I nodded and smiled at him. “All right.”

Gardner gave me the gentle smile that always reassured me. “How’s your family doing?”

“Good. How’s your fam—“ and I’d forgotten I’d heard through the grapevine that his divorce had been finalized in January, “—kiddo?”

“Great. Twelve going on eighteen,” he answered with an easy smile. “You? Planning on taking some time off to have some of your own?”

I stared at him. Then I stared at him a little longer.

The fuck?

“I’m messing with you, Sal,” Gardner laughed dryly.

“I really thought you were serious,” I said slowly. Jeez. Not that you need a boyfriend to have a baby but… My eyebrows went up. “Yeah. No.” I hadn’t had a date in…. a year? And I hadn’t had sex in…? A long, long time. Not that I didn’t want to—because I did—but because I had a vibrator, and a vibrator never left you hanging. Or had a wife or a girlfriend you didn’t know about. Anyway.

He snorted. “I’m just messing around. You’re still young.”

I thought about the other girls on the team and winced a little. Not that long ago, I was one of the new girls, the really young ones that had just finished college and been drafted. Now I was one of the girls that the other ones looked up to. I rolled my ankle and let the stiffness in it answer back, reminding me how precarious its health was.

Someone knocked on the door, and Gardner welcomed them in.

Sheena peeked her head through the cracked door. “Hi.” The door swung open and a second later, I spotted the head that appeared above hers.

My stupid, stupid, stupid traitorous heart remembered what it was like to be thirteen.

My brain, apparently the only logical organ in my body, said to all of its brothers and sisters: Get your shit together and calm down.

I put my Big Girl Socks on, took a deep steadying breath, and managed to smile at the two people who made their way into the office, right toward the chairs next to mine. I swallowed and said, “Hi, Sheena, hi, Coach Kulti.” All right, that came out a lot dumber than I would have liked. My cheeks decided right then that they were going to get hot, real hot.

Damn it. Get it together, Sal!

“Hello, Sal,” Sheena greeted me as she took the seat right next to mine, glancing over her shoulder for a moment to say, “I asked Mr. Kulti—“

Mr. Kulti? Really?

“—to come along.”

I blinked at the same time my bones froze.

The short-haired man, who resembled someone in a branch of the military, shook his head, still silent.

My knees felt stiff and traitorous as I planted my feet solidly on the ground and got to my feet, thrusting a surprisingly steady hand toward the man that had shaken hands with—

Poop. Poop, poop, poop.

Why should I care who he’d shaken hands with? I didn’t.

With a slow quiet breath through my nose, I tipped my chin up higher, like that would help me keep my dignity intact more. And like that wasn’t enough, I blurted out another “Hi, I’m Sal Casillas, one of the forwards…?”

Was it time to shut up? Yes. Definitely.

A large, warm masculine hand gripped mine almost immediately, and I filled my lungs with another steadying breath, smiling at the man standing on the other side of Sheena. It was a normal handshake; he wasn’t limp-fishing it, but he wasn’t trying to break my hand either. He was just a man. He was just a normal man with interesting eyes and a serious face.

“Can you tell me a little about the emails you’ve been getting?”

Drawing back the hand that had just touched Reiner Kulti, I settled my gaze on the woman next to me and nodded. I summarized the messages I’d been getting. Insults aimed at my brother, warnings that I should do everything I could to learn as much as possible from the German, and a bunch of other crap that stressed me out a whole lot.