Page 29 of Her Player

She shook her head, jaw working. I watched her fight it the way she always fought it, that war she always waged against her own softness like softness was something to be ashamed of.

“You don’t have to be fine right now,” I said. “Not in here. Not with me.”

She drew in a breath that shook on the way in and steadied on the way out. She did that sometimes. Inhaled the chaos and exhaled something that looked like composure, even when it wasn’t. Even when her eyes were still red and her hands were still trembling slightly against my arm.

She was quiet for so long I thought she’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.

Then she looked up at me.

Not the way she usually looked at me, the measured, guarded look she’d perfected over fourteen years of running a room full of people who underestimated her. This was different. This was the version of her she kept for rooms where nobody was watching and nothing was required of her. The one she didn’t know I’d been collecting for three years.

“He would have told me to stop being an idiot,” she said.

I didn’t ask who. I knew.

“Ryan.” The name sat soft in her mouth. Not painful, exactly. Just full. “He had — God, he had absolutely no patience for my bullshit. I mean that in the best possible way.” The ghost of something that wasn’t quite a smile moved across her face. “He would have watched you today. Everything you did. The calls, the mud on those cameras, the way you managed all of us without once making it about yourself.” She paused. “And then he would have looked at me like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever loved and told me to get out of my own way.”

I stayed very still.

“I’ve been so afraid,” she said, “of everything that comes after. The mess of it. The risk.” Her gray eyes stayed on mine, clear and deliberate in a way that made my chest ache. “I’ve been treating grief like it was loyalty. Like wanting something for myself was some kind of betrayal.”

“It isn’t,” I said quietly.

“I know.” She said it like she was hearing it for the first time and meaning it. “I think I’ve known for a while.” Her hand came up and pressed flat against my chest, right over my heart. “I just needed to catch up to it.”

I covered her hand with mine.

She looked at where our hands were stacked together for a long moment. Then she tilted her face up toward mine, and what I saw there wasn’t grief and it wasn’t desperation and it wasn’t someone trying to forget. It was Victoria Caldwell making a decision with her whole self, clear-eyed and deliberate, the same way she made every decision that mattered.

She kissed me.

Not me pulling her in. Not me taking what I’d been wanting for three years. Her. Her hands sliding up my chest, her chin tilting up, her mouth finding mine like she’d already thought about exactly how this would go and had decided she was done waiting.

I went completely still for one half-second, one stunned, reverent half-second, and then I kissed her back with everything I had.

She made a sound against my mouth that I felt in the back of my spine, and I gathered her in closer, one hand at her jaw and one at the small of her back, holding her like something I’d been waiting to hold for a very long time.

Because I had been.

Three years. Every turned left instead of right. Every morning in the shower. Every practice where I clocked exactly when she walked in because some part of me was always listening for those heels.

All of it led here. To her mouth on mine. To her hands in my hair. To Victoria Caldwell choosing me on purpose, in the dark, with no audience and no reason I could see except that she’d chosen to.

This woman was mine.

And she’d decided it herself.

She moaned in my mouth and collapsed against my chest.

All bets were officially off.

11

VICTORIA

I’d been lying awake for twenty minutes before he moved.

I knew he was still awake too. I could tell by his breathing. Not the slow, deliberate rhythm of sleep but something more conscious than that. More careful. Like a man trying very hard not to disturb something that might scatter if he moved too quickly.