Page 19 of Her Coach

Then I turned back to my drink.

I looked at the empty glass. I'd switched to Coke for a reason. I knew the reason. I'd been very deliberate about the reason.

I signaled for another bourbon anyway.

The guys had taken over the pool tables, loud and loose, burning off whatever was left after a hard day. I kept my spot at the bar and read them the way I always read a new group.

Jett was exactly what I expected: all instinct and no filter, running his mouth between shots, but his eyes were sharp. He tracked the table three moves ahead even while he was talking. That was useful if I could get him to apply it on the ice consistently instead of just when he felt like it.

Moose was quieter than he seemed. All that size and noise and underneath it he was watching everybody else, checking reactions, making sure the group was okay. Good instinct for a goalie. You needed that kind of awareness between the pipes.

Rhett didn't play. He sat on the edge of it, drink in hand, managing the room without anyone realising he was doing it. Stepped in when Jett went too far, smoothed things over when two of the defensemen started getting competitive about money. Did all of it without making it obvious. I'd seen veterans do that for twenty years and most of them had no idea they were doing it. Rhett knew exactly what he was doing.

That was the one I needed to get on my side early.

I was still watching them when she appeared at my elbow with a fresh glass I hadn't asked for.

"You're doing it right now," she said, setting it down in front of me.

"Doing what?"

"That thing." She nodded toward the pool tables. "Reading them. You've got the same look my dad used to get in the stands." She caught herself saying it and glanced down at the bar for a second. "Sorry. That was a weird thing to say."

"It wasn't," I said.

She looked at me. I looked at her. The bar noise filled the space around us without touching it.

"He would've liked watching you coach," she said quietly. Then she seemed to decide she'd said enough and reached for her rag. "Drink's on the house. Don't read into it."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

The corner of her mouth moved. She turned away before it became a full smile, but I caught the edge of it anyway.

She was refilling something at the far end of the bar when Moose leaned over and said in what he clearly believed was a quiet voice, "She's something else, right Coach?"

I looked at him for a long second. He was grinning, completely unbothered, the way guys grinned when they thought they'd clocked something you hadn't. Like he'd just scored a point.

He hadn't scored a point.

He immediately found something very interesting to examine on the ceiling.

From the far end of the bar, without looking up from what she was doing, Brynn said, "Whatever he just said, Coach, I'd charge him double for it."

The team lost it. Even Rhett cracked.

I turned back to my drink and said nothing, which was the only move available to a man who was trying very hard not to smile in front of his entire roster on the first night of the job.

I had spent six weeks in a quiet apartment in New York watching my life come apart at the seams, and now I was sitting in a bar in Las Vegas with a team that actually had potential if someone would just point them in the right direction, and the owner's daughter had just told me to ask her again at the end of the season like it was a challenge she expected me to show up for.

I could work with that.

I finished my drink. Set the glass down. And when she came back around and looked at me with that question in her eyes, I nodded once.

She smiled and reached for the bottle.

I stayed for another hour.

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