3. Victoria
VICTORIA
I tapped the end of my pencil against my clipboard and ran the numbers a second time, just to be sure.
Then a third, because the only kind of estimate I trusted was a conservative one, and the figure staring back at me from the bottom of the page was the kind I needed to triple-check before I let myself believe it.
It held.
Holy hell, it held.
I sat back in my chair, set the pencil down on the desk in front of me, and looked at that number for a long damn moment.
Without expression. Without celebration.
Without any of those involuntary movements that gave away what I was thinking to anyone in the room with me.
Ryan had taught me that, the year before he died, after he’d watched me lose a negotiation because I’d let my face react to a counteroffer.
Faces tell. Numbers don’t, he’d said. I’d been twenty-eight years old, and I’d never once forgotten it.
Forty thousand fans, packed nine games deep, at premium ticket prices we’d raised twice since opening night because the market kept absorbing it.
Concessions running double what we’d budgeted for.
Merchandise moving faster than the team store could restock it.
And ten weeks of broadcast revenue from a regional sports network that had paid us up front, in full, before the season even started, because they’d seen the preseason numbers and known exactly what was coming.
I picked the pencil back up and circled the figure once. Neat. Precise. The way I circled everything.
There was nobody to tell.
That was the small, specific weight that always sat on me whenever I closed out a quarter that justified a decade of work.
Brynn was busy with her own life, the way she was supposed to be.
My GM would get the report in the morning and email back his usual one-liner, good work, Vic, and that would be that.
The foundation board would clap politely at the next quarterly meeting and move on to the next agenda item.
There was nobody to call from the car on the drive home and say we did it.
The franchise. The team. The whole impossible damn thing.
We did it. Because the person I wanted to say it to had been gone for fourteen years.
The one person who would have understood what it actually meant was the very same person who wasn’t coming home to hear it.
I sat with that for exactly the length of one breath.
Then I set the pencil down beside the clipboard, perfectly parallel to the edge of the page, and reminded myself that pity was an indulgence I had not built fourteen years of empire on.
Forty-three years old. A grown daughter living her own damn life.
A team I’d dragged kicking and screaming into the PHL by sheer force of will.
A foundation that had funded six grief counseling centers across a state I’d chosen because it had the best tax structure for what I was trying to do, not because I’d ever loved Las Vegas.
I had built something Ryan would have been proud of.
I’d built it alone. And there was no one in this damn building to hear me admit out loud that I missed the part where someone got to say we did it with me.
I picked the pencil back up.
The work didn’t care if there was someone to tell.
The work was the point.
I sank into such a numerical frenzy that I didn’t even register my office door creaking open.
"Heeeeey, Miss C."
I didn't look up. "Rhett."
"Whatcha doing?"
"Crunching numbers." I circled another figure. "What do you need?"
"Just checkin' on ya. Wanted to see how you were."
"I'm fine."
"You sure?"
"Yep."
"Positive?"
I finally looked up. He was leaned against the doorframe with his hands shoved into the pockets of his sweatpants and that boyish grin that meant he had nothing in particular he needed to be doing. Which was a problem, because I had quite a lot I needed to be doing.
"Rhett. What do you actually need."
"You could call me Stone, you know."
I scoffed. "I would rather die."
"Everyone calls me Stone. You could if you wanted."
"Brynn doesn't call you Stone."
"Yeah, well... I don't expect her to—"
"Coach doesn't, either."
He snickered. "That... that's not what I'm—"
I pointed at him with my pencil. "Come to think of it, Jett doesn't call you—"
"All right," he said, crossing his arms. "I get it. Not everyone calls me Stone."
I flitted my gaze down his body, but it was all the glance I needed.
I understood why the fans called him Stone.
He was a literal stone of beef. Gave Coach a run for his money in a lot of areas.
He was thickly cut with a barreled chest and mountainous arms for a man skating around doing cardio on the ice for a living.
His shoulders were broad, making his waist look even more tapered.
His jaw was broad and prominent. His nose, wide and proud.
Even his forehead seemed strong, like it held its own strength from within.
The dusting of disheveled black hair on top of his head was the only thing that softened his icy blue stare.
Yeah, I understood why they called him Stone. Didn't mean I was going to, though.
You're looking at someone sixteen years your junior. Cut it out.
The voice in my head made me drop my eyes back to my clipboard.
"Had any issues with your tires lately?" Rhett asked.
"Nope."
"So I take it we're doing good, financially?"
I straightened a stack of papers that didn't need straightening. "We're doing fine."
"Any plans for the new funds?"
"The food court renovation is finally happening. We'll have the funds to do it properly after next weekend." A small smile slipped before I could catch it. "And the new Zamboni is on order. Coach is getting his replacement whether he admits he needs it or not."
Rhett chuckled. "Well, don't tell Coach. Otherwise he might ask for a raise."
I snickered. "Yeah, he'll get a raise. In his blood pressure. If he doesn't stop fiddling with that thing and breaking it more than he already has, I'm about to make his life a living hell over it."
The sound that came from Rhett flashed me back to that night.
The night he came over and helped me with my flat tire.
The night he came over, plopped me down on my couch, and watched Golden Girls with me while I tried to dig myself out of the recesses of my own mind.
The sound reminded me of how lovely his smile had been, illuminated by nothing but the light of my television.
I found my brain quickly doing the math in my head on the age difference between the two of us. Why it was important to my brain, I didn't have a clue.
Fourteen years.
Even bigger than the age split between my daughter and Coach.
I rolled my right shoulder, trying to work out the knot that had been living there for three days, and didn't quite succeed. I'd been at the desk too long.
"You're tight," Rhett said.
"I'm fine."
"You're rolling your shoulder like it owes you money."
"I'm fine, Rhett."
"Miss C." He pushed off the doorframe. He didn't come closer.
Just stood up straight, which was its own thing, because the man was easily six-foot-seven and pushing off a doorframe was a whole event.
"I've got hands that work for a living. Let me work on it for two minutes and you'll sleep tonight. "
"I sleep fine."
"You don't sleep fine."
"How would you know?"
He didn't answer that. He just looked at me with that infuriating patience of his, the one that didn't ask for anything, that wasn't going anywhere, that wasn't going to push.
That was the worst part. He wasn't going to push. He was going to stand there and wait until I either told him to leave or asked him to stay, and we both knew which one I was more likely to do.
"Two minutes," I said. Heard myself say it. Didn't quite believe I'd said it.
His grin did not get bigger. That was somehow the most galling thing about all of it. He didn't grin like he'd won. He just nodded once, the way he did everything, deliberate and unhurried, and walked the three steps it took him to get behind me.
"Where's it tight?"
"Right shoulder. Base of the neck."
"Hair," he said.
I pulled the pencil out of my bun and let it fall.
I stood without meaning to. His hands on my shoulders had straightened me up out of the chair like a marionette, and I was on my feet and facing the wall before my brain registered that I’d moved.
His hands settled on either side of my neck with the kind of warmth that told me he'd been planning the gentlest possible version of touching me from the moment he'd offered. His thumbs found the knot at the base of my skull on the first try, like he'd been studying it.
"Good Lord," I muttered before I could catch myself.
"Don't talk. Breathe."
"You don't get to tell me—"
"Breathe, Miss C."
I breathed.
His thumbs slid down either side of my spine, slow and certain, finding every place I'd been holding myself together for three days.
My right shoulder. The seam where my neck met my shoulders.
The spot between my shoulder blades that had been the reason I'd taken half a melatonin every night for a week.
I had to reach out and press my hand to the wall in front of me. The clipboard I'd been holding fell to my feet and I didn't pick it up.
"How long has this been like this?" he asked.
"Years," I admitted.
"That's what I figured."
"Don't be smug."
"Not smug. Just observant."
His thumbs pressed into the small of my back. I'd lost track of how he'd gotten there.
The groan I let out was positively salacious, and I had to brace my other hand against the wall just so I didn't collapse at the knees.
"Jesus, Miss C," Rhett muttered, his hands working at the dip in my spine. "Do you ever take a break from your shoes?"
"Depends." A grunt slipped out as a muscle jumped beneath his thumb, which only made him encircle the knot with the tips of his fingers. "You ever take a break from your skates?"
"Yeah. When I'm off the ice."
I pressed my forehead against the wall. "Yeah, well. When I'm home."
His breath tickled my ear and it made me jump. He'd shifted closer.
"You mean you're not clip-cloppin' around in those red bottoms while making breakfast in the kitchen?"
That pulled me out of my trance. I snickered and quickly whipped around on him.
Massage done. Moment over. He needed to go.
Whoa.
Holy hell, he was close.
Closer than close. He’d moved while my back was turned, and now there was maybe six inches between his chest and mine, and somewhere in those six inches my office had shrunk down to the size of two people breathing the same air.
"Rhett," I said, my voice not quite steady.
He took the smallest step forward. Not enough to actually touch me. Just enough to close those six inches down to four, and brace his hand flat against the wall behind me, right above my head. The motion was unhurried. Deliberate. The same way he did everything.
My back found the wall without me deciding to put it there.
His smug little grin had nothing on the way his jet-black hair dusted his forehead as he braced his hand against my office wall above my head.
My fingers tingled to touch his locks. He slid his other hand into the pocket of his sweatpants, and I had to shake my head to rid myself of the image of my hand threading into his hair just to shove his disheveled locks out of the way.
The man was six-foot-seven and standing close enough that I could smell whatever he used after the shower.
Sandalwood. Something clean. I had to tip my chin up to look at him, and even in my heels I was tipping my chin a lot further than I was used to.
He didn’t have to lean down. He was just there, taking up all the space my office had and a little of the space I’d been pretending to occupy with composure.
"You know, Miss C," he said in a voice that seemed to come from his gut instead of his chest, "there doesn't have to be anything wrong with your tires for me to come over. You could just... invite me over."
I blinked up at him. My God, he had to be six-foot-seven at least. Even in my heels, which made me almost six feet tall in and of itself, he towered over me. "And why would I do that?"
The smirk he gave me, however, told me he had an answer for me.
An answer that my brain was going to like more than it should.