Page 46 of Her Coach

I stood there until Rhett’s footsteps could no longer be heard.

“You sure you’re⁠—?”

“Look,” she said with a curt voice as she slapped her pen down against her desk, “I get it. My daughter is on a crusade to get me out of my routine rut. But to be quite honest, Coach, you’re not my type.”

I blinked. “That’s fine. You’re not my type, either.”

She sighed before she picked her pen back up. “Good, because my type died fifteen years ago. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to get done before your center and my daughter harass me about another meal. So if you’ll excuse me.”

And when the icy cold demeanor of her attitude settled heavily in the space around us, I just nodded my head before slipping silently out of her office.

Well, at least we were all on the same page with that one.

I was halfway down the hallway when I turned the corner and nearly walked straight into her.

Brynn pulled up short, her iced coffee tilting in her hand, her eyes going wide behind those glasses. She had her laptop tucked under her other arm and her hair half up, half down, and she was wearing that bar shirt again, the one with the faded logo across the chest that fit her in a way that I was choosing not to think about.

“Sorry,” she said, steadying the coffee. “Didn’t see you.”

I didn’t move out of the way. I should have. The hallway was empty and there was plenty of room and I had approximately twelve good reasons to step aside and keep walking.

I didn’t move.

She looked up at me. Tilted her head the way she did when she was figuring something out. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out lower than I intended.

She studied me for another second. Then something shifted in her expression, not quite a smile, something quieter than that, like she’d just arrived at an answer she wasn’t sure she was ready for. She moved to step around me.

I caught her elbow.

She stopped. Looked down at my hand on her arm. Looked back up at me.

I walked her back two steps until her shoulders met the wall. Not hard. Deliberate. She let me do it, which was its own kind of answer. Her coffee hand came up between us and I took it from her, set it on the floor against the baseboard without looking away from her face, and straightened back up.

“Colton,” she said. Barely a sound.

“I know,” I said.

I braced one hand against the wall beside her head and lowered my face toward hers. Slow. Giving her every chance to say no. She didn’t say no. She tipped her chin up instead, those brown eyes steady on mine from behind those glasses, and when my mouth finally touched hers it was soft at first, careful, the way I’d been telling myself all morning I wasn’t going to do this.

Then she made a small sound against my mouth and my hand moved from the wall to her jaw and soft turned into something else entirely.

She tasted like that goddamn iced coffee and something underneath it that was just her, and I felt her free hand curl into the front of my shirt like she needed something to hold onto. I let her have it. I tilted her head back and took my time with her mouth the way I had been wanting to since the first night she stood behind that bar and looked at me like I was a problem she hadn’t decided whether to solve yet.

It was a bad idea. A terrible, specific, completely avoidable bad idea that I was making worse by the second.

I pulled back.

Not far. Just enough. She was flushed, her glasses slightly skewed, her hand still twisted in my shirt. She blinked up at me like she was coming back from somewhere, and I watched her get there, watched the moment her brain came back online and her eyes focused.

“Noon today,” I said. My voice had gone rough and I didn’t do anything about it. “Don’t be late.”

She stared at me. “That’s it?”

“For now.” I picked her coffee up off the floor and pressed it back into her hand. Straightened her glasses with two fingers. “Go do your work, Brynn.”

She made a sound that wasn’t quite a word. Then she pushed off the wall, adjusted her laptop under her arm, and walked down the hallway without looking back.