Page 101 of Her Player

Jett's footwork is sloppy. Fix it when you're back.

Langley pulled something in his left hip. Doctor says he's fine. I say he's milking it.

The Canadian Dynamites just dropped their starting lineup for the championship. Their center is six-foot-nine and two hundred and sixty pounds. Start thinking.

I stared at that last text for a long damn time.

Six-foot-nine. Two hundred and sixty pounds.

I had two inches on him and about fifteen pounds. But size didn't win championships. Positioning did. Patience did. The kind of quiet, calculated patience that Coach had been drilling into us all damn season long. I set my phone face down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling of Victoria's bedroom, running plays in my head until they blurred together.

"You're doing it again," Victoria said from the doorway.

I turned my head toward her. She stood there with two mugs of coffee, her hair loose for once, falling pin straight past her shoulders. She wore one of her silken robes, the kind that made my hands itch to unwrap her. But there was something about Victoria without the armor, without the pencil skirt and the heels and the claw clip, that made my goddamn chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the bruise still blooming across my ribs.

"Doing what?" I asked.

She crossed the room, set one of the mugs on my nightstand, and perched on the edge of the bed beside me. "That thing where your eyes go somewhere else entirely but your body stays put."

I reached for the coffee. "Just thinking."

"About the Dynamites."

It wasn't a question. I glanced at her sideways. "How'd you know?"

She wrapped both hands around her mug and took a slow sip. "Because I've been thinking about them, too." She paused, those gray eyes scanning the middle distance like she was running her own damn calculations. "Their center. I pulled their last three games last night."

I blinked. "You pulled game tape?"

"I pulled everything." She set her mug down and reached behind her, grabbing her tablet off the nightstand. "Their coach has a pattern. He runs the same defensive formation every time they're up by one in the third period. Locks everything down on the left side. But the right side?" She tilted the tablet toward me, showing a freeze frame from a game I didn't recognize. "Wide open every time. They just never get challenged there because their center is so damn dominant that nobody bothers trying."

I took the tablet from her and studied the frame. She was right. The right side gaped like an open door.

"You've been doing my job," I said.

She snatched the tablet back. "Someone had to. You've been lying in my bed staring at the ceiling for four days."

"I've been recovering."

"You've been brooding."

I grinned at her. "Those are the same thing."

She clicked her tongue, but she didn't move away from me. That was the thing about Victoria that I'd spent three damn years learning to read. She said one thing with her mouth and another with her body entirely. Her mouth told me she was annoyed. Her body, settled against my side with her hip pressed warm against mine, told me she didn't want to be anywhere else.

I set my coffee down and reached over, my thumb tracing across her knuckles the way it always did. She stilled under my touch. Some part of her still surprised every damn time I reached for her.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" I asked.

"The right side gap."

"No." I turned her face toward mine with my finger beneath her chin. "The look on your face when that puck went in."

She blinked. "What look?"

"The one where you forgot to be composed for about three seconds." I held her gaze. "Right before you saw me go down."

Her jaw tightened. There it was, the flinch she tried to hide. The one that still surfaced whenever the conversation drifted back to that hit. I'd seen her wake up twice this week in the middle of the night, sitting straight up in the dark before she registered that I was still breathing next to her.