Page 100 of Her Player

I did the math standing right there.

Hargrove's operational oversight clause was going to come back rewritten in three weeks. Maybe four. The new version would be polite as hell. Cleaner than a fresh sheet of ice. Either gutted of the leverage that mattered, or quietly pulled off the table entirely, the way men like Hargrove pulled things off the table, as if they'd never been on the table to begin with.

Coach would never have to know how close he came to losing the second job of his life.

Victoria would never have to know how close Hargrove had come to taking another piece of Ryan's legacy off the board.

Brynn would never have to know what could have happened to her mother and her coach if I hadn't shown up at a black-tie gala in March in a rental tuxedo with my eyes open.

Three people I cared about more than my own goddamn life were going to skate through championship week with nothing in their pockets heavier than what they were already carrying.

That was the math.

That was the only math I gave a damn about.

I excused myself from the cluster.

I walked back across the ballroom with the same gait I'd come over with. Easy. Unhurried. Like I'd just been making polite conversation with an older gentleman about his hockey investments. Which, in a damn sense, I had.

I passed Coach and Brynn on my way toward the bar. Coach nodded at me. Brynn waved with two fingers, the way she always did when she was happy. Neither one of them had a single goddamn clue what had just happened sixty feet away. That was the point.

I got to the bar. Ordered a soda water with lime.

When the bartender set it down in front of me, I noticed my hands were shaking. Just slightly. The aftermath, not the moment. The hit you didn't feel during the brawl but always felt the second you got off the ice.

I took a long drink.

Then I turned and leaned my back against the bar and found Victoria across the room.

She was mid-conversation with a Senator. She had her chin tilted slightly, the way she did when she was listening to someone she was choosing to be polite to instead of correct. Her free hand was at her side. The champagne flute in her other hand was barely sipped from. She was beautiful. She was tired. She was holding the entire damn night together with her smile and her shoulders the way she'd been holding the entire franchise together for fourteen years.

She didn't know what I'd just done.

She wasn't going to know. Not tonight. Maybe not for months. Maybe never, if I played it right.

That was the point.

I'd waited three years to be the kind of man who could quietly handle a room like this for her. The kind of man whose presence at a gala wasn't just about showing up in a rental tux. I didn't need her to thank me for it. I didn't need her to know. I just needed the math to work out the way I'd told it to work out the night of a flat tire and a Golden Girls rerun, with her head finally on my shoulder in the dim light.

I raised my soda water in a small salute across the ballroom, even though she wasn't looking.

Whatever it cost me. Whatever the press did when they finally figured it out. Whatever the PHL conduct committee did when it convened to review the paperwork I'd already filed.

I was already hers.

I'd just made damn sure the franchise she'd spent fourteen years building was going to keep being hers too.

34

RHETT

Doctors had a funny way of telling you to take it easy.

No practices. No sprints. No weight room. No games.

What they failed to account for was the fact that I didn't know how to be still. I never had. Even as a kid, the second my ass hit a chair, my leg started bouncing. My fingers started drumming. My mind started calculating the next thing, the next move, the next play. Stillness wasn't something I understood, and a week of enforced rest with a championship game looming over my head wasn't doing me any goddamn favors.

It didn't help that Coach texted me every twelve hours with updates from practice.