Chapter 8
Ryan POV
The sound of my skate blades carving through the frost was the only noise inside twelve thousand empty seats.
A single thousand-watt industrial halogen floodlight hung suspended sixty feet above center ice, buzzing with a persistent, low-frequency hum that vibrated in my teeth.
The rest of The Foundry was swallowed in pitch blackness, the cavernous timber rafters lost in the freezing gloom.
The air temperature on the ice hovered at twenty degrees, sharp enough to turn every lungful of air into a mouthful of needles.
I drove off my right outside edge, leaning hard into the turn, spraying a white fan of ice shavings against the kick plate at the blue line.
Crack.
The puck exploded off the toe of my composite stick, streaking across forty feet of grey ice before slamming into the steel crossbar of the empty net with a violent, concussive PING that rattled the chain-link netting behind the frame.
I didn't stop to watch it drop.
I crossed over, digging my blades into the cut surface, sprinting the length of the neutral zone until my quads burned with lactic acid.
Sweat was dripping from the tip of my nose, freezing instantly along the stubble of my jawline.
My grey sleeveless compression shirt was soaked through, plastered to the thick muscle across my ribs, steam rising off my bare shoulders and vascular forearms in thick, pale plumes that drifted upward into the rafters.
My left flank throbbed. The deep contusion from the BC game felt like a hot branding iron pressed against my ribs with every heavy, ragged inhalation.
I didn't care. I needed the pain.
For twenty-four hours, my mind had been locked in an unyielding vice.
Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the delicate, frantic flutter of her pulse beneath my calloused thumb in the library annex.
I could still smell that clean, sharp scent of crushed winter mint and rain that clung to her woolen clothes.
It had gotten into the lining of my throat, burning hotter than the menthol rub or the sub-zero draft off the ice plant.
I pulled another puck from the wooden crate near the blue line, dragged it across the hash marks, and leaned my full two hundred and twenty pounds into a snapshot.
The carbon shaft flexed, loading up three hundred pounds of torque, before discharging with a sound like a small-caliber rifle.
CLANG.
The puck dented the iron post and ricocheted into the corner boards.
Across the arena, sixty yards into the dark concourse, the heavy steel crash bar of Section 104 clicked.
The sound was tiny, muffled by rows of empty plastic seats, but in the dead silence of the barn, it hit my eardrums like a gunshot.
I stopped dead at the top of the slot. My blades slid three feet across the ice before catching an edge, throwing up a small spray of frost. My chest rose and fell in heavy, ragged hitches, the breath billowing out from between my parted lips in thick white clouds.
A silhouette slipped through the gloom of the lower aisle, stepping out from beneath the concrete overhang into the faint, jaundiced glow of the floodlight.
Nylah.
* * *
She walked down the steps toward the home bench, her boots making a soft, rhythmic scuff against the rubber floor matting.
She was bundled against the outside nor'easter in her charcoal wool coat, a dark green scarf wrapped twice around her throat, the wool pulled high enough to graze her chin. Her cheeks were flushed a deep, wind-bitten rose, her dark hair tucked away beneath a black knit beanie.
I didn't move for three long seconds. I stood there on the ice, watching her, my hands locked around the shaft of my stick, the sweat freezing on my bare forearms while the blood in my veins ran hot as asphalt.
Then I pushed off the ice.
I didn't rush. I glided toward the boards with slow, deliberate momentum, the steel edges hissing over the frosted surface until I drifted to a halt six inches from the dasher rail directly in front of her.
The elevation of the ice, combined with the two-inch steel blades beneath my boots, put my chin well over seven feet off the concrete concourse. I towered over her, casting a massive, broad-shouldered shadow that blotted out the light behind her head.
Steam rolled off my bare chest and biceps, pushing a wave of intense physical heat across the four feet of freezing air separating us.
Nylah stopped at the yellow cap rail. Her amber-flecked eyes traveled slowly up the corded muscle of my forearms, past the mottled purple bruising spreading over my left ribs, until they locked onto my face. Her lips parted slightly, drawing in a sharp, shallow breath that caught in the cold air.
She was holding a thick manila folder against her ribs with both hands.
"The arena doors were supposed to be locked at midnight, Owen," she said. Her voice sounded thin, swallowed up by the immense, echoing emptiness of the arena, but she held her chin at that infuriating, stubborn horizontal plane.
"I have a master key," I said. My voice was a low, gravelly scrape that sounded like two stones grinding together in the dark.
I placed my bare, calloused palms flat on top of the yellow dasher rail, leaning my upper body forward until my face was three feet from hers. A drop of sweat fell from my temple, hitting the plastic cap rail with a tiny, sharp tap.
"You left the certified compliance docket on the desk in the annex," she said, holding the folder out across the boards.
"Along with your keycard for the varsity training room.
The registrar needed the physical signatures logged into the system before six in the morning, or your clearance wouldn't appear on the printed roster for tomorrow night’s broadcast."
I didn't reach for the folder. I kept my hands flat on the rail, my pale grey eyes pinning her pupils.
"You could have slid it under Hayes’s office door," I said, my voice dropping an octave, slow and heavy. "You could have left it with the facilities desk on the first floor."
Her throat moved as she swallowed dry. The silver band on her right thumb turned once, twice, against her knuckle beneath her knit gloves.
"The facilities desk was closed," she countered, her words clipped, retreating into that safe, clinical armor she liked to wear like a shield. "I didn't want the paperwork sitting in an unsecured hallway where anyone could tamper with it."
"So you drove three miles through an ice storm past midnight," I murmured, leaning down another inch, watching the dark pupils of her eyes dilate until they swallowed the gold in her irises. "Walked into a pitch-black arena. Tracked me down onto the ice."
"I was finishing my job, Owen."
"Bullshit, Collins."
* * *
The word hung in the freezing air between us, flat and stripped of compromise.
I took my left hand off the dasher rail, reached down, and caught the heavy iron latch of the player gate.
The metal mechanism lifted with a sharp, concussive clatter. I kicked the wooden door outward, stepping off the ice onto the thick rubber runner of the player box without breaking eye contact.
On the rubber, with my skates still strapped to my feet, I was an immovable six-foot-six of bruised bone and burning muscle.
Nylah took an involuntary half-step back, but the heels of her winter boots hit the base of the player partition. Her shoulders met the cold, frosted Plexiglas of the penalty box enclosure.
She ran out of room.
I closed the distance in half a stride, stepping directly into her perimeter, boxing her in against the glass. The heat radiating off my bare skin collided with the freezing air, trapping her in a suffocating pocket of warmth that smelled of cold cedar, athletic sweat, and raw ozone.
She held the manila folder up between us like a breastplate, her knuckles white through her gloves.
"Owen—"
I ignored the paper. I dropped my composite stick; it hit the rubber matting with a dull clatter.
My right hand came up.
My skin was numb from the arena chill on the outside, but underneath the surface, the blood was boiling. I reached out and hooked my bare, calloused thumb under the edge of her dark green wool scarf, pushing the heavy fabric aside.
My fingers spread across the pale, exposed skin of her throat.
Nylah gasped, her breath hitching sharply in her chest. The contact was blistering, rough, and immediate. The tips of my fingers grazed the sensitive hollow beneath her ear, while the pad of my thumb pressed down against the heavy, frantic thrum of her carotid artery.
Her pulse was wild, hammering against my skin in a desperate, rabbit-fast rhythm that gave away every lie she had ever spoken.
I applied a fraction of pressure, tipping her chin upward, forcing her head back against the frosted glass until she had no choice but to look straight up into my face.
"Look at me," I commanded, my voice a dark, velvet rumble that vibrated against the roof of my mouth.
Her amber eyes locked onto mine. Her chest was heaving beneath the heavy wool of her coat, rising and falling in rapid, shallow bursts that brushed the front of my grey compression top with every breath.
She didn't pull away. She didn't fight my grip.
She stood there, pinned between the cold glass and the heat of my body, her lips parted, drawing in ragged mouthfuls of the air I was exhaling.
"You keep coming to me in the dark, Nylah," I whispered, leaning down until my rough stubble brushed the sensitive, burning curve of her jawline.
Her head tilted back further, an involuntary, shuddering surrender that exposed the pale line of her throat to my mouth. A tremor ran through her whole frame, starting at the point where my thumb held her jaw and traveling all the way down to the soles of her boots.
"You keep pushing past the lines," I murmured, my lips millimeters from the delicate skin below her ear, my gravelly voice thick with a hunger that threatened to break every bone in my hands to keep from taking her right here against the boards.
"You keep looking at me like you want to see what happens when I lose my grip. "
Her eyelids fluttered, her breath washing hot and sweet across my cheek, smelling of winter mint.
"Ryan..." My name left her lips in a broken, breathless whisper that snapped the last chain of my control.
My thumb stroked once across the soft hollow beneath her ear, slow, rough, and unapologetically possessive.
"One of these nights, sweetheart," I growled, my teeth grazing the freezing shell of her ear, "you're going to come down these stairs, and I’m not going to let you leave this barn."