9. Victoria
VICTORIA
There he stood, all six-foot-seven of him. A massive moose of a human being, even taller than Coach. A stone of beef on skates, that article had called him. Mountain on metal.
Sometimes, I swore Rhett was older than twenty-seven.
I’d caught the tail end of their conversation.
Hell, after my daughter and I prepared dinner, I’d slipped down the back hallway and into the doorway of the living room, tucking myself into the shadows before either Rhett or Coach noticed me.
I came to catalogue every way I planned to make Coach’s life difficult for putting my daughter in this position.
How could they not have prepared for this?
Then, I heard Rhett. I heard what he did. The calls he placed. The initiative he took when Coach simply stood there like a bump on a fucking log like this wasn’t all his fucking fault.
The media. Not his.
I hated that voice in my head sometimes.
The one that always used rationale. It served me well in my business.
It’s how I built a marketing consultancy from nothing and sold it for enough to buy a PHL franchise.
That little voice in my head had always guided me.
Always been there, chirping advice at me when my own father was too hung up on himself to care about what happened to his own daughter.
I listened to Coach as he talked about the first girl.
The one they already compared my daughter to in the news.
Of course, I looked things up while we were cooking.
Of course, I knew the trending headlines.
I didn’t even have to read the goddamn articles to know they already attempted to dig up information on my daughter.
Comparing her to whatever young woman threw herself at the man.
The entire situation was bonkers. The entire situation was exactly what I wanted to avoid when I first spotted that old man staring my daughter down like prey.
He’s not old. If he’s old, you’re old.
But then, Rhett spoke. He spoke with wisdom well beyond his years.
I watched as Coach became destitute. As his face morphed into different shades of frustration and defeat.
I listened as Rhett fed him advice. Well-thought-out advice.
The kind of advice that any friend or loved one would go searching for during a time of need.
And then, I heard Coach’s admission for my daughter.
I couldn’t listen to that part of the conversation.
Hence, why I interjected from the shadows.
Rhett and I stared one another down. He stood next to the slitted velveteen curtain that covered the floor to ceiling window.
Rays of fading sun cast a warm hue over his pale complexion, and it danced my eyes around light brown freckles scattered along his cheeks and nose that I’d never realized he had before.
You’re staring. Stop.
I folded my hands in front of me and thumbed over my shoulder. “Help yourself. Me and Brynn made vegetable alfredo with a nice Caesar salad.”
That cheeky little grin of his spread across his cheeks, but it was the way his icy blue eyes slid down my body without a care in the world for my opinion on the reaction that made me hold my breath.
I stood there, back straight, hands clasped in front of me, feet stationed into a proper ‘T’ as if I were some sort of ballerina.
The way he licked his lips shouldn’t have sent the shiver down my spine that it did.
“Do you own anything except business suits?” he asked as his gaze whipped back up to my face.
Look at how his eyes sparkle.
Go over to him.
I bet his cheeks are warm from that sun.
Just a hug. We deserve a hug, right?
I snickered and turned on the balls of my feet, clip-clopping my way down the hallway to the room in which I stayed.
It was on the complete opposite end of the part of the house that had the master suite in it, courtesy of all the tours I took when I first bought it, and I did my best not to think about the ‘whys’ of that particular setup.
The insinuation alone, however, sped up my steps, encroaching upon the doorway to the room I stayed in.
Rhett’s voice followed me down the hallway like an omen I couldn’t outrun. “At least take off those heels! They can’t be comfortable!”
My head fell back with a bark of a laugh that surprised even myself.
Rhett’s chuckling rumbled up the hallway as I slipped into my bedroom and inched the door closed behind me.
Giggles fell from my lips as I shook my head, and I had to bite down onto my tongue just to give my jaw something else to do.
I stretched my arms over my head, feeling my back pop in at least four different places.
I bent down toward the floor, trying to unlock all of the muscles Coach had managed to vice-grip closed.
I had to stop blaming that man. He was in just as much hot water as my daughter.
Did I like this for my Brynn? Absolutely fucking not.
What mother would?! But it wasn’t as if she was the only one under fire.
The media was going in on Coach Mercer for a second time around.
And they weren’t being kind.
I traipsed over to the door for the walk-in closet where my two suitcases were stacked, and I kicked them into the room.
I proceeded to backtrack and unpack my toiletries into the bathroom since I honest-to-God didn’t know how long we’d all have to hole up here until this was all said and done.
I pulled a few things out of my purse. Got my cell phone charger plugged in and my latest book lying on the nightstand, among other things.
I generally made quick work of trying to make myself as comfortable as possible in the opulent, plush bedroom that I had chosen myself, years ago, when this place was still new.
I tried to ignore the fact that Rhett’s shadow loomed right outside my bedroom door.
What the hell was he doing out there? Listening out for sounds?
Creep. And yet, my lips didn’t frown. If I wasn’t mistaken, I could have sworn I felt them turning upward.
I rolled my lips over my teeth and bit down to show them a thing or two.
My daughter was being attacked in the media for nothing more than giving her attention to the wrong man, and I had to help her.
If the press caught me doing what I was doing right now, fantasizing about a man on my own roster while my daughter sat in another wing of this estate having her face dragged across every sports network in the country, the damage would not be containable.
I knew exactly what would happen. I had spent fourteen years in this business and I had not survived it by being unable to game out a public relations disaster three moves ahead.
The franchise valuation would take a hit.
Not catastrophic, but a hit, somewhere in the eight figures at minimum.
The PHL would open a conflict-of-interest review whether I asked for one or not.
A handful of corporate sponsors would quietly pause their renewals until they could see which way the wind blew.
The other team owners, who already considered me a novelty for being a woman in a chair built for men, would have something to murmur about at the next league meeting that they had been waiting fourteen years for permission to murmur about.
But it wasn’t the franchise hit that would actually hurt. The franchise would survive. I had built it to survive me.
It was the foundation.
The Ryan Caldwell Foundation had spent fourteen years building a reputation as a serious organization.
Senators returned my calls. Donors wrote checks at the gala the size of small businesses.
The work we’d funded had touched six counseling centers and three legislative initiatives and a generation of families who had lost someone the way I had lost Ryan.
All of it was built on the bedrock of a single quiet narrative the public had decided to believe about me: that I was a woman who had loved her husband and never gotten over him and channeled that grief into something useful.
The minute I was photographed kissing a hockey player sixteen years my junior, that narrative cracked.
The donors would still come, probably. The senators would still pick up the phone, probably.
But the bedrock would be gone, and Ryan’s name on a foundation would become a punchline at the country club, and that I could not survive.
So.
Not fantasize about some too-young hockey player sixteen years my junior.
I listened out as I made my way back into the closet and changed out of my clothing.
I’d been in it for far too long today, if I did say so myself.
I unwound my hair from its tightly kept bun, allowing my still-pin-straight hair to fall down past my shoulders.
I stripped out of my outfit, tossing them into a corner that I had just then dubbed my ‘dry cleaning’ corner.
I rummaged around in my suitcase until my fingertips felt the fabric.
To say I enjoyed the finer things was an understatement.
If there was one thing I took seriously besides this franchise, it was the clothes on my back.
Many people called me selfish for it. Some called me vain.
Even more called me greedy, and I’m sure many things had been whispered behind my back in this city where red-bottomed shoes were something kids painted accidentally while Mom and Dad weren’t looking.
I looked down at the pair currently on my feet.
Christian Louboutin. The So Kate pump in classic black patent, one hundred and twenty millimeters of heel that I’d been walking in since before Brynn could walk herself.
I owned fourteen pairs of Louboutins. Seven pairs of Manolo Blahniks.
A rotating collection of Chanel suits that my dry cleaner knew by name.
The Birkin on the shelf in my closet at home had a five year waiting list that I hadn’t waited on because waiting lists were for people who couldn’t make a phone call.
Ryan used to tease me about it mercilessly.