Page 38 of SCRUMptious

The entire timeI made my way through airport security, I kept my eyes peeled for Lauren, but by the time I made it to the assigned gate, I still hadn’t seen her. And that worried me. I hadn’t had a lot of time to formulate a coherent plan to win her back, but the one I had managed to cobble together rested entirely on us being on the same flight. Specifically, sitting next to her for the 11 hours it took to fly to Los Angeles. I’d stopped at the ATM and pulled out four crisp €50 bills to bribe whoever’d actually been assigned the seat next to her. That, and I’d picked up a bottle of limited edition Teeling Irish Whiskey. I was a desperate man willing to resort to desperate measures.

As the minutes ticked by, I became increasingly nervous. I didn’t know where Lauren lived—not entirely. All I knew was that she owned a house in Los Feliz that she’d been renting out as an AirBnB while she’d been in Ireland and that she could see the Griffith Observatory from her deck on a clear day. According to Google Earth, you could see the Observatory from the whole damn neighborhood, so I had no idea how I was going to narrow down her location.

I feared I’d have to ask my dad for another favor.

We’d spent an hour on the phone last night while I’d filled him in on my relationship with Lauren and why I was going to L.A. on such short notice. If it turned out she wasn’t on my flight—or worse, if she was but refused to forgive me—I was going to need a place to crash once we landed. He’d quickly offered up his beach house and the keys to his Range Rover. I’d had an important stop to make before I’d headed to the airport, but once in the taxi, I’d mapped the distance from Malibu to Los Feliz, and I really fucking hoped it wouldn’t come to that. With L.A.’s notorious traffic, the trip between my dad’s place and Lauren’s could take close to three hours.

When the gate agent called pre-boarding for business class passengers, I raked my eyes over my fellow travelers once again, my good leg bouncing frantically. Shit. She wasn’t going to be on this flight. Before I fell into a full blown panic, I scanned the crowd one last time. And then my eyes landed on her coming down the hall toward ourgate.

I let out a massive sigh of relief. I hadn’t seen Lauren yet because she hadn’t beenhere.

I caught the eye of the man sitting directly across from me. “Can you watch my stuff?” I gestured to my duffel bag, the only luggage I’d bothered to bring. There hadn’t been time to pack properly. And besides, anything I hadn’t thought to bring or couldn’t live without I could pick up once we landed. It wasn’t like I was going to a third world country or anything. “I need to go find my girlfriend.”

“Yeah, sure,” he answered with a quick glance my way. Then he did a double take. “Areyou—?”

“Yup,” I answered quickly, shaking his hand and stepping around mybag.

Given that I hadn’t been one of the team’s superstar players, I was always surprised when people recognized me. (People not dressed in sequins and wearing three layers of paint on their faces, that was. Those girls had radar like you wouldn’t believe and could pick a player out of a lineup a mile away). Had I been paying attention to him instead of tracking Lauren’s progress down the hall, I would have noticed the Dublin Rugby cap he wore on hishead.

“Thanks!” I called over my shoulder and gave him a thumbs up. It wasn’t how I would normally have treated a fan, but I needed to get to my woman, not stand around chatting with him about my injury. If I’d still been on the team, I might have double-backed to chat, but I’d been officially retired for a couple of weeks now. My brushing him off wasn’t going to land me in hot water with the team’s management or PR group.

When I was within a few feet of Lauren, and I realized she hadn’t noticed me yet, I stopped and studied her; just let my eyes take their fill. God, I missed her, I thought, my heart pinching painfully in my chest.

And it looked as if she hadn’t been doing so well without me either. Her eyes were rimmed in red and she’d thrown her hair into a haphazard bun on top of her head, several wisps having broken loose of their hold. In the nearly two months I’d known her, she’d never once looked this haggard—not even when her kitchen had almost burneddown.

She also looked distracted. No, not that. She looked distraught, I realized with a twisting of my gut, knowing I’d put that look on her face. Before I could make out anything else about her, Lauren dropped her gaze to the phone in her hand, pressed a button, and then brought it to her ear. She shifted away and my own phone started ringing in my pocket. Not wanting to tear my eyes from the woman I loved, I rooted around in my pocket and, without looking to see who was calling, brought it to myear.

“Hello.”

“Donal?”

My breath caught and then released in a gust of relief. She’d been callingme.

“Baby,” I breathed, fighting the urge to step forward and pull her into myarms.

With her back to me, I watched as her shoulders rose and fell with a shuddering sob. “I’m so sorry,” she cried. “I didn’t meant to leave likethat.”

“It’s okay,” I said, my voice breaking. I clenched my jaw and took a deep breath in an effort to calm my emotions. “I understand.”

“I understand too, why you left and needed some time. I didn’t want to, but I do.” She let go of the handle of her bag and wrapped her arm around her waist, as if to hold herself together.

“I shouldn’t have left you. I never want to leave you again.”

Silence fell between us and I stepped closer. If she turned around now, I could reach out and touchher.

“I love you so much, Donal.” She let go then, let the full weight of her unhappiness loose, as her body rocked with the force of her tears. “I’m such afool.”

I took a deep breath and blinked as a tear of my own slipped from my eye and trailed down my face. Instead of reaching out to her, slowly, I got down on my knees behind her. With one hand clutched around my phone in a vice grip, I reached into the inner pocket of my fleece with the other. “Lauren?”

“Yeah,” she said, and then took a deep breath of her own and swiped the back of her hand over her cheeks.

“Turn around, baby.”

“What—?”

“Turn around, Lauren.”

Slowly, as if time had ceased to function properly, I watched Lauren turn to face me. She sucked in a startled gasp when she saw me on my knees in front ofher.

“Will you marry me, baby?” I asked, holding up the diamond ring I’d purchased earlier that afternoon.

But instead of saying yes as I’d hoped, Lauren’s face went white and she dropped her phone. When it clanged to the ground, time seemed to hurtle forward into overdrive and the loud, harsh sounds of the airport assaulted my ears. Dimly, I became aware of the crowd we’d attracted, but I was most aware of the fact that Lauren had placed her hands over her mouth and that her whole body was shaking.

The longer she took to speak, the more worried I became.

She’d been damaged after Javier had abandoned her, and I understood that, but I also needed her to know I’d never leave her side like he had. This morning, as I’d showered, I’d known in my heart that the only way to prove to Lauren that I wasn’t like her ex-boyfriend was to ask her to be my wife—and then to actually meet her at the altar. To pledge myself to her, in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer, until death do us part. If she’d have me, I wanted to spend the rest of my life making her happy, and proving to her that love didlast.

Now, as the seconds ticked by and the crowd began to titter amongst themselves about the horrible proposal they were witnessing, I wondered if maybe I’d overstepped my bounds, if once again I’d fallen back on bad habits and acted before thinking through the consequences of my actions.

But just as I was about to put away the ring and get to my feet, Lauren unleashed a flood of tears and dropped to her knees in front of me. Throwing her arms around me, she buried her face against the exposed skin of my throat and nodded her head up and down. And into the crook of my neck she whispered, “Yes. A thousand timesyes.”

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