Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sloane
The door closes shut behind him, and the air changes shape. It gets heavier, denser, like the room remembers him before I do.
Maddox crosses the threshold without hurry, shoulders squared, jaw locked, that contained kind of force he wears like armor.
My pulse jumps in a way it has no business jumping, and I smooth my fingers over the edge of my desk to keep from giving myself away.
He eyes the space around him—floor-to-ceiling glass, sharp lines, walnut, and order. While he doesn’t normally hang out in these types of rooms, he manages to command it and make it feel smaller anyway.
“Take a seat, please,” I say, voice steady and flat enough to skate on.
He doesn’t, not at first. He stands there like a challenge, like the silence between us has a clock in it.
He’s testing me.
I let the beat stretch, matching his stare, spine tall, breath measured, not so much as a blink I don’t own.
The trick with men like him—men like my father, men like every investor who’s ever thought “young” meant “easy”—is to let them think they’re winning the second before they decide to give ground.
Then you set the line.
Maddox finally moves. He drops into the chair with a sprawl that reads as deliberate disrespect. Long legs open, shoulders heavy into the back, one big hand curls on the armrest like a warning.
I feel the rip of heat in my chest anyway. It irritates me that I feel it, and the irritation irritates me more.
He smells like cold air and clean soap and the ghost of rubber from the rink. It pulls at a thread I should have cut downstairs—my palms on his shoulder, the heat of him through the thin compression fabric, and the way he went very still under my hands when I wrapped the ice tight.
He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t have to. I felt the bite of his breath. I felt my own.
I lace my fingers together and lock my elbows, the posture my old etiquette coach would call “composed readiness.”
“Dean and the board want a different story out of you,” I say, clean and clinical. “On the ice, you’re doing what we brought you here to do. Off the ice, yesterday was… not what we need.”
His jaw tics. A small movement. A warning. He lifts his gaze to mine without lifting his head, like a man sighting along the barrel. “I’m a goalie. Not a circus act.”
His voice is sharp enough to cut glass.
“You’re a goalie and a face,” I answer, not unkindly. “And the city is watching our second season as hard if not harder than our first year.”
I drum my fingers on my desk. “Media day is designed to feed them. You looked like you wanted to break every microphone in the room.”
“I wanted to leave the room. That part wasn’t a secret.”
Tension snaps through me so fast it almost makes me laugh. Not because he’s wrong, but because he’s honest. I respect honest.
But respecting his honesty only complicates things.
“Perception is louder than truth. You know that, even if you hate it.”
He leans back farther, like he’s testing how much space he can take. “You want me to smile on command and pretend I like being poked.”
“I want you to look like you’re part of something, because you are.”
We stare at each other across twenty-eight inches of walnut. I could tap the desk once and call this done with an edict. I could play the owner card so hard it cracks his teeth.
But power only works once if you wield it like a hammer. The second time, men like him break the hammer.
“There’s a way to fix it,” I slide a folder across the desk with a tab that reads COMMUNITY INITIATIVE in Sierra’s precise handwriting.
“Saturday morning at Atlanta Children’s hospital.
Photo window is ninety minutes. We’re reading to two rooms, signing jerseys in the atrium, and doing a small meet-and-greet with the oncology floor for those who are up for it.
Cameras will be there at the beginning and the end. Middle is just you and the kids.”
There’s a flicker of something in his eyes at the mention of kids. But it’s fleeting, and I almost wonder if I imagined it.
“A dog-and-pony show.”
“A show of decency. They need it. We need it. It’s the right play.”
“Sloane, I don’t have a soft side.”
I meet his eyes and don’t blink. “Yes, you do.”
He doesn’t move, but there’s that flicker of something again. I didn’t imagine it because it takes him a little longer to shut it down this time.
“I’ve seen it, Maddox.”
As soon as I say it, I want to claw the words back.
Not only does he know for sure now that I watch him, but what I’ve seen is dangerous for me.
The way he holds himself still when rookies flail, the way he doesn’t humiliate weakness even when the room would cheer him for it.
The way he let me touch him, for a breath and no more, wrapped him tight and close and didn’t shrug me off.
The way my own body feels traitorous even now.
“You don’t know me,” he says, quiet enough to make my skin prickle.
“Maybe not, but I know what I saw. And I know what it will do for this team if people see it.”
He looks away, huffing out a breath that isn’t quite a laugh. After a moment, his gaze comes back to the folder. He flips it open with two fingers like it might bite him.
His eyes skim the schedule, the talking points Dean insisted we include, the photo thumbnails Sierra curated to look candid. His mouth hardens.
“This is nothing but theater.”
“Be that as it may, it’s good for the community. And for this franchise. One that you agreed to be a a part of when you signed the contract.”
His gaze meets mine, the intensity pinning me to my seat. “I signed the contract to do my job, which is to stop pucks.”
“It’s the core of the job,” I concede. “But this isn’t your first rodeo, and you know as well as I do, that isn’t the whole of it.”
I cross my arms and lean back in my chair. “We may not be storied in all the history you’re used to like in Boston, but we’re a professional organization. We do the same kind of community outreach here you did there.”
He lifts a brow. “I didn’t come here to be liked.”
I wish I could tell him I didn’t hire him to be liked. That I hired him to anchor us when the ice turns ugly and the city gets hungry for blood.
That I hired him because control that violent and clean is rare, and when he’s on the ice the team breathes easier even if they pretend otherwise.
But we’re not that kind of honest with each other.
“You came here to win,” I say. “Winning requires oxygen. Optics are oxygen. Those kids will gladly give it to us for free if you don’t choke on your pride.”
He leans forward, forearms braced on his thighs. The chair creaks, just a little, a sound that shouldn’t feel intimate but does. “You think this is about pride.”
“I think this is about choice,” I say. “You can choose to make my job harder, or you can choose to make it easier. Either way, my job gets done. Yours goes better if you don’t pick a fight with a camera.”
“That what this is? You and your job?”
“That’s what all of this is. My name is on the deed. Every misstep hits my desk first. Every win and every loss lands on my back. So, yes. It’s my job. It’s also your job. We do them or we watch other people do them for us.”
He studies me for a long moment, and the weight of it is almost physical.
I feel it at the base of my throat. Along the inside of my wrists. Behind my knees.
Other places no one can see, but I can sure as hell feel.
“Listen, media day wasn’t all your fault,” I say, because it’s true and because I need one moment of truth between us that isn’t a weapon. “They came for you. You protected yourself. I don’t blame you for that.”
Surprise registers subtly in those icy blue eyes, shifting the heat from fury to focus.
“You don’t blame me,” he says, not quite a question.
“No. But I do need you to course-correct. And I need you to do it quickly.”
He looks back down at the folder, his thumb dragging along the edge, and I almost feel the scrape against my skin.
He’s thinking about the cameras, the kids, the way the world turns fast when you invite it to watch.
“The hospital…you’ll be there.”
I nod. “Yes.”
“With me.”
“Yes.”
“Reading,” he adds, like he can make it sound ridiculous enough to end the conversation.
I roll my lips inward to keep from smiling. “A book called ‘The Hockey Sweater.’ And if you complain about the translation I’ll let the eight-year-olds correct your French on live local television.”
For the first time since he walked in, his mouth moves in something that could almost be a smile if you glossed it in fiction and put it under soft lighting.
“You’ve thought this through,” he says.
“I make a living thinking things through.
He tilts his head, that stare on me once more. “Do you make a living doing it for me?”
“That depends on whether you insist on making it necessary.”
He sits back again with a sigh.
“I’m not a celebrity. I’m not polished. I’m not pretty. I’m thirty-nine, and I creak when I get out of bed. Half the guys in that room want my job because they should. Cameras make me feel like I’m supposed to lie. I don’t like who I have to be to make you happy in front of a lens.”
The truth of it hits hard. Not because I want him polished. Not because I want him to lie.
Because there’s something indecent about asking a man who has built his life on control to hand a piece of that control to strangers with tripods.
“This isn’t about pretty,” I say. “It’s about letting people see that who they’re pouring their hope into is a person.
It’s about the kids who will sleep better because the guy they see on billboards looked them in the eye and made them laugh.
It’s about the rookie who breathes easier because the cameras caught you doing what you already do—standing still when other people wobble. ”
His gaze hooks on mine and holds. Heat moves through my chest like whiskey.
“I see everything,” I say.
“And you wrapped my shoulder,” he adds after a beat, and now it’s like there’s no desk between us.
There’s only the memory of my hands on him. His skin hot, my fingers confident because confidence was safer than feeling anything else.
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
I shrug a shoulder. “I knew how and because no one was there to help you. Because it would hurt less if it was tight.”
He studies me the same way he studied the folder, like he could pry the edges up and see what is underneath if he decided he has time for it.
“You didn’t have to,” he says.
“I don’t do ‘have to’ very often. It makes me interesting company or terrible company, depending on the day.”
He snorts. The sound is a rough cut of amusement that does unforgivable things to the base of my spine.
“Saturday,” I say, before the room slides any closer to the edge. “Ten a.m. Call time at the hospital is nine-forty. Sierra will email the talking points; ignore the ones that feel like lies. Dean will coordinate the outlets for the top and the bottom of the shoot.”
I level him with my best “don’t fuck with me stare.” “You will not stonewall. You will not snarl. You will stand still for photos and make one kind of joke that reads as human, not hostile. I’ll be there. If you need a lifeline, I’m there.”
“I don’t take lifelines,” he says.
“I know; you take wins. This is one of them, so take it, Maddox.”
He taps the folder again, slow and deliberate. Once. Twice. “I’ll think about it.”
I try not to roll my eyes.
There it is. The non-answer that men give when they want to keep you in the air over the net and call it mercy.
My father used to do it all the time.
I don’t take the bait and keep my voice cool. “This isn’t an ask. It’s mandatory.”
A long moment slides by, thin as a blade.
He holds my stare like a man holding the line in a tide. I don’t look away.
The chair scrapes when he stands, towering over my desk once again.
Heat rushes to my core seeing him like that. The woman in me responds before the rest of me can body-check her.
And I hate it.
I hate the heat.
I hate the wanting.
I hate that the wanting makes me feel alive when I’m supposed to be steel.
Maddox turns for the door. He pauses with his hand on the knob, then looks back over his shoulder.
The look lands like a physical thing—a palm at the base of my neck.
And doesn’t that just make me think all kinds of inappropriate things.
“Mandatory,” he says, like he’s trying the word on.
“Mandatory.”
Something unreadable passes across his face. Not mockery. Not surrender. A private calculation I’m not invited into. Then the mask slides into place. He opens the door and steps out, closing it behind him with a soft click that still feels like a slam.
I take several deep breaths, giving myself a pep talk with each one.
I am steel.
I am Sloane fucking Carrington.
I own this damn team.
I belong here even if they think I don’t.
Time to get back to work.
I have eight emails from Dean, three calendar holds from the league office, a text from Tessa asking for the updated sponsor deck, and Sierra’s draft schedule for Saturday waiting in my inbox.
The work won’t do itself while I sit here vibrating, thinking about how Maddox’s skin felt under my hand.
How I want to feel it again. The muscle, the heat, the control lying just beneath.
And just how much I hate myself for wanting it.
Just one more time.