11. Brynn
brYNN
Waking up to my mother crying in the shower was always the worst wake-up call on a Monday morning.
Granted, she did her best to keep it under wraps. But even in a house this size, sound carried in the mornings.
Especially once Mom really got going.
The second I heard her struggling to sniffle, I threw the covers off me.
Moving back home to help Mom with her grief sounded like a good idea.
That was until I figured out that she’d carried it pretty much every day since Dad died.
She deserved more than this. More than crying in the shower just to wake herself up.
I slipped out of bed and reached for my fuzzy red robe.
I slung it around my shoulders, trudging out of my room and heading down the hallway.
I inched Mom’s bedroom door open and cringed at the stuttered breaths she took behind the closed shower door.
As steam slipped from beneath the crack, I shuffled up to the door and rapped against it with my knuckles.
“Mom?” I asked groggily.
I heard her clear her throat before she fixed her voice. “Morning, princess. Did I wake you?”
She only ever called me ‘princess’ on the days where she couldn’t get Dad off her mind. After all, that’s what he always called me.
His little princess.
“You okay in there?” I asked as I wrapped my arms around my chest.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said breathlessly in that way that told me she was lying through her morning breath. “Just getting out some stress.”
I paused. “Mom, I’m twenty-six. I know when you’re upset.”
Mom sighed. “Princess, I told you, it’s just—”
I didn’t let her get away with it, though. “How can I help, Mom?”
The heavy sigh she heaved as she turned off the shower water told me she’d already given in. We did this dance a lot. She woke up crying, I found her in some unraveled state somewhere in her personal space, and then we talked around it before she finally let me help.
I wasn’t talking around it this time, though.
We had to take steps forward.
Even if Mom wanted to stay planted in the past.
“Mom,” I said a bit too sharply for a Monday morning.
“Can you go open the stadium and get Coach Colton his keys, if he hasn’t found them already? I’m not sure if he opened his desk to find them there. Men sometimes don’t poke around in places like women do.”
I nodded. “Anything else?”
“Just that I’ll be in the stadium office by lunch time after all of my morning meetings are done here at my home office.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “If you’re having that bad of a day, maybe coming down to the stadium will help perk you up a bit. When’s your first meeting of the day? We could make some coffee in the—”
She whipped the door open, and I swear to hell on high, it scared the shit out of me. Sometimes Mom walked with all of the confidence in the world, clicking those heels across any surface she walked upon so that all heard her coming. Other times, she moved as silent as a mouse.
I didn’t even realize she’d gotten out of the shower and put her robe on in the first place.
“Morning,” I said as she walked past me.
She gave me a once-over with those slate gray eyes of hers that shut me up silently many times as an unruly teenage girl.
“I saw the way you were hovering on Friday. You followed that tour like you had nowhere better to be.” Those gray eyes didn’t blink. “Don’t try to set me up with him, Brynn. It’s not going to work.”
On the one hand, relief coursed its way through my veins. Relief I had no rhyme or reason to experience. But I couldn’t help the next question that popped its way through my lips. “Why?”
Her face hardened before she drew in a deep breath and pulled me into a hug.
I wrapped her up tightly, burying my face into the crook of her neck as she swayed me side to side.
It didn’t matter that the heat from her shower made me sweat.
It didn’t matter that she was still damp.
It didn’t matter that her hair dripped all over me.
She tucked my head beneath her chin like all of those times when I was a child and cried over a skinned knee, or a bruised elbow, or a friend that wouldn’t stop teasing me.
Then she kissed the top of my head before her whispered voice poured forth. “Because there’s no one on this planet made for me the way your father was.”
I squeezed her as tightly as I could. I didn’t want to look up at her because I didn’t want to think of my mother being alone for the rest of her life.
Maybe that’s why I moved home. Maybe it wasn’t to help my mother get better, but to help her find a better life.
Maybe I just didn’t want Mom being alone.
I sure as shit didn’t like being alone.
“Now, come on,” Mom said with a soft sniffle before she placed her hands on my shoulders.
When I looked up into her face, I felt ten years old all over again. “I love you, Mom.”
She smiled through her tears as she carded her hands through my tangled hair. “Love you, too, princess.” Then she cleared her throat and released me. “Now, get on down to that stadium. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes, a phone call after that, and then I’ll be down.”
When Mom disappeared into her closet, I resolved myself to my morning tasks.
I made my way into the hallway bathroom, cleaned myself up quickly, and threw on some comfy clothes.
I forwent my contacts in favor of my squared-off black glasses and slipped into a pair of fuzzy slippers that Mom would chastise me about wearing in public later.
Then again, she always did have a thing about nice shoes.
After snatching up my purse and grabbing my keys, I made my way to the stadium. The drive over was short enough that I had just enough time to swing through a coffee drive-through first.
My phone buzzed before I even got to the car. Rhett: she doing ok this morning? I hadn't even told him about the shower. I stared at the text for a second, then typed back she's fine, and didn't let myself think too hard about how he already knew to ask.
It didn't shock me that the stadium was already buzzing by the time I got there.
I could hear the team on the ice from the corridor — skates and sticks and Jett's voice carrying over all of it the way Jett's voice always did.
I'd watched them Saturday and I already knew what I'd find if I walked down to the stands.
Colton moving between lines, no clipboard, just his eyes and whatever he said that made guys reset and try again without needing to be yelled at.
I had community relations work to do. I went to my office.
I settled in at my desk and pulled up the sponsorship emails I'd been putting off since Friday. Three of them needed actual responses. I worked through the first two without looking up.
I was halfway through the third when I heard footsteps in the hallway and looked at the clock. An hour had passed.
"Coach?" I called out.
"Yep," his gruff voice came from just outside.
He appeared in my doorway a second later, still in practice gear, skates off, a towel slung over one shoulder. He looked at me the way he always did — that quick, thorough once-over that didn't feel like checking you out so much as checking you in.
"Didn't know you were here," he said.
"Community relations stuff." I held up the email on my screen as evidence. "Mom said she'd be in by lunch. Anything you need before then?"
He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. "No. Just checking who left the light on."
"That would be me. Sorry."
"Don't be." His eyes moved around my office for a second, the framed team photos on the wall, the stack of sponsorship folders, the half-finished iced coffee sweating on my desk. "You do all of this from here?"
"Most of it." I leaned back in my chair. "Sometimes from the bar between customers, which my boss pretends not to notice."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Efficient."
"I prefer to think of it as multitasking."
He looked at me for a moment in that way he had, like he was deciding something. Then he pushed off the doorframe. "I'll let you get back to it."
"Hey—" I said before I could stop myself.
He paused.
I cast around for a reason I'd said that. "How's the first full week looking? Schedule wise."
He considered that for a second like he knew that wasn't what I'd almost said. "Manageable."
"Good." I nodded at nothing in particular. "Mom will want a full rundown when she's in."
"I know." He pushed off the doorframe fully. "She can have it."
He turned to go and I looked back at my screen and then heard myself say: "I looked you up last night."
He stopped.
"The Forbes list," I said. "You were on it. Not for hockey."
He studied me for a second the way he did when he was deciding something.
Then he turned back around and nodded once.
"Inherited. My grandfather built a real estate portfolio in the seventies that kept compounding long after he died.
My father grew up with it and never knew anything else.
Neither did I, for a while." He turned his coffee cup in his hands.
"I went professional out of college and I remember thinking that the signing bonus was the most money I had ever seen.
Took me about a week to realize it was nothing compared to what was already sitting in a trust with my name on it.
" He shrugged. "I never touched it. Not until my divorce, and even then, only enough to keep things clean.
Hockey was always the thing I actually earned.
The money just sat there." A pause. "It's not something I lead with. "
I nodded slowly. Looked down at my coffee cup. Turned it once in my hands.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
"No." I looked back up. "I just — I grew up with money, too.
My mother's money. And I made a decision a long time ago that I wasn't going to live inside it.
I work at the bar because I wanted something that was mine.
The community relations job, same thing.
Mom offered to put me on salary from the stadium's operating budget the second I moved back, and I said no.
" I shrugged. "I wanted to earn the version of my life I was living. Not just inherit it."
Something shifted in his face. Not surprise exactly. More like recognition.
"That's why you tipped 18%," he said.
I blinked. "You noticed that?"
"I notice everything." His voice was easy, but his eyes weren't. They were doing that thing where they held on too long, like he was deciding whether to say something. "I told you to tip whatever you needed. You could've taken a hundred bucks and I never would've blinked."
"I know."
"But you didn't."
"No," I said. "I didn't."
He was quiet for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, something quieter than that. "You know what the difference is between you and every other person who's ever had access to someone else's money?"
I raised an eyebrow. "What?"
"Most people convince themselves they earned it," he said. "You're the first one I've met who actually wanted to."
The warmth that moved through my chest at that had nothing to do with the coffee.
I scoffed and placed my hand against my chest, feigning offense. "Coach, just because my mother makes money doesn't mean we're prone to slinging it around."
"Those red-bottomed shoes of your mother's say differently."
I waved my hand in the air and took another pull of my coffee through the straw. "Mom's always had a thing for shoes. I hear it's a woman thing."
His eyes tracked the movement of my lips before he spoke, his voice a bit gruffer than before. "Not a shoes gal?"
I snickered and rolled my eyes. "Not a fashion gal, much to my mother's dismay."
His eyes flickered down my body as he slowly swiveled against the doorframe. My god, he was massive, even just leaning there. His forearms were on display again in the rolled-up sleeves of his practice shirt, and I made myself look back at my screen before I did something embarrassing.
"What you wear is fine," he said.
For some reason, warmth settled in my chest. "Thanks."
"No thanks needed for the truth."
The way he said that damn near made me shiver. I kept my eyes on my screen and did not look up, which was the only dignified move available to me.
I heard him push off the doorframe. His footsteps moved down the hall. I waited until they faded before I let myself exhale.
He is supposed to be the perfect match for Mom.
I stared at my screen.
So why was that getting harder to remember?