The Penalty for Loving You

Chapter 9 — The Bluff

“I’m not your Mrs. anything,” Sienna said. “Not anymore. You made it clear, in front of a hundred plus witnesses.”

Grant smiled like she’d confirmed something for him rather than corrected him. “Touchy. That’s new.” He set the scotch glass down on Hank’s sideboard, careful, like a man establishing he intended to stay a while. “I’m just saying — a woman doesn’t usually cry that hard for a grandfather she met in a folder of letters. Unless something else happened that night too. Something that’s still happening.”

“What exactly do you think you know?”

It was a small test, and she watched him fail it in real time. His eyes flicked — just slightly — toward the ice below, toward the man with the C on his chest still circling near the bench during a TV timeout.

He didn’t know anything. He was fishing with an empty hook, hoping the splash alone would scare something to the surface.

“I know,” he said carefully, “that you’ve been spending a great deal of time around our captain.”

“He’s my employee. I run a hockey team, Grant. Strange as it sounds, I spend time around the hockey players.”

“At midnight. Alone. On the ice.”

So someone had told him that. Or guessed. Or was simply throwing out enough darts to see which one she flinched at.

She didn’t flinch.

“Is there a question in here,” Sienna said, “or are you just going to keep describing my calendar back to me like it’s an evidence of something?”

He studied her for a moment, and something in his posture changed — the predator backing off, recalculating, switching to a different kind of hunt altogether. He picked the scotch back up. Smiled the same smile she used to find charming, before she learned it was a tool he kept sharpened for exactly this kind of moment.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. About us.”

“There is no us.”

“There could be.” He took a step closer, and the box suddenly felt very small, very far from the eighteen thousand people two floors below who would have helped her in an instant if they’d known she needed it.

“Think about it, Sienna. You inherited a hockey team you know nothing about. I’ve spent three years learning every name, every contract, every weakness on every roster in this conference. You need a partner who actually understands this business. I need—” He paused, like the next part cost him something to say, though she doubted it did.

“I need a second chance. The Vanessa thing was a mistake. I was scared of getting old, scared of being ordinary, and she made me feel like I wasn’t. That’s not love. You and I — we had real history. Six years. That doesn’t just disappear because I panicked once.”

“Twice,” Sienna said. “You panicked twice that I know about. Eighteen months and six months, according to the timestamps.”

His face flickered — the first honest thing she’d seen from him all night.

“I made mistakes,” he said. “I’m asking for the chance to fix them. My hockey brain, your shares. We could run this team together. The way it should have been from the start.”

Sienna let the silence stretch long enough that he started to look uncertain, which she found enjoyable more than she expected to.

Then she walked to the door, opened it, and held it.

“Get your coat, Grant.”

“Sienna—”

“You were demoted from my life few hours before I found out who my grandfather was,” she said. “I demoted you. I don’t regret it, I’m not reconsidering it, and I am absolutely not interviewing you for a promotion back into it. Don’t make me repeat this conversation at the office, where I’ll have to use smaller words and an audience.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Whatever calculation was running behind his eyes, he decided against showing it to her.

He picked up his coat. At the door, he paused.

“You’ll regret this,” he said, his voice betraying the tremor underneath. “Everyone will know. Eventually.”

“Goodnight, Grant.”

He left.

After the game, Sienna didn’t go straight to her car. She walked the long way, down through the service level, past the equipment room and the cold-storage.

The parking garage was nearly empty by the time she got there. Echoing concrete, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, her own footsteps the loudest thing in the building.

She didn’t see anyone at first until Vanessa stepped out from between two parked cars, her ring catching the bad light like it had its own opinion about the conversation that was about to happen.

“You should be more careful where you walk alone,” Vanessa said.

Sienna stopped. “Is that a threat?”

“It’s advice.” She came closer, heels sharp on the concrete, every inch of her dressed for a war she’d apparently decided to start tonight. “I saw him go up to your box. I know what he wanted.” Her mouth curved, not quite a smile. “Whatever he’s promising you up there — the partnership, the second chance, the we could run this together speech — he promised me first…”

“I turned him down.” Sienna cut her off.

“Good.” Vanessa’s voice didn’t soften. “Keep it that way. Because I have spent two years building a life around that man, and I am not interested in starting over because some photographer-turned-heiress decided she wanted her old husband back out of spite.”

“I don’t want him back.”

“Then we agree on something.” She stepped close enough that Sienna could smell her perfume — sharp and expensive. “Stay away from anything that’s mine. Because I know things hidden in that man’s office that would end careers, Sienna, his career, my father’s, half the front office’s—and I am perfectly willing to burn the whole building down if I think you’re trying to take what’s mine.”

She held Sienna’s eyes for one more second.

Then she turned, heels clicking, and disappeared into the parked cars, leaving Sienna alone in the garage with her own heartbeat and the distinct, unsettling sense that she had just made an enemy who knew far more than she did.