4. Rhett
RHETT
I’d been in Victoria’s office exactly eleven times in three years.
I knew because I counted. Not obsessively, just the way you kept track of things that mattered without meaning to.
The first time was a roster meeting two weeks after I signed.
She’d sat behind that mahogany desk with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a clipboard in her lap and she’d told me what she expected from her captain in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t asking.
The second time was a contract dispute over my PHL standard player agreement that lasted forty minutes and ended with me getting exactly what I asked for, which I suspected had less to do with my negotiating skills and more to do with her GM quietly recommending it. I didn’t bring that up.
The other nine times were variations on a theme. Team business. Stadium logistics. Two occasions where Coach had called us both in at the same time and the air compressed with everything nobody was saying until I had to consciously remind myself how to breathe.
Eleven times over three years.
Every single one of them, I’d had a reason. A legitimate reason. Something that required her signature or her input or her presence in a professional capacity that I could point to if anyone asked what I was doing in the administrative wing instead of in the locker room where I belonged.
This was the twelfth time.
I didn’t have a reason.
A smart man wouldn’t have been there. A smart man would have stayed in the locker room with the rest of the guys, sucking down protein and bullshitting about the Pirates and pretending his Coach getting fileted in the morning paper wasn’t a preview of what could happen to any one of us who stepped out of line.
A smart man would have done his job, kept his head down, and ridden out the season with his contract intact and his captaincy unburned.
I wasn’t a smart man. Not when it came to her.
I didn’t let myself think about what walking into her office for no reason might cost me. Not the contract Coach had spent eighteen months negotiating on my behalf, not the captaincy I’d earned with my teeth, not the goddamn season we were nine days out from changing forever. None of it.
I just walked toward her office because I always walked toward her office.
I had that night. A flat tire and a couch and Golden Girls reruns and the stillness of a woman who’d been holding herself together so long she’d forgotten what it felt like to put something down.
I had the way she’d looked at me when I left.
Not the composed, boardroom version of Victoria Caldwell, but the other one.
The one that only came out in the dark when she thought no one was paying close enough attention.
I was always paying attention.
I’d been paying attention from the moment I’d knocked on her open doorframe twenty minutes ago and watched her composure slip for one half-breath of a second before it came back down like a shutter over glass.
From the moment she’d asked me what I needed and I’d answered with banter because the real answer wasn’t something a man said out loud in his boss’s office on a Thursday afternoon.
From the moment she’d let me put my hands on the back of her neck and felt her relax under them for the first time since I’d known her.
And now I was standing in front of her with my hand braced against the wall above her head, and she’d just looked up at me with those gray eyes through her reading glasses and asked the only question that mattered.
Why would I do that?
“Oh, I don’t know. Why would you let me in your home after changing your tire? Why would you let me sit on your couch and watch Golden Girls with you? Why does anyone do anything if not because it’s exactly what they want?”
Maybe those heels made her feel powerful, but as I loomed over her, she seemed just as small as she had that night.
I stood at six-foot-seven-inches, a towering mass of muscles flying around on the ice on sharpened pieces of metal.
No one took a second look at me unless they wanted to get their heads slammed into the ice.
I was the intimidator, and it helped that I was just as agile as I was conniving while on the ice.
But even in those heels, my body dwarfed hers.
I could tell by the flush of her cheeks that she didn’t mind.
“Rhett, we can’t,” she whispered as she peered up at me through her reading glasses.
I reached my fingers up, gripped the middle band of her glasses over the bridge of her nose, and slid them off her face. “Why not?”
She snatched them from my hand, but she didn’t move. “Because. We can’t.”
“I can just fine. What I’m asking is, why can’t you?”
“Rhett,” she groaned as she slipped those folded-up glasses into the breast pocket of her blouse, “don’t do this. We’ve got a very important game coming up, and there are things we need t—”
Her tanned skin glistened underneath the warm white lights of her office.
Her brown hair was pin straight, twisted up into a pristine bun at the crown of her head that only had one sliver of hair out of place.
The small bump it left behind made me grin.
Victoria was always so put together. Yet in my presence, she seemed to allow herself to be a little bit… messy.
It got the blood pumping through my veins as I looked down at her. But I kept my hand on the wall where it was. I’d earned my way this close to her once tonight. I wasn’t going to push the rest.
“Tell me to go.”
She stopped mid-sentence.
“That’s all you have to do, Miss C. Three words. Rhett, go home. And I’ll walk out that door and never bring it up again. You won’t have to deal with whatever this is for one more minute.”
I dropped my hand from the wall and took a single step back.
That was the part she wasn’t expecting. I watched her process it.
Watched her realize that I was actually waiting for her answer instead of charming my way past her objection.
Watched something behind her eyes shift, because Victoria Caldwell had spent fourteen years bracing for the next push and I’d just stopped pushing.
“Three words,” I said quietly.
She didn’t say them.
She didn’t move toward me, either. She just stood there with her composure still in place, the breast pocket of her blouse rising and falling with breath she wasn’t quite controlling, and the silence stretched between us until it became its own kind of answer.
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
And then a rapid set of footsteps echoed down the hallway just outside of her office door.
I heard a very familiar voice.
“Victoria!” Coach bellowed.
I was already a step back when his voice cut through the air, but I gave her another one for good measure.
Victoria dipped down and ripped her clipboard up from the floor before she strode across her office, those hips of hers sashaying with a determination that held my eyes hostage.
God damn it, those tight little skirt numbers she wore would be the death of me.
She had this beautiful, globed ass that jiggled whenever she moved.
“Mom!” Bry exclaimed as she slammed into the office.
I watched with confusion as Victoria’s daughter collapsed into her arms. I looked over at Coach, who gave me an equally confusing stare.
But when my eyes dropped to the phone clutched tightly in his hand, I walked over to him and took it from him before my eyes drank in the headline lit up on the screen.
“What’s wrong?” Victoria asked sharply as she clung to her daughter. “Brynn, talk to me, sweetheart. What’s happening?”
I didn’t even have a chance to open my own fucking mouth to answer her question before Coach glared at me, ripping the phone from my hand, and shoved it in Victoria’s direction.
He held it out for her to see. “This dropped about an hour ago. The local outlets ran it first. It’ll probably be national by lunch.”
“It’s already national.” Brynn’s voice was muffled against her mother’s shoulder, but the words were sharp.
She pulled back and swiped at her face with the heel of her hand, that practiced motion of a woman who’d cried in professional settings before and refused to let it slow her down.
“AP picked it up forty minutes ago. My phone started blowing up while I was watching practice.”
Victoria’s jaw quivered as anger hardened her gray eyes. “’Disgraced PHL Coach Has A Type’? Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?! This is exactly what I was afraid of!”
“Mom.” Brynn’s voice was steadier now, the way it got when she was the one holding things together. “I know. I know what you’re going to say. But I need you to not say it for five minutes. I just need to think for a second.”
“Brynn, sweetheart...”
“Five minutes, Mom. Please.”
“And who the fuck took this picture?!” Victoria exclaimed as she shoved the phone back at Coach, like this was somehow his fault.
I’d never seen Coach look so defeated. In the months he had been the head of our team, he did nothing but walk around like someone had shoved a stick up his ass.
I swear, the man didn’t know how to bow his head, even if you’d stuck him in a fucking church or something.
But the way I watched his shoulders slowly hunch every time Brynn drew in a breath she couldn’t quite catch, I knew it was bad.
I just didn’t know how bad it was until Coach turned the screen toward me so I could take a look at the picture. “Is that—?”
“Yeah,” Coach practically growled, even with the defeated stance of his posture.
“They flew a drone up to his windows, Mom,” Brynn said, her voice tight but level. “Last night. We didn’t hear it. We didn’t see the flash. We didn’t know until I saw all of the notifications come through.”
And as I stared at the picture of Coach and Brynn embracing, captured by a drone hovering outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of Coach’s penthouse, anger flushed its way through my veins.
No one fucks with my team.
“Rhett, hit the locker room,” Coach said.
Normally, I would have taken the order without consideration. But this wasn’t a team matter. This wasn’t stadium shit. This was personal. I peered over at Victoria, who had her arm wrapped around her daughter, both of them holding it together by the skin of their teeth.
And when she nodded her head toward me, I took my cue.
“Let me know if I can help,” I said as Coach pocketed the phone.
But fucking hell, it took every ounce of strength Coach hadn’t wrung out of me in practice to force myself to walk out of that office. Because no matter how hard I tried putting it out of my head, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was supposed to be in there with them.
Comforting Victoria, the way Coach always comforted Bry.