Page 8 of Her Player

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.

4

RHETT

I’d been in Victoria’s office exactly eleven times in three years.

I knew because I counted. Not obsessively, just the way you kept track of things that mattered without meaning to. The first time was a roster meeting two weeks after I signed. She’d sat behind that mahogany desk with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a clipboard in her lap and she’d told me what she expected from her captain in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t asking. The second time was a contract dispute over my PHL standard player agreement that lasted forty minutes and ended with me getting exactly what I asked for, which I suspected had less to do with my negotiating skills and more to do with her GM quietly recommending it. I didn’t bring that up.

The other nine times were variations on a theme. Team business. Stadium logistics. Two occasions where Coach had called us both in at the same time and the air compressed with everything nobody was saying until I had to consciously remind myself how to breathe.

Eleven times over three years.

Every single one of them, I’d had a reason. A legitimate reason. Something that required her signature or her input or her presence in a professional capacity that I could point to if anyone asked what I was doing in the administrative wing instead of in the locker room where I belonged.

This was the twelfth time.

I didn’t have a reason.

A smart man wouldn’t have been there. A smart man would have stayed in the locker room with the rest of the guys, sucking down protein and bullshitting about the Pirates and pretending his Coach getting fileted in the morning paper wasn’t a preview of what could happen to any one of us who stepped out of line. A smart man would have done his job, kept his head down, and ridden out the season with his contract intact and his captaincy unburned.

I wasn’t a smart man. Not when it came to her.

I didn’t let myself think about what walking into her office for no reason might cost me. Not the contract Coach had spent eighteen months negotiating on my behalf, not the captaincy I’d earned with my teeth, not the goddamn season we were nine days out from changing forever. None of it.

I just walked toward her office because I always walked toward her office.

I had that night. A flat tire and a couch and Golden Girls reruns and the stillness of a woman who’d been holding herself together so long she’d forgotten what it felt like to put something down. I had the way she’d looked at me when I left. Not the composed, boardroom version of Victoria Caldwell, but the other one. The one that only came out in the dark when she thought no one was paying close enough attention.

I was always paying attention.

I’d been paying attention from the moment I’d knocked on her open doorframe twenty minutes ago and watched her composure slip for one half-breath of a second before it came back down like a shutter over glass. From the moment she’d asked me what I needed and I’d answered with banter because the real answer wasn’t something a man said out loud in his boss’s office on a Thursday afternoon. From the moment she’d let me put my hands on the back of her neck and felt her relax under them for the first time since I’d known her.

And now I was standing in front of her with my hand braced against the wall above her head, and she’d just looked up at me with those gray eyes through her reading glasses and asked the only question that mattered.

Why would I do that?