Page 123 of Her Player

We were both right, as it turned out.

I took a long sip of my coffee and studied the trophy in the early morning quiet of the arena. The cleaning crew had been through already. I could smell the polish they used on the floors, could hear the distant hum of the Zamboni running its morning circuit on the ice. The arena wouldn’t fill for another six hours. We had a home game tonight, our third of the new season, and the sold-out crowd had already made the scalpers outside miserable for two weeks running.

Funny what a championship did for ticket sales.

Funnier still what a very public kiss at the boards in front of forty thousand people did for them.

I turned away from the trophy and continued down the corridor toward my office, heels clicking against the polished floor in that rhythm I’d been told my entire adult life was too loud for an indoor space. I’d been told a lot of things my entire adult life that I had chosen not to listen to. This was simply the most persistent example.

My office door was open.

Which meant one of two things.

Either Brynn had gotten here before me, which happened occasionally now that she had a key and a standing Tuesday morning coffee ritual that she refused to give up despite the fact that she technically lived across the city with a certain head coach who I had gradually and grudgingly and with complete sincerity come to trust with my daughter’s heart.

Or Rhett had gotten here before me.

Which happened rather more frequently than occasionally.

I stepped through the doorway. The morning light was coming through the blinds the way it always did at this hour, falling across the mahogany desk in long stripes, catching the edge of the crystal award the PHL had sent over last month that I still hadn’t found a permanent place for because nothing in this office moved without my specific approval.

And Rhett was sitting in my chair.

Not the guest chairs in front of my desk. My chair. The good one. The leather one behind the desk that I had picked out myself and that nobody sat in except me. He had his feet up on the corner of my desk and a folder open in his lap and a cup of coffee from the good place two blocks over sitting on my desk next to his boots like he owned the entire building.

I stopped in the doorway.

“You’re in my chair,” I said.

He looked up. That slow grin of his started at one corner and worked its way across his face with absolutely no sense of urgency whatsoever. “Morning, Miss C.”

“That’s my chair, Rhett.”

“It is,” he agreed pleasantly, and didn’t move.

I crossed the room, set my clipboard on the desk, and held out my hand. He took it and stood in one motion, unfolding his considerable height in the small space behind my desk, and I slipped past him into my chair while he relocated to the edge of the desk beside me.

He handed me the folder.

“New investor packet from Hargrove’s group,” he said. “Seth sent it over last night. Terms are better than the last version.”

I opened it. Scanned the first page. Flipped to the terms section. “They dropped the operational oversight clause.”

“Completely.”

I looked up at him. “How.”

He picked up his coffee. He didn’t answer right away.

I watched his face. The way he was watching me back. The very small not-quite-smile at the corner of his mouth that said he was deciding which version of the answer to give me.

And it was at that moment that I remembered him crossing the ballroom at the Bellagio in March.

I had been talking to a Senator about a foundation grant. I had been half-watching Rhett out of the corner of my eye the way I always half-watched Rhett, because three years of practice was hard to break. I had seen him set down a champagne flute he hadn’t drunk from. I had seen him walk across the room toward the silent auction tables. I had not thought anything of it at the time. He had been a man at a gala excusing himself to look at the auction items, presumably.

He had not been looking at the auction items.

“Rhett,” I said.