Chapter 20
Ryan POV
The morning light broke through the frosted glass of the bedroom transom in a blinding, white glare.
It bounced off the four-foot snowdrifts piled against the exterior sill, throwing sharp, geometric slabs of brilliance across the dark pine floorboards and the charcoal linen sheets.
Outside, the violent roar of the blizzard had flatlined into a dead, ringing silence, leaving only the distant, rhythmic rumble of a municipal plow scraping the asphalt of Harbor View Lane three blocks away.
I lay on my back, my head propped against two pillows, my chest bare to the dry radiator heat of the room.
My right arm was pinned to the mattress, heavy and immovable, acting as an anchor beneath Nylah’s neck.
She was curled on her side, her back pressed flush against my ribs, her small frame molded into the curve of my torso.
Her head rested in the hollow of my shoulder, her dark hair tangled across my bicep in a wide, silken mess that smelled of winter pine and the clean, sweet heat of her skin.
Her breathing was a soft, rhythmic whisper that brushed against the hair on my chest in slow, even intervals.
My jaw was loose and relaxed. The masseter muscles beneath my stubble, perpetually locked in a grinding ache for four straight years, were soft and still.
The silence inside my skull was deafening.
Ever since the afternoon Leo’s spine had shattered on that Michigan pond, my head had been a slaughterhouse of noise.
Whistles, coaches barking shift times, the phantom clatter of my father’s medical bills hitting the kitchen table, the suffocating panic that one blown rotation would cost my family their house—it had been a ceaseless, violent roar that drowned out every human thought I possessed.
Right now, there was nothing.
Only the steady, heavy knock of my own heart beating at forty-two beats a minute, matched stroke for stroke by the quiet pulse fluttering beneath her collarbone.
A terrifying, foreign contentment settled into the marrow of my bones, heavy as lead.
I looked down at her bare shoulder resting above the charcoal duvet. A faint, rose-colored mark shadowed the pale skin near the crest of her collarbone—the phantom imprint of my teeth from hours ago when I had lost my mind in the dark.
My left hand came up.
My thumb, rough and calloused from a decade of holding a composite stick, moved with agonizing slowness, tracing the delicate line of her shoulder down to the notch of her throat.
She didn't wake. She merely sighed in her sleep, a small, contented sound that vibrated against my ribs, her hips shifting back into mine as her toes hooked lazily around the back of my ankle.
She was in my bed.
She was breathing my air, wrapped in my sheets, bearing my marks, and the thought of letting her walk out that front door felt like stepping onto thin ice with no skates.
* * *
At eight-forty, she began to stir.
Her eyelashes fluttered against her cheek, the dark fans casting shadows across her cheekbones. She took a long, deep breath, her spine arching in a slow, cat-like stretch that dragged her bare calves across my shins.
Then her eyes opened.
Her amber-flecked irises were hazy, swimming with the thick fog of deep sleep. She blinked against the blinding glare of the snow, her gaze traveling slowly from the rough brick wall opposite the bed, down to the charcoal linen, until it collided with my face.
She went dead still.
The realization of where she was hit her nervous system like a physical pulse.
A bright, burning flush bloomed at the base of her throat, crawling upward across her collarbones and flooding her cheeks with a deep, feverish rose.
Her lips, still swollen and darkened from hours of bruising friction, parted on a sharp, shallow intake of air.
She tried to pull the sheet higher, her knuckles whitening as she clutched the linen to her chin.
I didn't let her hide.
I shifted my weight, rolling off my back and rising onto my forearms. My massive frame blotted out the blinding sunlight, casting her face in dark, warm shadow, trapping her beneath two hundred and twenty pounds of unhurried power.
"Morning, sweetheart," I rumbled, my gravelly baritone thick with sleep and stripped of every defense I had ever maintained.
Her amber eyes darted across the scars on my chest, lingering on the mottled purple contusion on my ribs, before snapping up to meet my gaze. "Ryan..."
"Look at you," I murmured, leaning down until my rough morning stubble brushed the sensitive, burning curve of her jawline. "Look at you in my bed."
"We shouldn't have..." Her voice broke on the words, a raspy, reedy scrape that showed how much she had given away in the dark.
"Don't start lying to yourself now, Collins," I growled softly into the crook of her neck, my lips finding the sensitive notch beneath her ear. "You wanted this just as much as I did."
I pulled the charcoal sheet from her fingers, tossing it down to her hips, exposing the smooth, flushed expanse of her chest to the morning air. Before the draft could touch her, I pressed my bare chest flat against hers, burying her beneath my body heat.
The contact was concussive.
Nylah gasped, her hips arching involuntarily off the mattress as the hard, morning ridge of my pelvis ground against the soft heat between her thighs.
The friction was slow, heavy, and undeniable.
Her hands came up, her slender fingers sliding deep into the dark hair at the base of my skull, her nails biting into my scalp with a sudden, fierce possessiveness that answered every question she was too proud to ask.
"Good girl," I rasped against her lips, my mouth taking hers in a lazy, deep, devastating morning kiss that tasted of sleep, coffee, and total surrender.
She sighed into my mouth, her lips parting to welcome my tongue, her body melting beneath mine like snow under fire. Every trace of the rigid, clinical data analyst was gone, burned to ash on the mattress, leaving only the woman who had torn the armor right off my chest.
* * *
By ten o'clock, the smell of dark roast coffee was drifting through the high-ceilinged loft.
Nylah was sitting on the edge of the dark granite kitchen island, her bare legs dangling in the narrow space between my parted thighs.
She wore my faded black athletic crewneck shirt—the heavy cotton swallowed her frame, the hem falling past the middle of her thighs, the sleeves rolled up three times to free her wrists.
Her dark hair was pinned up haphazardly with a wooden pencil she had scavenged from my desk, exposing the pale, marked curve of her throat to the morning sun.
I pressed the stainless-steel plunger down on the French press, the glass canister clinking softly against the granite.
I poured two white ceramic mugs, sliding one into her small hands.
Her cold fingers wrapped around the hot porcelain, her shoulders relaxing as she brought the steam to her face. She looked at me over the rim of the mug, her amber eyes clear, steady, and holding a quiet warmth that hit me straight in the solar plexus.
"The campus transit authority issued an update five minutes ago," she said quietly. "Route One is clear. The university shuttles are running on a holiday schedule."
My hand stilled on the handle of my mug.
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed on the entryway table.
Two sharp, rhythmic vibrations that sounded like gunfire in the quiet kitchen.
I walked over, picked up the screen, and unlocked it.
ST. JUDE VARSITY HOCKEY: Rink facility cleared by facilities at 11:30. Mandatory film review at 14:00. Compliance load-management sync scheduled for 16:00. Vance expects full attendance.
The outside world had arrived.
The Frozen Four qualification game. The athletic board trustees. Arthur Vance looking for a reason to revoke her grant. The scouts with their clipboards and stopwatches, waiting to dissect my movement on the ice to see if I was worth an eight-figure contract.
I set the phone face down on the entry table, walked back to the kitchen island, and stepped directly between Nylah’s bare knees.
She looked down at her coffee, the defensive stiffness returning to her shoulders by a fraction of an inch as the reality of campus politics crashed back into our sanctuary.
I reached out.
My large, calloused hands framed the sides of her face, my fingers splaying across her jawline, my thumbs pressing gently into the soft hollows beneath her cheekbones. I applied steady, unyielding pressure, tilting her face upward until her amber eyes were locked onto mine.
Her pulse was steady, beating with a slow, heavy cadence against my palms.
"Listen to me, Nylah," I said, my voice dropping into that dark, gravelly register that brooked no argument.
She held my gaze, her throat working on a dry swallow.
"Out there, we play their game," I growled softly, my thumbs stroking the flushed skin beneath her eyes.
"We keep the distance in the concourse. We let Hayes and Albright think you're just logging numbers on a tablet.
We don't give those bastards a single millimeter of rope to hang your fellowship with. "
Her lower lip trembled, then stilled under the weight of my stare.
"And in here?" she whispered.
I leaned down, pressing my forehead against hers, my breath washing hot and possessive over her parted lips.
"In here, you belong to me," I rumbled, every word an ironclad vow forged in the quiet of the morning. "Every single night. When those doors close, you are mine, and I will tear this university apart before I let anyone take you out of my perimeter. Understand me?"
Nylah set her mug down on the granite counter behind her.
Her small hands came up, her fingers wrapping firmly around my wrists, her silver thumb ring pressing cool against my skin. She didn't flinch. She didn't look away.
"Understood, Captain," she whispered, her lips curving into a soft, fierce smile that took the last breath from my lungs.
I pulled her forward, burying my mouth in hers, sealing the pact in the blinding winter sun.