Page 95 of Her Player

She looked at me for a moment. “You don’t seem particularly concerned.”

“I’m not.”

“Rhett.”

“Victoria.” I took a step toward her. Just the one, just enough to close some of the distance without taking the choice away from her. “We won tonight. Forty thousand people just watched fourteen years of your work pay off in front of God and everybody. And we’ve got one more game between us and the rest of our goddamn lives, free and clear, with nobody able to say a single word about how we got there.”

I held her gaze.

“Whatever the press wants to do with tonight, we deal with it. Together. But I’ll be real honest with you, Miss C. I waited three years to almost kiss you in front of those cameras tonight. Another week ain’t gonna kill me. And when I do it for real, you’re not gonna have a single doubt left in that brilliant goddamn head of yours about whether I meant it.”

She looked at me for a long time.

Something moved behind her eyes that she didn’t try to stop.

“Go see the medical team,” she said quietly.

“Going right now.”

She nodded. Her hand pressed flat against the doorframe once, the way it always did when she was finishing a thought she wasn’t going to say out loud. Then she turned and went into her office.

I stood in the corridor for a second.

Forty thousand people. Cameras going off like a storm. The whole city watching.

And what I kept replaying in my head the whole way down that hallway was the half-second she’d tipped her chin up. The way she’d gone completely still when I leaned in. Not frozen. Not scared. Still like a woman who’d been waiting for something to show up and finally saw it walking through the door.

She’d been waiting too.

I smiled at the floor the whole way down the hall.

32

VICTORIA

He was still here.

That was the first thing I registered when my brain came back online. Not the light coming through the curtains. Not the ache in my neck from sleeping at the wrong angle. Not the fact that my hair was a goddamn disaster and my reading glasses were somewhere on the nightstand with a bent arm from where I'd dropped them in the dark.

He was still here.

His arm was warm beneath my fingers. I didn't remember reaching for it in my sleep, but apparently my body had made that decision without consulting me, because my hand was curled around his forearm like I'd been holding on all night.

I didn't let go.

I lay there for a minute with my eyes closed, listening to him breathe. Slow and steady, the way he did everything. The man breathed like he had nowhere else to be, which was infuriating, because I had been awake for approximately four seconds and I was already running a mental checklist of everything that needed to happen today.

Championship prep. Doctor's clearance timeline. The photograph that half the country had apparently already seen. Seth's voicemail from last night that I hadn't listened to yet. The PHL conduct committee filing. The foundation board's quarterly call on Thursday.

And the man lying next to me who had said "Later, Miss C" in front of forty cameras three days ago like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I opened my eyes.

He was watching me.

Of course he was watching me. He'd probably been watching me for an hour, because that was the thing about Rhett Calloway that had been undoing me for three damn years. He watched. He paid attention. He clocked every single thing I did and filed it away and never once made me feel like I was being studied. He just noticed. The way some people noticed the weather, or the time, or whether the coffee was ready. He noticed me.

I looked at the ceiling before I looked at him, because I needed the extra second.