34. Rhett
RHETT
Doctors had a funny way of telling you to take it easy.
No practices. No sprints. No weight room. No games.
What they failed to account for was the fact that I didn't know how to be still.
I never had. Even as a kid, the second my ass hit a chair, my leg started bouncing.
My fingers started drumming. My mind started calculating the next thing, the next move, the next play.
Stillness wasn't something I understood, and a week of enforced rest with a championship game looming over my head wasn't doing me any goddamn favors.
It didn't help that Coach texted me every twelve hours with updates from practice.
Jett's footwork is sloppy. Fix it when you're back.
Langley pulled something in his left hip. Doctor says he's fine. I say he's milking it.
The Canadian Dynamites just dropped their starting lineup for the championship. Their center is six-foot-nine and two hundred and sixty pounds. Start thinking.
I stared at that last text for a long damn time.
Six-foot-nine. Two hundred and sixty pounds.
I had two inches on him and about fifteen pounds.
But size didn't win championships. Positioning did.
Patience did. The kind of quiet, calculated patience that Coach had been drilling into us all damn season long.
I set my phone face down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling of Victoria's bedroom, running plays in my head until they blurred together.
"You're doing it again," Victoria said from the doorway.
I turned my head toward her. She stood there with two mugs of coffee, her hair loose for once, falling pin straight past her shoulders.
She wore one of her silken robes, the kind that made my hands itch to unwrap her.
But there was something about Victoria without the armor, without the pencil skirt and the heels and the claw clip, that made my goddamn chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the bruise still blooming across my ribs.
"Doing what?" I asked.
She crossed the room, set one of the mugs on my nightstand, and perched on the edge of the bed beside me. "That thing where your eyes go somewhere else entirely but your body stays put."
I reached for the coffee. "Just thinking."
"About the Dynamites."
It wasn't a question. I glanced at her sideways. "How'd you know?"
She wrapped both hands around her mug and took a slow sip. "Because I've been thinking about them, too." She paused, those gray eyes scanning the middle distance like she was running her own damn calculations. "Their center. I pulled their last three games last night."
I blinked. "You pulled game tape?"
"I pulled everything." She set her mug down and reached behind her, grabbing her tablet off the nightstand.
"Their coach has a pattern. He runs the same defensive formation every time they're up by one in the third period.
Locks everything down on the left side. But the right side?
" She tilted the tablet toward me, showing a freeze frame from a game I didn't recognize.
"Wide open every time. They just never get challenged there because their center is so damn dominant that nobody bothers trying. "
I took the tablet from her and studied the frame. She was right. The right side gaped like an open door.
"You've been doing my job," I said.
She snatched the tablet back. "Someone had to. You've been lying in my bed staring at the ceiling for four days."
"I've been recovering."
"You've been brooding."
I grinned at her. "Those are the same thing."
She clicked her tongue, but she didn't move away from me.
That was the thing about Victoria that I'd spent three damn years learning to read.
She said one thing with her mouth and another with her body entirely.
Her mouth told me she was annoyed. Her body, settled against my side with her hip pressed warm against mine, told me she didn't want to be anywhere else.
I set my coffee down and reached over, my thumb tracing across her knuckles the way it always did. She stilled under my touch. Some part of her still surprised every damn time I reached for her.
"You know what I keep thinking about?" I asked.
"The right side gap."
"No." I turned her face toward mine with my finger beneath her chin. "The look on your face when that puck went in."
She blinked. "What look?"
"The one where you forgot to be composed for about three seconds." I held her gaze. "Right before you saw me go down."
Her jaw tightened. There it was, the flinch she tried to hide.
The one that still surfaced whenever the conversation drifted back to that hit.
I'd seen her wake up twice this week in the middle of the night, sitting straight up in the dark before she registered that I was still breathing next to her.
I knew exactly what her mind did in those moments.
I knew whose face she saw.
"Victoria," I said.
"Don't," she said quietly.
"I heard him."
"I know you are." She drew in a measured breath through her nose. "I know."
I pressed a kiss to her temple and held it there. I felt the tight set of her shoulders slowly give way beneath my mouth. She let out a breath that she'd probably been holding since the wildcard game, and some of the steel went out of her spine.
"Six days," I said against her hair. "Doctor clears me in six days."
"Five," she corrected. "You've already survived four."
"Five days," I said, "and then I'm back on that ice, and we go take that damn championship."
She pulled back just enough to look up at me. Those gray eyes of hers were steady now, the flinch gone, replaced by something quieter and more settled. Something that looked almost like trust.
"You better not let that Canadian get anywhere near your neck," she said.
"I won't."
"I mean it, Rhett."
"I know you do."
I kissed her forehead. Let my mouth rest there for a second.
"Good," I said. "Now show me that right side gap again."
She picked up the tablet.
I padded down the hallway and leaned against the kitchen doorframe, watching her.
She stood at the window with her back to me, one arm crossed over her chest, the other holding her phone to her ear.
Still in the robe. Still in those lopsided glasses.
But her posture had shifted completely. Shoulders back and spine straight, feet planted like she was standing on the ice instead of her damn kitchen floor.
"Tell Hargrove I'm aware of his timeline and I don't care about it," she said into the phone.
"The deal closes when I say it closes. Not before.
" A pause. "Because I've got a championship game in five days and my attention is elsewhere right now, that's why.
Tell him to sit tight or find someone else's franchise to circle. "
She hung up without a goodbye.
I raised my eyebrows when she turned around and found me in the doorway. "Hargrove?"
"Investment group out of New York." She set her phone face down on the counter. "They've been sniffing around the team since the wildcard win. Third call this week."
"How much are they offering?"
Her mouth flattened. "Enough that my business partner thinks I should take the meeting."
"But you're not going to."
"Not until after the championship. And not without terms that keep full operational control exactly where it is." She looked at me. "In my hands."
I stared at her for a second. Standing there in her kitchen in a silk robe and crooked glasses, telling a New York investment group to sit the hell down while her coffee went cold on the counter. Running a franchise and shutting down a deal and managing a crisis, all before nine in the morning.
Goddamn it, I loved her.
"What?" she asked, clocking my expression.
"Nothing," I said. "You're just something else, Miss C."
I took it from her hand, set it back on the nightstand, and pulled her into my lap. She made a sound of protest, but her arms found their way around my neck anyway.
"Rhett," she said flatly.
"The tape will still be there in an hour," I said.
"We have a championship in five days."
"And I have you right now." I tipped her chin up with one finger and held her gaze. "Which one do you think I'm more focused on?"
She stared at me for a long moment. Then the corner of her mouth curled upward. Not the full smile. Victoria didn't give those out easily. But enough. Enough to make something in my chest go warm.
"You're insufferable," she said.
"You keep saying that." I pressed my lips to the corner of her mouth. "And you keep letting me stay."
She turned her face toward mine and kissed me properly, slow and unhurried, her hands sliding up the back of my neck into my hair.
I felt the last of the tension in her body dissolve against me and I held her there, in the early morning quiet of her bedroom, with the championship five days away and everything we hadn't said yet still humming in the air between us.
I didn't need to say it again right now.
She damn well knew.
She'd always damn well known.
She just needed the time to decide she was ready to keep it.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Victoria pulled back and glanced at it without moving from my lap.
"Coach," she said.
I didn't even look. "Ignore it."
She raised an eyebrow. "It could be important."
"It's about Langley's hip."
She blinked. Then she picked up the phone, read the text, and set it back down without a word.
I grinned. "Told you."
"You're annoyingly perceptive," she muttered.
"You love it."
She didn't answer that. But she settled deeper into my lap, reached past me for her coffee, and tilted the tablet back toward herself with her free hand.
Back to the gap on the right side.
Back to the work.
I pressed a kiss to the back of her shoulder, wrapped my arm around her waist, and let her study her tape while I thought about the Canadian Dynamites and the five days standing between us and the biggest game of my career.
Five days.
And every single one of them, I'd wake up with her.
I could think of worse damn ways to prepare for a championship.