the coach for the girls’ rugby team?”

Nat dropped the paintbrush, rocked back on her heels to avoid paint splatter, and ended up sprawled on her butt.

“Mum! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Nat got to her feet and picked up the paintbrush, now covered in grit and bits of leaf. Dammit. Isaac coach Olivia and the other girls wanting to play? “I don’t think he’d be a good choice for a coach.”

“Isaac’s the perfect choice. He knows everything about the game. Everything.”

“He does. But he also works full-time and helps out his mum and dad on their farm.” At least, that’s what he used to do in his downtime back when they’d been friends. “He’s too busy.”

“We could ask.”

Nat’s stomach curled into a little ball full of prickles. “No, we couldn’t.”

Not in this lifetime or any other would she ask that man for anything. But she couldn’t say that to Olivia. She’d promised Jackson to protect their daughter as best she could, and she’d protected her from as many of the rumors about her dad’s friend as possible.

“Honey…” She gentled her voice. “You’ve seen his limp. Now that you’re older”—she sucked in a steadying breath—“you can understand why he hasn’t set foot on a rugby field since Dad’s accident. Why he seems so angry all the time.”

“Oh. Because he’ll never play professionally again? I didn’t think of that.” Olivia’s brow crumpled. “Though, when I see him I think he looks sad, not angry. I bet he misses Dad, too.”

Nat felt as if her skin had shrunk to two sizes too small. Yeah. She’d go with that reason, then. “I’m sure he does. So let’s not poke the sleeping bear, okay? We’ll figure out someone else who can coach your team.”

Someone who wouldn’t give Nat heart palpitations at the thought of him being anywhere near her or her daughter.

* * *

Isaac Ngata woke alone in his bed, as he had every morning since his life had screwed up beyond all reason, and stared at the ceiling.

“I don’t want to adult today,” he told the empty room.

No one answered, not even the annoyingly cheerful birds who usually heralded the new day by trilling outside his window.

Isaac scrubbed a hand down his face, palm prickled by thick stubble that had sprouted on his jaw over the weekend, and swore. Where the hell had his weekend gone and how had it become Monday so damn fast? Oh yeah. He stretched out his legs, wincing as his left knee ached in protest. He sometimes worked six days a week so ‘weekend’ was a misnomer. And Sunday was hardly a day of rest once he’d finished helping out his dad on the farm.

He sat upright and gingerly swung his legs out from under the covers. Bare feet hitting the cold floor, he winced again. He sat for a few more seconds, head in hands, waiting for the last tentacles of the nightmare to release him.

Jackson’s laughter sounding as if it were piped down a long tube. The smell of caramelized sugar and cheap flowery perfume in the night air. Misty rain on Isaac’s face. His heart thudding painfully in his chest, his face growing hotter because he’d never been so fucking pissed at his best mate. The shriek of tyres on wet pavement, a blinding flash of headlights—an instant of pain so beyond anything he’d ever experienced on or off the rugby field—then a hazy, swirling gap in his memory that equaled nothing.

Isaac shoved the rest of the covers aside and lurched to his feet. His knee gave an almighty throbbing roar of you fucking idiot and he fell back again onto the mattress. He swore, using every one of the curse words he’d heard in locker rooms over the past twenty-nine years since he’d first pulled on his boots as a five-year-old. He lay still for a moment, waiting out the pain until it dialed back to the old and familiar ache.

“Next time, dickhead,” he told the ceiling, “remember you’re not that guy anymore.”

The guy who could run like the fucking wind, cliché or not. The guy who’d lived and breathed rugby as if it were the love of his life, a woman after whom he’d lusted for years in secret, then courted and wooed and worked his ass off to win—only to have her snatched away from him in an instant.

“Yeah, yeah. Get your pitying ass off the bed and get moving.” Isaac stood again—this time sloooowly. “Gotta stop talking to myself, too. Make a note, Siri. Screw it.”

He huffed a breath out of his nose, the closest he came nowadays to laughter, and glanced at his empty nightstand. He’d forgotten to take his ever-present phone out of his jacket pocket last night. Because there was no one there to witness it, he allowed himself the weakness of hobbling like the gimp he was out into the hallway to the old-fashioned coat stand near the front door. Digging around in the pocket of his leather jacket, he located the cool edge of his phone and dragged it out. No missed calls, no texts, no surprise.

Movement through the door’s frosted glass caught his attention, and he froze as someone stepped onto his porch. Partially hidden by his jacket and an oilskin stockman’s coat he wore in winter when he and his dad rode into the bush to muster cattle, he couldn’t back away without whoever was out there seeing him move.

Apparently whoever was outside hadn’t spotted the ‘No Salesmen’ sign beside the doorbell, because he or she reached out a hand and ding-dong!—there went his morning ritual of coffee, coffee, and more coffee. Now he’d be forced to tear some asshole salesman a new one, thereby delaying his first caffeine hit that would have put him in a mellower mood. Or as mellow as Isaac ever got when dealing with strangers, since people generally sucked.

He glanced down at his tank top and laundered-soft sleep pants. Not easy to look scary and badass in the Batman pajama pants his little sister had bought him as a gag. Not easy, but Isaac could look scary and badass in a tutu. So he’d open the door and let his cranky-before-coffee scowl make the salesperson jabber and backpedal the hell off his porch.

Ding-dong-ding-dong!

Someone had ants in their pants. Isaac’s eyes narrowed as the person moved closer to the glass. Close enough he could now make out the salesperson was in fact a kid, one wearing the blue plaid uniform of the local high school he’d attended with Sam and their little sister, Tui.

He cast a longing glance over his shoulder toward the kitchen and then back at the front door. It was probably one of the kids fund-raising by selling chocolate bars or collecting for charity. Best to get it over with.

Isaac opened the door, mentally combing through the bills left in his wallet. He’d a couple of twenties in there, maybe some coins. Enough to buy a few bars—

“Hello, Mr. Ngata,” said the teenage girl standing on his doorstep.

It was Natalie’s mini-me, Olivia.

His fingers crimped around the door handle, his brain spinning. What the hell was she doing there? He scanned the length of her, looking for a booklet of raffle tickets, a box of chocolate bars, something to give him a clue why Olivia Fisher was standing on his doorstep.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” he asked, because for the life of him he couldn’t think of one single, logical reason why she’d be there early on Monday morning.

“It’s seven thirty,” she said, deadpan. “School starts at, like, nine.”

Her pretty face crumpled into a look he’d seen so often on her mother’s face back when he and Natalie had been…friends. Back when he’d hang out with the Fishers and knock back a couple of cold ones in their backyard. Isaac would say something to make Nat stare blankly at him for a second, scrunch up her face in the very same expression her daughter now wore, then bust out laughing. Only Olivia didn’t laugh and he was pretty sure Natalie wouldn’t laugh either nowadays if she overheard him uttering something dumb and accidentally funny.

“Does your mother know you’re here?” He didn’t know why the words suddenly blurted out of his mouth so fiercely, but there they were, jagged and razor sharp in the gulf between the inside security of his private sanctuary and his outside bitter past in the form of the now frowning teenager hunched defensively in front of him.

“No. I told her I was going to the school library to catch up on homework. You can’t tell her I came here, either.”

That shouldn’t be a problem considering Nat’s phone number wasn’t on speed dial or even on his contacts’ list.

He rolled a shoulder, then leaned on the doorframe. “Why are you here?”

Olivia’s gaze shot to the scuffed toes of her black lace-up school shoes, and she gnawed on her bottom lip. Isaac’s gut knotted with the same panicked feeling he used to get as an openside flanker during the last minutes of the game when the entire match rested on scoring a try for the win.

“I want to ask you something.”

Isaac didn’t want to hear what that something was. “If you’re selling fund-raising chocolate, I’ll buy the whole box—hell, I’ll take two.”

“I’m not selling chocolate.”

“Raffle tickets? Collecting for Greenpeace?”

She shook her head and more curls escaped from her ponytail.

“Girl Guide cookies?” It was the last remaining reason he could dredge up.

Olivia flung out her palms. “Do you think I’m the type of girl to join the Girl Guides, Uncle Isaac?” Her mouth immediately snapped shut and a flush of rose spread over her cheekbones. “I mean, Mr. Ngata.”

Isaac honestly didn’t know what type of girl his best mate’s only child had grown into, but if she was anything like her mother she would be kind, strong, loyal to a fault, and completely, utterly beyond his reach. So he mirrored Olivia’s earlier defensive body language and folded his arms. Again—best get it over with and rip the sticky bandage off even if the wound hadn’t completely healed.

“What did you want to ask, Liv—Olivia?” The girl’s name felt so strange and unfamiliar on his tongue. So much so, he’d nearly called her Livvy, the pet name Jackson and Natalie sometimes called her. “Spit it out. I’ve got to get to work.”

He hadn’t meant to sound so harsh, but Olivia flinched. Then she straightened her spine and angled her chin up. “Ms. Pierce says she can’t coach the Bounty Bay High School girls’ rugby team this year, and our principal is looking for a replacement. I want to ask if you’ll be our coach.”

It would’ve hurt less if Olivia had removed her backpack, filled it with rocks, and used it to smack him in the face. Isaac’s folded arms dropped and he took a giant step backward—back into safety, into his private sanctuary.

“No.” His heart thudded hard enough inside his chest to bruise his rib cage. “No bloody way.”

Olivia’s jaw sagged. “But—”

“No.” He shut the door and locked it for good measure in case she was as tenacious as her mother.

“You got my dad killed. You owe me,” shouted the fuzzy blue outline on his doorstep. “I hate you.” Then she turned and stomped off his front porch.

“You and me both, kid,” he said as he limped back along the empty hallway to get ready for the long day ahead.