worry about you, Bailey.’
‘I’m fine,’ Bailey said, forcing herself to smile. ‘Just grumpy tonight. And don’t breathe a word of this to my mum, or she’ll say that I’m attracted to Jared Fraser and I’m in denial about it.’
‘Are you?’ Joni asked.
Bailey blew out a breath. ‘You’re about the only person who could get away with asking that. No. He might be nice looking if he smiled,’ she said, ‘and to be fair he does have nice eyes. The colour of bluebells. But even if he was as sweet as Aaron, I still wouldn’t be interested. I’m fine exactly as I am. I don’t need anyone to complicate my life.’
Her words were slightly hollow, and she was pretty sure that Joni would pick up on that. But to her relief Joni didn’t push it any further, or comment on that stupid remark she’d made about bluebells.
She wasn’t attracted to Jared Fraser. She wanted to give him a good shake and tell him to open his mind a bit.
And bluebells were out of the question.
Before the next match, Bailey had a meeting with Archie to discuss the latest results from her software. As she’d half expected, Jared was there. Still playing dour, strong and silent. Well, that was his problem. She had a job to do.
‘Travis is underperforming,’ she said, showing them the graph on her laptop screen. ‘It might be that he’s had too many late nights over the last week, or it might be that he’s coming down with something—but I’d recommend that he doesn’t play as part of the team today.’
‘I’ve already assessed the squad this morning, and they’re all perfectly fit,’ Jared said.
‘A player who’s underperforming is at a greater risk of soft-tissue injury,’ she reminded him.
‘According to your theory. Which has yet to be proven, because if you pull a player off every time they do a few steps less per game, then of course he won’t get a soft-tissue injury, because he won’t actually be playing. And if you follow that through every time, you’ll end up with a really tiny pool of players. And the rest of them won’t have had enough practice to help them improve their skills.’
‘If they’re off for weeks with an injury, that’s not going to help them improve their skills, either,’ she pointed out.
‘Travis is fine.’ He folded his arms. ‘You’re making a fuss over nothing.’
‘Travis isn’t fine.’ She mirrored his defensive stance. ‘But it isn’t our call. It’s Archie’s.’
‘Fine,’ Jared said.
Archie looked at them both and sighed. ‘I’ll have a word with the lad.’
Clearly Travis was desperate to play, because Archie came back to tell them that the boy was in the team.
If Jared said ‘Told you so’, she might just punch him.
He didn’t. But it was written all over his face.
Cross, Bailey sat on the bench at the side of the pitch and texted her best friend: Jared Fraser has to be the most smug, self-satisfied man in the universe.
A few seconds later, her phone beeped. She glanced at the screen, expecting Joni to have sent her a chin-up-and-rise-above-it type of message, and was surprised to see that the message was from Jared Fraser. Why would he be texting her? He was sitting less than six feet away from her. He could lean across and talk to her. He didn’t need to resort to texting.
Curious, she opened the message. Herod?
What?
Don’t understand, she texted back. Ridiculous man. What was he on about?
Her phone beeped a few seconds later. Your message: «Herod Fraser has to be the most smug, self-satisfied man in the universe.»
Then she realised exactly what had just happened.
Oh, no.
She’d been typing so fast that she obviously hadn’t noticed her phone autocorrecting ‘Jared’ to ‘Herod’. And Jared’s name was right next to Joni’s in her phone book. When Bailey had tapped on the recipient box, she’d clearly pressed the wrong name on the screen.
So now Jared Fraser knew exactly what she thought about him.
Which could make life very awkward indeed.
Sorry, she typed back. Not that she was apologising for what she’d said. She stood by every word of that—well, bar the autocorrected name. She was only apologising for her mistake.
Didn’t mean to send that to you.
I’d already worked that one out for myself.
She sneaked a glance at him to see if she could work out how much he was going to make her pay for that little error, and was shocked to realise that he was actually smiling. He wasn’t angry or even irritated; he was amused.
There was a sudden rush of feeling in her stomach, as if champagne was fizzing through her veins instead of blood. Totally ridiculous. But when the man smiled, it changed him totally. Rather than being the dour, hard-faced, slightly intimidating man she’d instinctively disliked, he was beautiful.
Oh, help. She really couldn’t afford to let her thoughts go in that direction. For all she knew, he could be married or at least involved with someone. She knew nothing about the man, other than that he was the new youth team doctor and he didn’t believe in her research at all.
‘Sir, are you the Jared Fraser?’ Billy, one of the substitutes, asked, coming over to sit in the pointedly large gap on the bench between Bailey and Jared.
The Jared Fraser? Why would there be something special about a football team’s doctor? Bailey wondered.
‘How do you mean?’ Jared asked.
‘Me and the lads—we saw it on the Internet. We weren’t sure if it was you. But if it is—you were one of the youngest players ever to score a goal in the England under-nineteen team. And on your debut match,’ Billy added breathlessly. ‘And you scored that goal in the championship, the one that won the match.’
‘It was a long time ago now. I haven’t played in years,’ Jared said.
Bailey couldn’t quite work this out. Jared had been a star football player as a teenager? Then how come he was a doctor now? He didn’t look that much older than she was—five years at the most, she reckoned—so surely he could still play football. Or, if he’d retired from football, it was more likely that he would have become a coach or a manager. Footballer to medic was quite a career change. Especially given that you needed four years at university followed by two years’ foundation training, and then you had to work your way up the ranks. To be experienced enough to have a job as a football team doctor, Jared must have been working in medicine for at least ten years. Maybe more. So why had he switched careers?
Feeling slightly guilty about being so nosy—but she could hardly ask the man himself, given how grumpy and impossible he was—she flicked onto the Internet on her phone and looked
