Page 107 of Her Coach

And when he pulled back, I saw all of the love in the world in his stoic brown stare.

“No matter what happens,” he said, his voice filled with intent, “no matter where we go from here, no matter what my career does, I will always protect you, Brynn Caldwell. I will always keep you safe. From the media. From your mother’s grief. Even from yourself, if necessary.”

I smiled softly. “I love you, Colton.”

“I love you, too, Brynn.”

And with one last kiss, I settled against him for the night, slipping off into an effortless slumber that promised a morning filled with smiles and new beginnings.

Just like the two of us deserved.

42

COLTON

My phone lit up at six in the morning.

I’d been awake for a while already. Old habit from twenty years of early morning skates. Brynn was still out cold on her side of the bed, one arm folded under her cheek, hair everywhere, dead to the world. I’d been lying there watching the ceiling do nothing, just thinking. Good thinking, for once. The kind where the future didn’t feel like something I was running from.

Then my phone lit up again. Then again. Three times in under a minute, which meant it wasn’t a text.

I knew that pattern. I’d felt that pattern before, and every single time it came, it meant something had broken overnight that I was going to have to deal with before I had my coffee.

I slipped out of bed as quietly as I could and took my phone into the hallway.

Eleven missed calls. Four from Dave. Two from a number I didn’t recognize. One from Rhett, which made zero fucking sense at six in the morning. And the rest from a 212 area code I’d spent the past few years trying to forget.

New York.

I opened the first text from my agent before I even thought about calling anyone back. He’d sent a link. Nothing else, just the link. Which was the worst possible way to receive bad news because it meant he couldn’t even find words to put around it.

I clicked it.

The headline loaded fast. PHL HockeyBuzz, one of those sports gossip rags that dressed itself up as legitimate journalism. The photo was worse than the headline. Someone had caught us in the parking lot after the opening game — me, Brynn, hand in hand, her laughing at something I said, me looking down at her like she was the only person in a half-full parking lot. It was a good photo, actually. Under any other circumstances, I’d have kept it.

Disgraced PHL Coach Colton Mercer’s Pattern Continues — This Time It’s the Owner’s Daughter.

I stood there in the hallway of my penthouse and read the whole thing. Every word. The recap of the Titans scandal. The insinuation that I’d targeted Brynn because she had access to the owner. The suggestion that Victoria Caldwell had either sanctioned it or was being kept in the dark. They’d pulled Brynn’s name from the team’s public website — community relations coordinator, right there for anyone to find. They’d pulled her photo. Her job title. The little bio paragraph she’d probably written herself without ever once thinking a gossip rag was going to put it in a story next to a photo of her and a man with a reputation like mine.

I put my phone face down on the hallway table.

I went downstairs and made coffee.

I stood at the counter while it brewed and looked at the cabinet above the refrigerator. The one I’d been emptying slowly since the morning after the opening game. There were still two bottles in there — a bourbon I’d opened the night before the season started and a backup I’d never cracked. I could see the shape of them through the frosted glass of the cabinet door.

I stood there looking at those bottles for longer than I wanted to. Long enough that the coffee finished brewing and I didn’t move to pour it. Long enough that I heard the sound it made hitting the burner plate when the cycle ended.

Then I opened the cabinet and took them both out. Set them on the counter. Uncapped the open one and tipped it over the sink and watched it go. The backup I didn’t open. I just held it for a second — good bourbon, the kind I used to know by label without looking — and then set it in the recycling bin under the counter where I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

It wasn’t dramatic. That was the thing I hadn’t expected — how undramatic it felt. Just the sound of liquid hitting porcelain and then it was done and the cabinet was empty and I was still standing at the sink with the same problem I’d had before I opened it.

Then I poured a cup and sat down at the kitchen table instead.

I knew exactly what happened the last time. I’d watched a woman I cared about get her name dragged through the dirt because she had the bad luck of being connected to mine. That hadn’t been my choice. This one was. And the question that sat on my chest like a full set of gear wasn’t whether I was willing to take the hit — I could take the hit, I’d been taking hits since the Titans. The question was whether I had any right to ask Brynn to take one too.

She hadn’t signed up for this. She didn’t know what it actually looked like, not from the inside. She’d said she did, last night, with those big brown eyes and all that certainty. But she was twenty-six years old and had spent the last five years running her mother’s errands and working behind a bar. She hadn’t had a camera shoved in her face. She hadn’t seen her name in a headline with words like “pattern” and “predatory” sitting next to it.

I didn’t go back upstairs. I stood at the counter while it brewed and stared at the backyard through those floor-to-ceiling windows and tried to figure out the right thing to do. The wildflowers the landscaper kept barely in check were still dark, just starting to catch the first pale edge of morning light. I watched them like they were going to tell me something useful.