Page 36 of Her Player

I blinked back my own tears as I rolled her on top of me. Her body rested against mine, limbs draped over my sides, and I cradled her in both of my arms. She cried into my chest as I stared up at the ceiling, forcing my own emotions to the side to make way for hers.

But suddenly, I understood her.

I understood all of it.

Why she became the owner of the hockey team. Why she single-handedly built this franchise from the ground up. It was a shrine to her late husband. A place where she could go and remember and relish days gone by. Days she could never get back. She cried harder, and I held her tighter, hoping she could feel that she wasn’t alone.

That she’d never once again be alone.

So long as she wanted to keep me around.

13

VICTORIA

Birds chirping greeted me before my eyes opened. Thin streams of light pouring through the heavy velveteen curtains that hung over the windows of my bedroom cast a warm shimmer across the dust floating in the air. I groaned as I rolled over, half expecting a warm stone of meat to be lying right next to me.

But instead, the other side of the bed was cool.

“Mmmmm, cold,” I muttered as I slipped over into the space where Rhett was last night.

To be quite honest, I was glad he wasn’t there when I woke up. Enough happened that it would take time to process. While I didn’t mean to fall asleep next to the man, much less break down in his fucking arms, I couldn’t have imagined what it might have felt like, waking up to someone beside me. I’d slept in a bed by myself ever since Ryan was killed.

It felt wrong, waking up next to someone who wasn’t him.

It also didn’t feel wrong.

That was the part I couldn’t say out loud, even to myself, even in the privacy of my own head. Both things were true at the same time, and they had been getting truer for longer than I was prepared to acknowledge.

I had not let myself want anything for fourteen years. That was the math of it. Wanting was an expensive habit. Wanting meant having something to lose, and I had already lost the thing I’d most been willing to want, and I had decided very deliberately and very young that the rest of my life would be built out of duty and competence and quiet love for my daughter, none of which could be taken away from me the way Ryan had been. Duty couldn’t die in a gas station parking lot. Competence couldn’t leave a voicemail saying it was running late. I had made peace with what I had decided to settle for. I had built an empire inside the smallness of that peace.

And then a hockey player had shown up at my house with a tire iron and a smile and an inexplicable patience for the Golden Girls, and somewhere in the last two months I had started to want.

I had started to want the way other people wanted. Casually. Daily. In small specific ways that crept up on me at inconvenient moments. I wanted to know what he ordered for lunch. I wanted to know what his apartment looked like and whether he kept it clean. I wanted to know what he sounded like on the phone with someone he loved, because I had a suspicion the answer was going to be devastating, and I wanted to hear it anyway. I wanted to wake up beside him on a Tuesday with nothing on the schedule and find out what kind of man he was before coffee.

These were not the wants of a forty-three-year-old widow who had a foundation to run.

These were the wants of a woman.

I had not been a woman in fourteen years. I had been a widow, a mother, an owner, a CEO, a board chair, a strategist. Useful nouns. Functional nouns. Nouns that earned a paycheck and a Wikipedia entry. But underneath all of them had been a woman who had been waiting for fourteen years for permission to want something for herself again, and the goddamn problem was that nobody was going to give her that permission except me.

I rolled over again, flopping back onto my stomach. I buried my face into the pillow and ignored how I drew in the scent of Rhett.

Goddamn it, I was in so much trouble.

It was for the better, anyway. I thoroughly embarrassed myself by unleashing emotions that weren’t Rhett’s to field. It wasn’t his responsibility to pick up the pieces of my life I had yet to stop kicking around on the floor. However, the growing rays of sun shining through the velveteen curtains reminded me of the bigger fish we had to fry.

I slipped out of bed, cleaned myself up for the day, and pulled out the Chanel. The black one. The one I wore when I needed to remember exactly who I was.

I decided to head to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast.

“Brynn?” I asked.

I didn’t even have to come around the corner of the kitchen to hear her sniffling, and the second I saw her at the table with her head pressed to it, I rushed to her side.

“Oh, Brynn. Come here,” I said as I wrapped my arms around her.

“Mama, this is so bad,” she hiccupped through her soft crying.