Page 22 of Her Player

He gazed out into the backyard with the curtain slightly pulled open.

“Went to go check,” I said as I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Press is still at the gate.” Coach nodded, but didn’t say anything. So I continued. “I gave Sheriff Hainley a call as well. He should be down here soon with a couple of deputies to disperse things.”

But all Coach did was nod aimlessly once more.

I walked up to his side, standing beside him as we peered out the broad slat of the blackout curtains toward the backyard. Holy fuck, was that a pool and a hot tub in the middle of a hedge maze at the bottom of that hill? No, I had to focus. I could gawk later.

I slid my hands into my pockets. “Wanna talk about it?”

“I’ve been here before.”

I kept my eyes on the backyard and waited. Coach wasn’t a man who opened his mouth without something worth saying already lined up behind it.

“The press. The scrutiny. All of it.” His jaw worked. “Last time I was alone. I could take whatever they threw at me because the only person it landed on was me. I didn’t have to watch someone else absorb it.”

I nodded. “And now there’s Brynn.”

“My history followed her into her present.” The words came out flat. Like he’d turned them over so many times they’d gone smooth. “She didn’t sign up for any of this.”

“Did she know what your history was before any of this?” I asked.

He turned from the window to face me then. I turned to meet him.

“Yeah,” he said. “She knew.”

I held his gaze. “Then she signed up for it, Coach. Eyes open.” I paused. “That’s not on you. That’s hers.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Something in the set of his shoulders shifted. Not quite relief. More like a man who’d been carrying an argument against himself and had finally run out of new ways to make it.

“I just don’t want to be the thing that costs her something,” he said quietly.

“Then don’t,” I said simply. “Make sure she gains more than she loses. Every single day. That’s the whole job.”

He didn’t answer. But he looked at me like the answer was already somewhere behind his eyes, and he just needed a second to let it settle.

The two of us were so focused on the moment that we didn’t even realize Victoria had entered the room until…

“Dinner’s ready whenever you guys are hungry, but my daughter doesn’t feel like sitting down at the dinner table.”

That made Coach move. He reached his hand out, patting my shoulder and squeezing it. Almost as if he were thanking me. I simply nodded my head, my hands still in my pockets, and in an instant, Coach was across the room. His strides were purposeful. Determined. Like he was glad to finally have some sort of a goal to focus on. He blew past Victoria in search of the woman I knew he loved more than his own life. I saw it right there, in his eyes, while he gazed out that window, blaming himself for the bullshit the media had already pulled on him once before.

I was happy for the two of them. Even though I was a little bit jealous as well. And as I watched Coach storm out of the living room, my eyes fell to Victoria.

Watching her where she stood as the voices of both Coach and Bry faded into the distance.

9

VICTORIA

There he stood, all six-foot-seven of him. A massive moose of a human being, even taller than Coach. A stone of beef on skates, that article had called him. Mountain on metal.

Sometimes, I swore Rhett was older than twenty-seven.

I’d caught the tail end of their conversation. Hell, after my daughter and I prepared dinner, I’d slipped down the back hallway and into the doorway of the living room, tucking myself into the shadows before either Rhett or Coach noticed me. I came to catalogue every way I planned to make Coach’s life difficult for putting my daughter in this position.

How could they not have prepared for this?

Then, I heard Rhett. I heard what he did. The calls he placed. The initiative he took when Coach simply stood there like a bump on a fucking log like this wasn’t all his fucking fault.