27. Best Laid Plans
Chapter twenty-seven
Best Laid Plans
Emma
The door opens before I knock.
Luke’s in sweats and a t-shirt, his standard off-duty uniform that looks way too damn good on him. But his face is wrong. Not destroyed. Not the panicked version of him I feared. Something more contained and more worrying.
“Hey, you.”
“Em.” He steps aside. I enter. The door closes behind me with the soft click that's quickly become the sound of safety.
His apartment looks the same. The championship photo on the mantel, the two on the bookshelf. The practice plans in a neat stack. The coffee maker that’s definitely been used too many times today.
But the air feels different. Charged. The way it feels before a storm or a big game or a conversation that’s going to change something you can’t change back.
“I talked to Drew.” I say it before he can speak.
Luke blinks. His mouth opens, closes. Recalibrates.
“You what?”
“After the game. I found him outside the visitors’ locker room. ”
His expression shifts from surprise to something that looks like the first sparks of a fire catching.
“Emma. Why would you—”
“Because I saw him talk to you.” My bag lands on the end table. I turn to face him. “I was in the corridor. Couldn’t hear what he said, but I saw your face. I saw what it did to you.”
Luke drags a hand through his hair. “Okay. What did you say to him?”
“I confronted him about the texts. The ‘connections’ comment. Told him he doesn’t get to have opinions about my career. Told him the transfer was about finding something better, not about running from him.” I pause. “Told him you built something special.”
“So why do you look nervous about telling me?”
“I...” The admission catches in my throat. “I think he read into it. And I might’ve used your first name. But he knows you’re friends with Grayson. That we’ve known each other forever. That we…” I trail off, realizing I’m rambling now.
Luke closes his eyes. Opens them. Nods slowly, like he’s absorbing a hit to the boards and checking for damage before he keeps skating.
“I was trying to show him I'd changed,” I continue, needing to close the silence. “That I would've played the same regardless of who my coach was. But instead I basically confirmed that you’re—” I gesture between us. “That we’re—”
“Em. Come here.”
His arms open and I walk into them because there is nowhere else in the world I would rather be when everything feels like it’s tilting sideways. His chin rests on top of my head. My face presses into his chest, and I can hear his elevated but steady heartbeat.
“Tell me what he said to you,” I mumble into his shirt.
Luke’s quiet for a moment. His hand runs up and down my back in slow passes. Then:
“He introduced himself after the game. Casual. Like we were just two hockey guys making small talk.” Luke’s voice is measured but I can hear the edges of it fraying. “Said he’d heard good things about the women’s program. Complimented the team’s record. All very normal, very polite.”
“Drew’s always polite when he’s about to gut you.”
“Yeah, I got that impression.” His arms tighten around me. “Then he said something about the team having ‘impressive ink.’ Said he’d always thought athletes with tattoos showed real commitment. That the best ones had meaning behind them.”
My stomach twists.
“And then he got specific. Looked right at me and said—” Luke pauses. I feel his chest expand with a breath he’s holding before releasing it. “‘Nineteen’s a hell of a number, Coach. Must mean a lot to someone.’”
The walls seem to shrink around us. The warm, safe apartment that’s been our refuge for months suddenly feels permeable. Breakable. Like the walls are thinner than we thought and the world outside is closer than we pretended.
“He knows,” I whisper.
“He knows about the tattoo,” Luke corrects. “He suspects the rest.”
He pulls back enough to look at me. His hands find my face, thumb on my cheekbone, eyes searching mine. “But suspecting and proving are different things. He doesn’t have proof, Em.”
“He doesn’t need proof. He just needs suspicion and the right audience.”
The words hang between us. Heavy. True.
Because that’s what Drew does. He doesn’t detonate bombs. He plants seeds. Asks questions in the right ears. Creates the conditions for other people to draw conclusions and lets the conclusions do the damage.
“The championship is Sunday,” I say. “You’re call with Walsh is Monday. If Drew says something to anyone… To a teammate who tells a friend who tells a reporter. To BC’s coaching staff. To literally anyone with a phone and an opinion—”
“It’ll be okay, Em. Sienna had me file a disclosure of our history before the season. The board knows we’ve known each other for years.”
“And you think that’ll…protect us? Even if they suspect…”
“I don’t know. But it’s something.”
But is it?
Because Sloane knows, and Becca probably believes, and Addison definitely suspects…
“We need to tell Grayson,” I say, and the sentence feels like stepping off a cliff. “Before Drew has the chance to turn this into something it’s not.”
Luke goes still. The kind of stillness I saw on the bench tonight when Drew’s words landed .
“After the championship,” he responds quietly. “After the call. After—”
“Luke.”
“I know.” He presses his forehead to mine.
“I know. But if we tell Grayson now—tonight, tomorrow—he’ll lose his mind.
And then he’ll show up to Sunday’s game in full protective-brother mode, and everyone will want to know why Grayson Cole is in the stands looking like he wants to murder his sister’s coach, and the story becomes public before we can control it. ”
He’s right. I hate that he’s right.
“We’re having brunch at Gray’s tomorrow,” I remind him. “Zane will be there, too. Probably chirping about how LA will beat the Grizzlies tomorrow night when they face off.”
“I’m aware.” Luke’s voice is dry in the way that tells me he’s been thinking about this all evening. “Spending five hours with your brother and my other former linemate while keeping this secret is basically my personal hell.”
“Sienna's been suspicious since that first game.”
“Sienna’s been suspicious since the night she met you, Em. She just has the decency not to say it out loud.”
I pull back. Look at him. Past the composure and the reasoning and the analytical brain that’s always running scenarios.
Underneath all of it is the boy who sat in a dark living room after telling me we were better as friends.
The one who spent seven months not responding to my texts because every response said too much.
The one whose hands shook when he signed a coaching contract and wondered if he deserved any of it.
“Whatever Drew does or doesn’t do,” I tell him, my hands flat on his chest, “it doesn’t change us.
It doesn’t change what I feel. It doesn’t change this.
” I press one hand against my hip. Against the tattoo.
Against the proof of something that existed long before Drew Markham ever entered the picture.
“I know.” His hand covers mine. Both of us touching the ink through fabric. “But I need you focused on Sunday. Westmore is the best team in the conference and we haven’t beaten them. And if we want the NCAA tournament bid—”
“Always with the hockey.”
“It’s who I am.”
“Yeah.” I kiss him. Soft. The kind that isn’t going anywhere but says everything. “It’s one of the reasons I love you.”
He pulls me closer. Deepens the kiss just enough to make my pulse jump before taking a deliberate breath. “Stay tonight?”
It’s not smart.
Not with the knowledge that Drew could say something at any moment. That someone could notice my car or have seen me walk up the stairs.
But I know I’ll never sleep if he’s not with me.
“Okay.”
We don’t have sex. Don’t even try. Instead, he pulls me onto his bed, wraps around me from behind—his arm over my waist, his hand finding the tattoo through my shirt the way it always does—and we lie in the dark listening to each other breathe.
“Sunday we win the championship,” he murmurs against my hair. “Monday you’ll get the official invite to the development camp. And then...” He pauses. “Then we figure out the rest. Drew. Grayson. All of it.”
“Together?”
“Together.”
“Promise?”
His lips press against the back of my neck. “I’m not going anywhere, Em. I told you that on a highway. I meant it then. I mean it now.”
I close my eyes. Let the warmth of him settle into my bones. Try to trust that the fire we’ve been playing with hasn’t yet burned beyond what we can control.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, in the part that’s been trained by years of reading plays, I can see what’s coming.
Drew Markham lit a match tonight.
And a match, in the right conditions, can down an entire house.