Page 107 of Her Player

“You were going to script it.” His voice wasn’t angry. That was the infuriating thing. It was just plain and certain, the same voice he used when he told me to look at him on the ice. “You were going to plan out exactly how the world found out about us so that you had control over every single piece of it.”

“That’s called being smart, Rhett.”

“That’s called being scared.”

The word landed like a puck against glass. Sharp and sudden and loud in the quiet kitchen.

I turned to face him. “Don’t.”

“You told Brynn fear couldn’t make her decisions.” He tilted his head. “I heard you say it. Right here, in this city, in a bar with reporters outside the door. You told her that.”

I ground my teeth together. “That was different.”

“How.”

“Because she wasn’t the owner of a PHL franchise dealing with a conduct inquiry, that’s how.” I folded my arms over my chest, hating that my robe felt suddenly flimsy. Like not enough armor. “You don’t understand what this looks like from the outside, Rhett. Everything I’ve built. Everything this team is about to accomplish. And now every sports commentator in the country is going to spend the next news cycle asking whether any of it is legitimate⁠—”

“It’s legitimate because we earned it.” His voice rose slightly, just enough. “Every sprint. Every practice. Every game we bled on that ice. You think one photograph undoes that?”

“I think one photograph changes the conversation.”

“Then we change it back.” He crossed the kitchen in three strides and stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes. “We go out there and we win that championship. And when it’s done, we stand in front of every camera that wants a piece of us and we tell them the truth. That this team is mine because I worked for it. And that you are mine because I’ve been working for that even longer.”

I stared up at him.

Something in my chest cracked open that I wasn’t expecting.

Three years. Showing up in my office. On my couch. In my kitchen. At my door in the middle of the night with a spare tire and nowhere better to be. Every corner of my life I hadn’t offered and couldn’t seem to take back.

For me.

My phone buzzed again on the counter. Seth, with the list of outlets. I glanced at it and felt the familiar tug of the life I’d built pulling me back toward itself. Toward control. Toward the script.

Rhett’s hand came up and he tucked that rogue strand of hair behind my ear.

“Two days,” he said softly. “Just let me have two days to win this thing. And then we deal with it together. All of it. Whatever comes.”

I looked up at him. At those ice blue eyes that had been watching me for three years without ever once letting me forget they were there.

“Together,” I repeated.

“Together,” he said.

My phone buzzed a third time.

I reached past him and flipped it face down on the counter.

His smile started slow, the way it always did, beginning at one corner before it spread across the whole of his face. I pressed two fingers to the center of his chest, feeling his heart beating steadily beneath my palm.

“If you don’t win that championship,” I said flatly, “I’m blaming the photographs.”

He laughed then, full and warm and real, the sound filling every corner of my kitchen.

And for just a moment, before the phones started ringing again and Seth sent the second email and Brynn texted asking if she should come over, I let myself stand there in the mess and noise of it and feel something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.

Ready.

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