Forbidden Hockey Player

1. Victoria

VICTORIA

The Zamboni left the ice in worse shape than it found it.

I clicked across the arena floor with my clipboard pressed to my chest, my heels announcing every step against the concrete.

Tick, tick, tick. I watched the damn thing finish its final pass and leave a faint diagonal streak across the far blue line that told me everything I needed to know about the condition of the blade.

I jotted it down. Underlined it twice. I’d been making the same note for a month, and at some point I was going to stop making notes and start making phone calls.

Coach was going to find out the hard way that I didn’t issue warnings twice.

That point, I decided right then and there, was today.

I pulled out my phone before I could talk myself out of it and fired off an email to the equipment vendor. New Zamboni. Full replacement. I’d have the funds after next weekend’s game anyway. Done. The decision took eleven seconds, and I felt better the second I hit send.

I checked my watch.

Practice was a little over halfway through.

I could hear them from the corridor, the specific chaos of two dozen men being pushed mid-session.

Skates carving the ice. Coach’s whistle cutting through everything like a damn blade.

I’d come down to do a walk-through. Check on the supply closet maintenance request I filed in October, the crack in the baseboard molding near the east corridor that facilities had somehow not managed to address in five months.

I was not here to watch practice.

I made that very clear to myself as I kept clicking along, scribbling down everything I noticed.

A scuff on the plexiglass near section C.

Two overhead lights running dim on the south end.

I wrote it all down in my neat, tight handwriting, each item its own line, each line a problem I could solve.

I kept my eyes on my clipboard and not on the ice.

I was doing very well.

Then the shouting started.

Not the usual noise of practice. Something sharper. A whistle chirping in quick succession. Coach’s voice climbing over the top of it. The unmistakable sound of pads colliding with pads, and the boom of a body hitting the ice.

Don’t.

I kept my pen on the page and underlined the note about the dim lights.

The shouting got louder. You did that on fucking purpose. I heard Jett’s laughter, even from where I stood, sharp and unbothered. Then Coach’s whistle again, longer this time, the kind that meant someone was about to lose a kidney to wind sprints.

Don’t you dare look up, Victoria.

I looked up.

Through the plexiglass, I caught a flash of movement near the center of the ice.

Bodies tangled. Moose’s mask glinting under the lights.

And one man on top of the pile pinning the chaos down with the kind of calm, methodical authority that came from doing this exact thing more times than he could count.

Rhett had Moose flat to the ice, his whole body pinning the bigger man flat, talking him down in a voice that traveled through the glass without a single word being clear enough to actually make out.

He didn’t look up. He was too busy. He was handling it.

I should have been relieved.

I was not relieved.

Coach's voice hauled Moose off the ice, and the noise tipped over into the kind of bellowing that meant practice was about to get significantly worse for everyone involved.

“PLACES! We get to end this practice with sprints until your legs dissolve!”

I made another note about the dim lights. Underlined it twice.

From the corner of my eye, through the plexiglass, I caught movement again. Rhett pushing back up onto his skates. Grabbing his stick. Head turning just for a second toward the corridor.

Toward me.

You are forty-three years old, Victoria Caldwell.

You own this whole damn building. You have a daughter the same age as some of his teammates.

You have a foundation to run and a franchise to manage and forty-seven emails sitting in your inbox right now.

You do not have one single reason in this world to be standing at this glass.

I turned away before I could confirm whether he was actually looking at me or whether I’d made it up in my own head, which was somehow worse.

I started moving. Tick, tick, tick. I kept my chin up and my clipboard against my chest and my pace deliberately unhurried, because I was not a woman who rushed.

And I was absolutely, positively, not rushing now.

I made it to the east corridor before I let myself exhale.

There was a crack in the baseboard molding near the supply closet.

I’d put in a maintenance request for it in October.

It was now March. I made a note. Something to follow up on.

Something productive to do with my hands while I stood in a corridor instead of going back to my office the way I absolutely intended to.

Ryan would have laughed at me.

He would have seen right through this whole song and dance the same way he saw through everything I did, with that infuriating patience of his that never once felt like judgment.

He would have leaned in the doorframe with his arms crossed and that look on his face.

The one that meant I’m not going to say it, but we both know what I’m thinking.

I would have told him to mind his own goddamn business, and he would have said you are my business, Vic, and that would have been the end of it.

I straightened the already-straight lapel of my jacket.

Ryan had been gone for fourteen years.

In those fourteen years I had built three things. A consultancy I sold for enough to buy a hockey franchise. A foundation that bore my husband’s name. And a wall around myself so well-constructed that most people simply assumed it was my personality.

Fine. That was by design. The wall kept things orderly. The wall kept things manageable. The wall was the whole reason I’d been functional for fourteen years instead of a puddle on the kitchen floor.

The wall had not, apparently, been built to withstand a six-foot-seven hockey player with callused hands and the audacity to show up at my house unasked and be kind about it.

Goddamn it.

I wrote down the maintenance request in full. Date, location, nature of the issue, original ticket number, number of follow-ups.

From inside the rink, I heard the whistle chirp again.

Sprints starting up. The collective grunt of two dozen men kicking off the boards in unison.

The scrape and hiss of blades. Brynn’s voice cutting through from somewhere in the stands with something that made half the team laugh mid-stride.

Then Coach’s voice rising again. The speech I’d heard him give in some form a hundred times.

The Pirates. Nine days. This is where we lay it on the line.

He’d be wrapping up soon.

I turned and walked back toward my office before he could.

My heels clicked against the arena floor. Tick, tick, tick. Unhurried. Deliberate. I did not look back through the glass as I passed it.

I did not.

I was almost certain I did not.