Page 93 of Her Player

“Miss Caldwell! Can you comment on the forfeit⁠—”

“The forfeit stands,” she said, not breaking stride. “The PHL office has the full incident report. Next.”

“Miss Caldwell, what about the Detroit⁠—”

“Handled.” She didn’t even look at the man. “Next.”

“Coach Mercer’s relationship with your daughter⁠—”

She stopped walking.

The whole crowd seemed to stop with her. I watched her turn toward the camera with the particular slow deliberateness of a woman who had decided exactly how much rope she was about to hand someone.

“My daughter,” she said, her voice carrying clean and clear over the noise, “is a grown woman who makes her own choices. I’d suggest the next question be a better one.”

Silence. Then someone had the nerve.

“Stone! Stone, over here! Any comment on the hit from their defenseman?”

I opened my mouth.

“Mr. Calloway is unavailable for comment tonight,” Victoria said, smooth as anything, half a second before I could speak. “He’ll be assessed by our medical team shortly.”

I looked at her sideways. She was already moving again, tablet in hand, scanning something with that focused downward pull between her brows that meant her brain was three conversations ahead of her mouth. The cameras tracked her like she was the only thing worth looking at in the entire parking lot, which, honestly, fair.

Someone shouted something about the championship. Someone else asked about ticket prices for next season. Victoria handled them the way she handled everything, efficiently, without warmth, with the specific brand of authority that made people feel lucky to have gotten any answer at all.

And I stood there beside her and I thought about a flat tire in the dark. About a couch and a Golden Girls rerun and her head on my shoulder before she caught herself. About years of turned lefts. About her hand pressed flat against the boards and her eyes finding mine across the ice and her voice in the dark of a shower saying I love you, I love you, I love you like she was finally done carrying it alone.

I thought about how she was going to turn back to me in about thirty seconds with that composed, impassive face of hers and ask me something logistical. About the medical team, or the press schedule, or the league filing, or any of the thousand things that lived in the clipboard she carried like armor.

And I thought: not yet.

“Rhett.” She turned toward me, tablet raised, already talking. “Seth needs you to⁠—”

I leaned in close.

Not all the way. Not the way every cell in my body was screaming at me to. Just close enough that her tablet stalled mid-sentence between us. Just close enough that the press of cameras behind me caught their breath all at once, like forty journalists collectively forgot how to be journalists for the next four seconds.

Victoria tipped her chin up.

Just a fraction. The kind of tilt nobody else in the parking lot would have caught, because nobody else had spent three goddamn years cataloging every single involuntary thing this woman did when she stopped policing herself. Her tablet drifted toward her hip. Her lips parted, just barely. Her gray eyes flicked up to mine and held there.

And just like that, the rest of the world fell away.

I could have done it.

Holy hell, I could have done it. Three years of waiting. A flat tire and a couch and a shower and her voice in the dark saying it three times in a row. Six inches of cool Las Vegas night air between me and the cleanest answer I’d ever given anything in my life.

I didn’t do it.

Not here. Not tonight. Not in a damn parking lot after a semifinal win, with a championship game still ahead of us, and her franchise sitting square in the crosshairs of every news outlet in the country. Fourteen years she’d spent building this team into something Ryan would have stood up and cheered for. I wasn’t about to hand the press the headline before she’d finished writing the goddamn story herself.

When I kissed Victoria Caldwell in front of cameras for the first time, it was going to be on her terms.

Not theirs.

Not the league’s. Not the PHL conduct committee’s. Not Hargrove’s. Not a single soul in this parking lot or behind it.