Page 97 of Her Player

I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it until right now, sitting here with an ice pack and a bent pair of glasses and a man who was patiently not saying anything because he knew (he always knew) that I needed the silence more than I needed the words.

"The doctor said a week," I said finally.

"I know what the doctor said."

"No practices. No weight room."

"Victoria."

"No games."

"I heard him."

I looked at him sideways. "Did you?"

He looked back at me. His eyes moved across my face and I watched something settle behind them. Not resignation, not defeat, just the quiet certainty of a man who had already made his decision and was waiting for me to catch up.

"I heard him," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

I held his gaze.

There it was. The thing I'd been running from. Not a promise. Promises were easy, promises were what people made when they wanted you to stop asking questions. This was something else. This was a man who had waited three years and taken a hit that could have ended his career and was sitting in my bed with ice on his shoulder telling me he wasn't going anywhere, and meaning it the way only someone who had already proven it seventy times over could mean it.

I believed him.

Goddamn it, I believed him.

"Good," I said quietly.

I looked back at the window.

We drank our coffee. I held the ice to his shoulder. Outside, Las Vegas did what Las Vegas did. Started loud and bright and completely indifferent to whatever was happening inside the quiet of my bedroom.

We had a championship to prepare for. A week of enforced rest. A photograph the whole damn country had seen. A conduct committee filing. A foundation board call. A press cycle that was going to need managing. All of it was going to need to be dealt with.

But not this morning.

This morning was ours.

33

RHETT

The tuxedo was a rental. I knew it was a rental because the sleeves were an inch shorter than they should have been and the bow tie was the kind that came pre-tied with a hook in the back. I'd tied it anyway and then untied it and then tied it again before giving up and using the hook like a normal person who had not grown up going to events that required a bow tie.

I had not grown up going to events that required a bow tie.

I'd grown up going to events that required shin guards and a mouthguard and the kind of sneakers you could replace at Target for thirty bucks. The Ryan Caldwell Foundation's annual March gala was not that kind of event.

It was a black-tie ballroom at the Bellagio with two hundred and fifty people in it and an open bar I was not drinking at and a string quartet doing something in the corner that nobody was actually listening to. The whole room hummed with the kind of energy that money gave off when it piled up in one place. I stood near a marble column with a champagne flute I had no intention of touching and I tried to look like a man who knew what the hell to do with his hands.

I knew exactly what to do with my hands on the ice. I just didn't know what the hell to do with them here.

I'd come because Victoria was coming. Victoria coming meant Brynn was coming, which meant Coach was coming, which meant somebody on the Vipers' actual roster needed to be standing somewhere visible looking like the team had its shit together. I was the captain. The C was on my chest even when I wasn't wearing my chest pads. Walk like you mean it, I'd told myself in the back of the Uber on the way over, and ninety percent of people will assume you did.

Plus, I'd wanted to see her in whatever dress she'd picked out.

She was across the ballroom in something dark and tailored that started at one shoulder and ended somewhere I was choosing not to look at in public. Her hair was up. Her smile was on. It was the boardroom smile, the one she wore like goddamn armor, and watching her work that room from forty feet away was like watching someone run a military operation. People talked to her. She talked back. They walked away believing they had been important. They had not been important. Three of them were going to write checks before the night was over. Two of them already had.