9. Snowfall #3
The sentence hit low and deep and honest enough to hurt.
For one suspended second neither of them moved.
Then Noah lifted his right hand, slowly enough to be refused, and touched two gloved fingers to the side of her jaw.
Talia could have stepped back.
She didn’t.
The first kiss was cold at the edges and devastating at the center.
He kissed her like he had been holding the line so long he’d forgotten what surrender felt like.
Not rough. Not careful in the false, overmanaged way of men who wanted credit for restraint.
Just a single, hungry, controlled collision of mouth and breath and winter air, all the heat he had kept bridled finally given a shape.
Talia made a sound against his mouth she would blame on surprise later and fisted her gloves in the front of his coat.
That changed everything.
Noah’s other hand came up to cup the back of her neck, still measured, still giving her room to break it, but when she leaned in instead, choosing, his control frayed into something richer.
He kissed her deeper. Slower. Then deeper again, like he was learning the exact shape of her response and letting himself have it by degrees.
Snow fell around them in thick quiet sheets.
The library vanished. The quad vanished. There was only the cold bite in her lungs and the heat of his mouth and the astonishing fact that the man who played in front of packed arenas and cameras and an entire institution’s appetite kissed like privacy was sacred.
He tasted like winter and coffee gone cold and the last shred of discipline before it burned away.
Talia slid one hand up into the damp wool at the back of his neck. His breath broke. He pulled back a fraction, forehead nearly touching hers, as if the space was the only thing keeping him from forgetting where they were.
“Tell me to stop,” he said, voice wrecked.
She opened her eyes.
Snow caught on his lashes, on the dark sweep of his brows. His mouth was red from hers. He looked stunned by himself.
Only one person sees him.
The thought came back, dangerous and bright.
“Do you want to stop?” she asked.
His laugh was almost painful. “Not even a little.”
“Good.”
Then she kissed him again.
This time it was her choice in full.
His hand tightened at her neck, not forcing, just holding with reverent intensity while she took what she wanted.
The angle changed. Their breaths tangled.
Her entire body lit in response, heat flooding low and fast despite the cold.
He made that rough, quiet sound again when she moved closer, and the honesty of it nearly undid her.
He was so warm under the coat. So solid. The hard line of his chest beneath layers, the latent power in a body built by years of ice and contact and discipline. Even standing still, he felt like contained momentum.
When they finally broke apart, both of them breathing harder than the weather justified, the snowfall seemed louder somehow.
Noah rested his forehead briefly against hers. “This is a terrible idea.”
“Yes,” Talia said, and could not summon a shred of regret.
A smile ghosted at the corner of his mouth, nothing like the public grin. This one belonged to no one else.
Then reality came back in cold pieces.
Students crossing the far path. The library doors opening and shutting. The audit. Cole. Compliance. The road loss still sitting ugly in the team’s chest. Everything waiting.
Talia stepped back first.
The distance was less than a foot. It felt enormous.
Noah let his hands fall immediately, respect written all through the movement. No attempt to keep her there. No entitlement. Just that same impossible restraint, now shot through with kiss-flushed want.
Her mouth tingled in the snow.
“We are not done with the fight,” she said.
His chest rose and fell once, deep. “I know.”
“This does not solve the audit.”
“I know.”
“And if you use this to avoid answering me, I will regret it very loudly.”
That got a real huff of laughter out of him, brief and disbelieving. “I don’t think anything about you is vague enough to count as a threat quietly.”
Despite everything, warmth flickered in her.
Then she saw it—the shift in his face. The way the softness receded, not because he regretted the kiss, but because something else had landed.
“What?” she asked at once.
Noah’s gaze had gone past her shoulder toward the avenue.
She turned.
Two men in dark campus coats were crossing from the administration side toward the athletic complex, heads bent together against the snow. One carried a folder tucked under his arm. The other wore the tight, efficient expression she had already learned to associate with university counsel.
Even from here, the posture of urgency was unmistakable.
Noah swore under his breath.
“Talia.”
She looked back at him.
The last heat of the kiss was still in his mouth, but his eyes had gone hard with recognition.
“That’s not media,” he said.
Snow gathered between them as the men kept walking toward the rink. “Then who?”
His jaw locked.
“Board investigators,” he said. “And if they’re coming over in person, something just got worse.”