6. Rhett
RHETT
Rhett and I will come over with everything before dinner…
It was the only thing swirling around in my head as Coach and Bry left her office.
As we packed up and headed back to her place.
As we navigated back streets, keeping an eye out for news vans and cameras that could have followed us.
I kept a vigilant eye, despite the fact that her voice kept echoing off the corners of my mind.
“You want me to pack your things, or Bry?” I asked when we stepped through her back door.
“Neither,” she said plainly as she clicked her way toward the hallway.
“I want you to pull all of the curtains closed in the house. Then I want you to go around and check the lamps. Many of them are on automatic timers. Set the timers to click on and off randomly throughout the day. I want it to look like someone’s here. ”
I nodded once before I got to work.
I knew better than to question Victoria while she was like this. And to be quite honest, I enjoyed her dominant side. Her barked orders. She was easy to read, despite the stoic demeanor she kept. You always knew where you stood with her, she always spoke her mind, and she never once lied.
She’d go silent if she didn’t want to answer truthfully.
But she never lied.
“Shit,” I hissed.
Just as I went to pull the living room curtains closed, I watched two separate news vans roll down the road.
I shook my head as I watched people leap out of a sliding white door on the side of the van, and I whipped the curtains closed before they could brandish their cameras to snap pictures of me.
Because the last thing we needed was the press thinking that the owner of the team was fucking the captain of the team.
I mean, unless we actually fucked.
I wouldn’t mind that if she actually hiked that skirt up and showed me what was underneath.
“Are you. For fucking. Real?” Victoria asked, punctuating her words as she came up behind me.
I whipped around just before I saw her peeking through the living room window curtains I had just pulled closed. “Don’t worry, they only just pulled up.”
She released her finger from the blackout curtain, and it fluttered closed. “I’ve got my stuff packed. Head into my room and grab the two suitcases and the toiletry bag. I’ll go get started on Bry’ things.”
I nodded. “On it.”
She packed light for a woman on a mission.
I tossed the two suitcases onto one of my shoulders, then grabbed the little toiletry case.
For a woman who seemed as snooty and put-together as Victoria, she didn’t pack a great deal.
Most women, for a stay of unknown length, packed at least half of their closets.
Hell, some of them packed a suitcase just for their shoes!
Not Victoria, though.
It was intriguing to say the least.
That woman always kept me on my toes.
But after loading her things into the back of my car that we had parked around the backside of her home, I went and found her in Bry’ room.
Folding and packing things like it was a game of Tetris.
Like she’d be graded for it. And as I stood there, leaning against the doorframe of her daughter’s bedroom, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that Victoria picked me.
Volunteered me for this mission without asking. Without a second thought.
Almost as if it were instinct.
The thought tugged a smile across my face.
I’m finally wearing her down.
Only took me three fucking years to do it.
I stood there longer than I should have.
She didn’t notice. She was already three moves ahead, refolding a sweater she’d just folded, repositioning it in the suitcase with the same focused precision she gave everything.
Brynn’s room was a mess by any normal standard.
Clothes draped over the chair, books stacked sideways, a throw blanket that had migrated from the bed to the floor to somewhere underneath the desk.
Victoria moved through it like she was solving a problem, pulling order out of chaos with quiet efficiency, and I watched her and thought about the fact that this was probably what she’d been doing for fourteen years.
Making order out of chaos. Holding things together by sheer force of will. Running a franchise and raising a daughter and grieving a husband and never once letting anyone see the seams.
Until me.
Not that she’d chosen it. Not that she’d offered it consciously.
But something about the way she’d looked at me in that office today, the way she’d said it so easily, like I was just part of the plan.
Like I was already accounted for in whatever equation she ran in her head without even meaning to put me there.
I picked up the bag she tossed my way without looking up.
“You good?” she asked, still not looking at me.
“Yeah, Miss C,” I said. “I’m good.”
She packed in silence. She tossed me the bags in silence. We tossed them into the back of my car… again, in silence. But once we dipped down into my car, I watched as a couple of men with cameras slinked along the edge of the property toward the back of the house.
“Hang on,” I muttered as I cranked my car.
Victoria yelped as I slammed on the gas. I threw my car into the gear I needed it to, spinning its back end toward those news cameras and journalists. I spun my tires into the muddy dirt of her backyard, thanking my fucking stars that we’d had a wet week.
And after I splattered those assholes with mud, we took off through her backyard.
I headed toward the first backroad I could find.
“Rhett!” Victoria exclaimed.
“Hang on,” I gritted out.
I cut a corner going damn near sixty miles an hour when I saw the glint of a news van behind us.
Fucking hell, they were chasing us down like rabid dogs.
I had to get us out of there. I mean, I knew the press couldn’t come onto the property or anything.
But it wasn’t as if she lived somewhere the press couldn’t reach her.
Her personal house was a deliberate choice, I always figured.
No gates, no guards, nothing that screamed money.
She kept that for the estate. Here she was just a woman on a street, same as anyone, which was exactly the way it always seemed to suit her.
“Rhett! You’re speeding!” Victoria yelped as she grabbed onto the ‘oh shit’ handlebar on her side of the vehicle.
“And I’m gonna do it for a bit longer,” I said through gritted teeth.
I slammed on the brakes and the clutch at the same time, spinning the car around and throwing it into reverse. And when I got Victoria turned around long enough for her to see what was behind us, the yelp in her voice hardened into determination.
“Shake ‘em loose,” she commanded as she watched that news van gain speed.
I smirked as I threw the car back into the gear I needed, spun it around, and kept racing down the back road. “I’ve got a better idea. Hang on.”
My tires skidded as we took a particularly hard left before I dug my cell phone out of my back pocket.
“What are you doing?” Victoria hissed. “Pay attention to the road!”
I grinned as I pulled out my phone, dialing without having to look at the screen. “I am.”
I didn’t even have to look at her to know she rolled her eyes at me. Her scoff told me everything I needed to know.
I held my ringing cell phone to my ear as I took another hard right.
“Jett! It’s me. You still lunching with Officer Lindley? Can you ask her if that police checkpoint is still up? I got a news van speeding behind me and Victoria right now. Uh huh. Yep. Sweet, okay. Can you tell—thanks, man. I appreciate it.”
“The hell was that?” Victoria asked breathlessly.
“Hang on,” I muttered as I whipped a ninety-degree turn.
I watched in my rearview mirror as the news van damn near toppled over onto itself just to make the turn.
Fucking hell, they were relentless, and my voice grew stern with frustration. “We’re going to hit ‘em where it hurts. Hang on, and stop asking questions, Miss C.”
And, shockingly enough, she did exactly as I asked.
With one last turn, I saw the police checkpoint come into view. Well, not a raging checkpoint. But there was one of those signs that told you the speed limit, then clocked how fast you were actually going with a wire that ran across the road.
I rumbled over that wire doing eighty in a forty-five.
But the instant that news van rumbled over that wire, sirens rang out.
“Hah hah HAAAAH!” I exclaimed as I watched three officers surrounding the news van, forcing it to stop. “I love it when a good plan comes together. Woo!”
And after I eased the car into the gear I needed, I slowed us down and turned us toward the direction of Victoria's estate.
The choppy sound of Victoria’s breathing turned my attention to her as we blazed a lone trail down the multitude of back roads I and the guys always used to get to Victoria’s estate.
“Hey,” I said softly.
Victoria turned her gaze toward her window, hiding her face from me. And when we came to a rolling stop at an intersection, I reached over and grabbed her chin.
I pulled that watery gray stare back to me.
“Oh, sad eyes,” I said softly as I caught a tear rumbling down her cheek with the pad of my thumb, “we’re going to get through this. Okay?”
I’d been on this team three years. Playing in this city. Making it mine and keeping my eye on her. For three years, she’d done nothing but turn my head, done nothing but capture my attention. And her lower lip quivered, the helpless look in her eye making everything in me go hard.
I’d get her and her daughter out of this mess if it was the last thing I did on this fucking planet.
“You have my word,” I said as I gazed into her eyes.
And with the soft tick of her head, she pulled her chin out of my grasp and stared aimlessly out the windshield.
Three women.
That’s what I had on me right now. Three women I’d never in a million years admit out loud I was responsible for, but that’s what it boiled down to as I sat at that intersection with the engine idling and Victoria’s tears drying on her cheekbones and the press scattered behind us like cockroaches under a kitchen light.
Bry was Coach’s girl, sure. But she was also part of this team, the way she’d always been part of this team, ever since she was a little shit running around Caldwell Arena in pigtails and her dad’s old jerseys.
The team was family. Family was the team.
That’s how Coach ran the locker room, and that’s how I’d run it under him.
Then there was Victoria. The woman I’d been losing sleep over for three years and was now sitting in the passenger seat of my car with her face turned to the window because she didn’t want me to see her cry.
I knew exactly what she was doing. She was running the math on the day in her head, ledger style.
Damage. Cost. Liability. Filing it all into columns she could solve later.
And then there was the team. Twenty-three other guys whose contracts and reputations and shots at the championship were sitting in Coach’s penthouse photographs right now, getting plastered across every sports network in the country.
Moose. Langley. Jett. The whole roster. If this scandal sank Coach, it sank the season.
And if it sank the season, every man who’d bled with me on that ice this year went home to a quieter offseason and a thinner contract negotiation come spring.
That was on me too. Captains held the line when shit got loud. That’s what the C on my chest was for.
I let out a slow breath.
I could handle three women. I could handle twenty-three men. I could handle a press van full of vultures, a sheriff who owed Jett’s hookup a favor, and a Coach who’d looked at me at the kitchen window of his penthouse like he didn’t recognize his own life anymore.
What I couldn’t handle was Victoria crying.
So I was about to make damn sure she didn’t have to do it twice.
I pulled us away from the intersection and started toward Victoria’s estate.