Page 99 of Her Coach

Now, I was just curious. “What do you dip your fries in?”

She giggled. “Honey mustard.”

“Huh,” I said as I picked up a bare fry and held it up to her mouth. “Open.”

“Colton.”

I didn’t move. “Open, Brynn.”

She shot me a look. “I can feed myself.”

“I know,” I said as I moved the fry a bit closer. “Now, do as I ask. Open.”

Despite the flat look on her face, she did as I asked, and when I fed that fry into her mouth, all it did was remind me of how I fed my cock down her throat. I released the fry and swiveled around in the bar stool chair, surveying the packed bar and the way the boys bounced from table to table, recounting their game with the fans, taking pictures, and generally having a good time, without destroying a damn thing in the process.

“Hey!” Moose barked over everyone’s heads. “Anyone seen Rhett!? Him and I have a pool score to settle!”

“Oh boy,” Brynn muttered as she cracked open a couple of beers and passed them to a woman on my left, “better go make sure all of the pool tables are set up for playing.”

Before she moved, I downed my drink and slid out of the stool. “I got it.”

“Colton, I can⁠—”

I held up my hand. “I said, I’ve got it. Okay?”

She nodded and gave me a soft smile. “Okay. Thanks.”

“Not a problem.”

As I made my way over to the pool tables, my head was on a swivel for our center. He should’ve been out here celebrating with us. After all, him and Jett’s pulling off that play was reason enough to get a drink or two. But as I took the long way around the bar, heading to the alcove where the jukebox and pool tables were, I realized something.

Rhett wasn’t at the bar with us.

“Huh,” I said as I pulled pool balls out of the pool table holes and racked them on the tabletop.

“I’ve got ten on Moose!” a patron of the bar shouted.

“Oh, hell no,” a woman said as she came up with a ten-dollar-bill in her hand, “if Coach is playing? My money’s on him.”

I quirked an eyebrow as some of the team gathered in the miniature pool hall off in the corner of the bar. Before I knew it, all five pool tables were taken up with me and the guys from the hockey team, and the bar patrons all pooled together a betting pool to see who’d win in their games. Some of the men drew brackets, readying to whittle us down as each of the winners were scheduled to go up against one another until there was only one left standing.

As I chalked up my pool cue, I looked over everyone’s heads toward the bar, only to find Brynn already looking at me.

I was about to sink my second ball when I saw him.

Some guy at the bar. Mid-thirties, decent looking in the way that guys who didn’t have to work very hard for it were decent looking. He’d been sitting there nursing a beer for the last twenty minutes, and somewhere in those twenty minutes he’d migrated three stools closer to the end of the bar where Brynn was working. I’d noticed it the same way I noticed everything — automatically, without meaning to, the way your eye went to movement on the ice before your brain caught up with it.

Now he was leaning forward on both forearms, talking to her. Brynn had that smile on, the professional one, the one she used on everyone, warm and easy and completely unreadable. She reached past him to grab a bottle from the rail and he said something that made her laugh and tilt her head, and the hand that wasn’t holding a pool cue curled into a fist at my side.

“Coach.”

“Your shot,” Rhett said from somewhere beside me.

I looked at the table. I looked back at the bar. The guy was writing something on a napkin now. Sliding it across the bar toward her. Brynn glanced down at it, and that professional smile stayed exactly where it was, which told me nothing I wanted to know.

I sank my shot without looking at it. Handed the cue to Rhett. And walked to the bar.

I didn’t storm over. I didn’t make a scene. I just walked to the end of the bar where Brynn was working, pulled out the stool directly beside the guy who’d been watching her all night, and sat down. He looked at me the way men looked at other men when they were trying to figure out if they had a problem. I looked back at him the way I looked at players who were about to find out they did.