Page 94 of Her Player

Hers.

I leaned in just enough that only she could hear me.

“Later, Miss C,” I murmured against her ear.

Her breath caught.

I pulled back. Took half a step away. Slid my hands into the pockets of my dress slacks like a man who had not just held himself dead still on the edge of doing the one thing he’d wanted to do for three solid goddamn years.

Cameras kept clicking around us, hungry as hell, having clocked something they couldn’t quite name.

Victoria stared at me for one more beat.

Then the corner of her mouth lifted. Just the corner. That tiny private smile she did when she was making a decision behind her own eyes and had no intention of telling the room about it.

Yeah.

She got the message.

She turned away from the cameras. Turned back toward the arena doors. And as she passed me, close enough that I caught the faint scent of her perfume under the cool night air, she said, quietly, just for me, “Medical team. Now.”

I grinned at the pavement.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Behind us, the cameras kept going.

I followed her back inside.

The door closed behind us and the noise dropped from something physical to something muffled and distant, like the whole world got pushed behind glass. The corridor was empty. Just the two of us and the hum of the building and the particular stillness that settled over Caldwell Arena when the crowds had gone and the lights had shifted and it stopped being a place where things happened and became just a building again.

Victoria was already moving. Of course she was. Tablet up, heels clicking, brain somewhere three steps ahead of her feet. She turned the corner toward the administrative wing and I fell into step beside her without being asked, the same way I always did, the same way I always had, only this time the cameras weren’t following us and there was no crowd noise to fill the silence between us and nowhere either of us had to be in the next thirty seconds.

She felt it too. I could tell by the way her stride slowed, almost imperceptibly, just a fraction off the pace she kept everywhere else. Like her body knew something had changed even if her brain was still catching up to it.

We stopped outside her office door.

She stood there for a moment with her hand on the frame, not quite going in, not quite turning around. I watched her take one long breath through her nose. The composure thing she did. The reset.

Then she turned to face me.

Her lipstick was faded. The game, probably. The press scrum after. Her hair had a strand loose that she hadn’t bothered to fix and her glasses had left a faint mark at the bridge of her nose from where she’d pushed them up one too many times during the game. She looked nothing like the woman who had walked into that press scrum forty minutes ago like she owned everything the cameras could see.

She looked like Victoria.

Just Victoria.

“You almost did it,” she said. Not angry. Not really. More like a woman running a post-mortem on something she hadn’t quite decided was over.

“Probably,” I said.

“Every outlet in the country had a camera on us.”

“I know.”

“The PHL conduct policy⁠—”

“I know.”