Prologue

It was love at first sight.

Her breath was stolen the moment she walked out into the sunlight and the soles of her soft leather boots crunched the tops of the dewy morning grass. In all her ten years, Miss Myfanwy Wright had never encountered something so disparate from the welter of her ordinary life.

Myfanwy’s tears had been left at home; the solitary misery that had filled her days and nights had been whisked away by the hushed breeze of the open field. Its vastness had lain before her like a magic carpet ready and willing to carry her anywhere. She’d been ripe for the picking, and she’d never stood a chance against the fresh allure of it all.

Myfanwy’s father held her hand that day as they’d surveyed the pitch. His grip was warm and strong while he dragged her from end to end, eagerly reciting everything he knew about the game and the players. It was a revelation to her—every little bit of it. The men with their grass-stained white flannels, the numbers and statistics that tripped and rolled from her father’s mouth like he was speaking in tongues. The experience was religious and unorthodox, otherworldly and yet very much on the mortal plane.

Myfanwy had been nervous for the match to begin. When they took their seats in the pavilion, she had assumed her father would forget her as he had done over the past months. Her young heart hadn’t the strength to blame him. Losing one’s mother was one thing; losing a soulmate was another. And her parents had truly been that—soulmates of the highest order. So, she could bite away the disappointment whenever he seemed to look through her as she spoke, or when he would flee from the dining table abruptly without any sort of apology. If her mother’s unexpected death had taught Myfanwy anything, it was that men weren’t particularly equipped to deal with pain.

That was women’s work.

Men like her father, the Viscount Newton, needed diversions. They needed games and play. They needed cricket.

Up until that day, Myfanwy hadn’t thought she needed anything. Her mother was gone; needing would now become a thing of the past, a childlike luxury that she could no longer afford.

But then the teams took the pitch, and that na?ve thought soared from Myfanwy’s youthful head faster than the first bowl.

Because that was when she first saw him.

And in a year when Myfanwy’s life had cracked and splintered and ultimately shattered, it changed one more time. Her father’s excited voice picked up, buzzing in the background, but it was lost to her. A different kind of humming had taken hold of the young girl, a humming she had never experienced before. A verve, an energy, sparked repeatedly inside her, making it hard to sit. Myfanwy tucked her hands underneath her thighs and leaned forward on her bench, absorbed by the action.

To the outside observer, cricket can be a head-scratching thing, an incredibly British game where rules—both arbitrary and not—are dealt with in the most respectable of fashion. It was a game for Englishmen. More importantly, a game for gentlemen.

But Myfanwy was no gentleman, and neither was the man she watched on the field that day. And yet she was still drawn to the allure.

Looking back, she often wondered if the sport would have had the same effect on her had her mother not died. Surely her father wouldn’t have taken her to the match in an attempt to get her out of her room and repair what had been so recently fractured.

Without that stinging loss, would Myfanwy have been able to appreciate the spine-tingling crack of the ball off the bat, or the dizzying spin of the ball as it shot up from the ground? Would she have been able to understand the steely determination in her player’s eyes as he tramped up to the wicket?

Would she have understood cricket—and him—so plainly without her heartache?

But despite being a game with so many rules, so many players, so many scenarios considered after each and every ball thrown, at that moment, it was remarkably simple to her and would be forever after.

As he lined up his stance, gripping the bat, he held his destiny in his hands. He had to withstand.

Withstand the bowler who was trying to bowl him out.

Withstand the fielders who were trying to catch him out.

With every bowl, he had to fight just to stay alive, to stay in the game. Every swing could be his last; every stroke of his bat could be his downfall.

So, you took it one bowl at a time, one hit at a time, one run at a time. Because when it felt like everything from God to men and even nature was trying to force you to your knees, you only had yourself.

And you stayed alive no matter what.

It was so obvious to Myfanwy.

Cricket wasn’t a game. Cricket was life, and for the first time in a long time, she felt alive.

It was love at first sight.