Page 16 of Her Player

Victoria turned her gaze toward her window, hiding her face from me. And when we came to a rolling stop at an intersection, I reached over and grabbed her chin.

I pulled that watery gray stare back to me.

“Oh, sad eyes,” I said softly as I caught a tear rumbling down her cheek with the pad of my thumb, “we’re going to get through this. Okay?”

I’d been on this team three years. Playing in this city. Making it mine and keeping my eye on her. For three years, she’d done nothing but turn my head, done nothing but capture my attention. And her lower lip quivered, the helpless look in her eye making everything in me go hard.

I’d get her and her daughter out of this mess if it was the last thing I did on this fucking planet.

“You have my word,” I said as I gazed into her eyes.

And with the soft tick of her head, she pulled her chin out of my grasp and stared aimlessly out the windshield.

Three women.

That’s what I had on me right now. Three women I’d never in a million years admit out loud I was responsible for, but that’s what it boiled down to as I sat at that intersection with the engine idling and Victoria’s tears drying on her cheekbones and the press scattered behind us like cockroaches under a kitchen light.

Bry was Coach’s girl, sure. But she was also part of this team, the way she’d always been part of this team, ever since she was a little shit running around Caldwell Arena in pigtails and her dad’s old jerseys. The team was family. Family was the team. That’s how Coach ran the locker room, and that’s how I’d run it under him.

Then there was Victoria. The woman I’d been losing sleep over for three years and was now sitting in the passenger seat of my car with her face turned to the window because she didn’t want me to see her cry. I knew exactly what she was doing. She was running the math on the day in her head, ledger style. Damage. Cost. Liability. Filing it all into columns she could solve later.

And then there was the team. Twenty-three other guys whose contracts and reputations and shots at the championship were sitting in Coach’s penthouse photographs right now, getting plastered across every sports network in the country. Moose. Langley. Jett. The whole roster. If this scandal sank Coach, it sank the season. And if it sank the season, every man who’d bled with me on that ice this year went home to a quieter offseason and a thinner contract negotiation come spring.

That was on me too. Captains held the line when shit got loud. That’s what the C on my chest was for.

I let out a slow breath.

I could handle three women. I could handle twenty-three men. I could handle a press van full of vultures, a sheriff who owed Jett’s hookup a favor, and a Coach who’d looked at me at the kitchen window of his penthouse like he didn’t recognize his own life anymore.

What I couldn’t handle was Victoria crying.

So I was about to make damn sure she didn’t have to do it twice.

I pulled us away from the intersection and started toward Victoria’s estate.

7

VICTORIA

I knew we were close before Rhett even turned off the engine.

The willow trees gave it away. Long and sweeping, their branches dragging along the ground in the dark like something out of a dream I hadn't let myself have in a very long damn time. I watched them through the passenger window as Rhett's headlights swept the curve of the driveway, and something in my chest did a complicated, unwelcome thing I didn't want to look at directly.

I bought this property on a Tuesday afternoon in April, sixteen years ago.

Ryan was supposed to be with me. He had a meeting that ran long, a parent-teacher conference he couldn't get out of, and so I'd walked through the estate alone with the realtor while Brynn sat in the car eating crackers and watching cartoons on my phone. The realtor kept apologizing for the state of the place. It had been a small museum for years, then empty for two more, and it showed. Wallpaper peeling in the upper corridors. Fixtures outdated. A smell of closed rooms and old carpet that the realtor kept trying to cover with cheerful descriptions of square footage and potential.

I bought it anyway.

Because of the goddamn willow trees.

They lined the western edge of the property in a long graceful row, and when I stood beneath them that April afternoon with my heels sinking into the soft grass and Brynn's little voice carrying from the car, all I could think was Ryan is going to love this. He was a man who needed green things around him. Grew up in a city apartment and never quite got over the absence of trees. Kept plants on every surface of our house and mourned them personally when they died. The willow trees alone would have made him fall in love with this place on sight.

He never got to see them.

He was gone within two years of the closing. And I kept the estate the way I'd kept a lot of things. Maintained but not lived in. Present but not touched. Too full of something I didn't have a damn word for to ever do anything useful with.

Rhett put the car in park.