Page 92 of Her Player

That was the part that surprised me.

I’d been afraid of everything for fourteen years. Afraid of hoping too much. Afraid of wanting something and having it disappear. Afraid of letting someone close enough to matter because mattering meant losing and I knew exactly what losing felt like and I had decided a long time ago that I would rather be alone than find out what it felt like twice.

And then Rhett Calloway changed my tire in the dark and sat on my couch and watched Golden Girls with me and showed up every time after that whether I asked or not, and here we were. Standing in my shower at whatever ungodly hour this was, his arms around me and my face pressed against his chest and the whole city humming outside like it had no idea.

He’d never told me much about his mother.

Not really. Bits and pieces, sure. The grandma who raised him on Bea Arthur reruns and roast chicken every Sunday. The dad who never quite arrived in the same room he was standing in. But the mother he never quite got around to.

I’d worked it out anyway, though. Three years of paying attention will do that to a woman.

Some of it from the things he didn’t say when I asked about family. Some of it from the way he watched Brynn and Colton in a doorway like he was committing every second of it to memory, in case he never got to see it again. But mostly from the simple, undeniable fact that this man had spent three years showing up for a woman who had not once asked him to.

And there was only one kind of man who learned to show up like that.

The kind who had once been the kid waiting for someone to.

Somewhere along the line, quietly, in the kind of decision Rhett made with no fanfare and no announcement and no need for anyone to clap for him, he had decided he was going to be the opposite. Not the one who left. The one who stayed.

Goddamn it, Rhett Calloway.

He didn’t need me to know that about him.

I knew it anyway.

I tilted my head back.

He was already looking at me. He did that. He was always already looking.

“I meant it,” I said. “In case you were wondering.”

“I know you did.” His thumb traced along my jaw. “I’ve known for a while.”

“How long?”

He considered it. “Long enough that you don’t need to worry about it.”

I held his gaze. “I’m not worried.”

His expression went quiet in a way it didn’t very often. The version of him that lived underneath the easy grin and the boyish charm and the years of patient, deliberate, infuriating waiting. The real one.

“Good,” he said.

31

RHETT

The team scheduled a press availability for Thursday, three days after the Bulldogs game. My shoulder was still sore as hell but the doctors had cleared me to stand upright and answer questions, which was apparently the bar for public appearances in this league.

The press was already waiting when we came out.

Of course they were. Forty thousand people had just watched us punch our ticket to the championship and half of them had phones. By the time the locker room settled and Victoria finished whatever she needed to finish inside Caldwell Arena, the story was already everywhere. I could see it in the way the crowd surged the second the side doors opened. Cameras. Microphones. People shouting questions over one another in that particular aggressive overlap that stopped sounding like language after about four seconds.

Victoria didn’t even break stride.

That was the thing about her. She walked out of those doors and the whole world shifted to accommodate her without her asking it to. Shoulders back. Chin up. Those heels hitting the pavement in that rhythm I’d spent years learning to track by sound alone. She moved toward the press like she’d scheduled this meeting herself and they were running slightly late.

I fell into step beside her.