Page 26 of Her Player

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked finally.

“I don’t sleep in unfamiliar places.”

“This place isn’t that unfamiliar. You designed it.”

“I designed it,” I agreed. “I’ve never lived in it.”

He was quiet for a beat. He seemed to understand the distinction. That was the thing about Rhett that I kept running into, no matter how many times I tried to convince myself otherwise. He caught the things I left unsaid the way you only could if you’d been watching long enough to learn the gaps.

I turned around.

He was leaning against the kitchen doorframe with his arms crossed, barefoot, still in the clothes he’d had on all day. His hair was doing what it always did when he’d been running his hand through it, that disheveled thing that should not have looked as good as it did. He was watching me with those ice blue eyes and not pretending he wasn’t.

“You should go to bed,” I said.

“Probably.”

“You have practice tomorrow.”

“We all do.” He tilted his head. “You should sleep too.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve been fine all day,” he said. “That’s a lot of fine for one person.”

I looked at him. At the freckles across the bridge of his nose that I’d never noticed until today, when the afternoon light caught them just right. At the steadiness of him, standing there in my kitchen at God knows what hour, not asking anything of me. Just present. Just there.

Ryan would have liked him.

The thought arrived without any of the usual weight. No guilt attached, no flinching away from it. Just the clean, simple truth of it landing in the center of my chest and staying there.

Ryan would have liked him enormously. He would have watched Rhett manage Coach and Brynn and the media chaos of this afternoon and he would have looked at me with that expression he got sometimes, the one that meant *see, I told you* and then he would have been completely insufferable about it for the rest of the evening.

You’re allowed to be happy, Vee.

My throat tightened.

I took a step toward Rhett and then stopped. One step. Just the one. Enough to close half the distance between us and no further, because the other half of it was the part I didn’t know what to do with yet. He didn’t move. He just let me stand there, a step closer than I’d been a moment ago, and waited.

I looked up at him.

He looked back.

“Good night, Rhett,” I said quietly.

His face shifted. Recognition, maybe. Or patience. The patience of a man who had been waiting for three years and understood that waiting a little longer wasn’t going to cost him anything.

“Good night, Miss C,” he said.

I turned back down the hallway toward my room.

I didn’t look back.

But I was still thinking about that one step when I finally closed my eyes.

10

RHETT