Chapter 20
Chosen POV
The light woke me.
It didn't filter through the frosted glass in gray, threatening shadows like it had for three months of Adirondack winter. It spilled across the cedar-paneled bedroom in a blinding, brilliant silver wash, bouncing off four feet of fresh, undisturbed powder that blanketed the lakefront outside.
The gale had died. The silence in the woods was absolute, so deep and clean it sounded like the world had stopped turning.
My eyes opened slowly, tracking the pale glare across the ceiling planks.
For the first time since November of my freshman year, I didn't wake with my jaw locked tight enough to crack enamel.
I didn't wake with my fists balled into the sheets, gasping for air against the memory of Julian's neck snapping against the dasher glass.
My resting pulse was sitting at forty-eight beats a minute, low, rhythmic, and calm as deep water.
Beneath my chin, a soft, steady warmth rose and fell against my sternum.
I shifted my gaze downward, and the breath in my lungs hitched.
Marie was asleep on my chest.
She was curled onto her right side, her slender body tucked flush against my left flank beneath the heavy charcoal duvet. One of her bare thighs was thrown over my hip, pinning my leg, her skin radiating a fever-hot, drowsy warmth that soaked straight into my muscle.
Her dark hair was a tangled, silken spill across my collarbone, dark waves pooling over the black ink of my compass rose tattoo.
Her cheek was pressed flat against my ribs, right over my heart, her lips parted slightly as she breathed out long, quiet sighs that warmed the bare skin above my sternum.
My right arm was locked around her waist.
My large palm was splayed wide over the small of her back, my blunt fingers resting against the curve of her hip, holding her securely against my side.
I didn't move a muscle. I stayed pinned to the mattress, terrified that the slightest shift of my weight would shatter the quiet.
She looked small in the silver morning light, stripped of her lab coat, her clipboards, and her weaponized clinical vocabulary.
Her eyelashes rested like dark crescents against the high crest of her cheekbones; her brow was smooth, unburdened by the academic grind and the twenty-hour weeks she worked to pay for her textbooks.
On her left pinky, the cool metal of her antique silver signet ring rested against the scar tissue of my ribs.
A quiet, terrifying ache expanded behind my breastbone, heavy and profound.
I had spent four years believing that survival was an equation of discipline, physical violence, and solitary restitution. I thought if I took enough hits, bled enough on the ice, and paid enough invoices, I could buy back my right to exist.
Holding this woman in the quiet of my bed, listening to the synchronized cadence of our breathing, I realized the truth: the hockey, the draft boards, the nine-hundred-thousand-dollar rookie contracts meant nothing if she wasn't standing at the end of the tunnel.
* * *
I lifted my left hand with agonizing slowness, my calloused fingers brushing a loose, dark curl from her forehead.
Her skin was soft as water beneath my thumb. I smoothed the strand behind her ear, my knuckles trailing down the delicate line of her jaw to her throat, where her pulse fluttered with slow, peaceful regularity.
Marie stirred.
A soft, sleepy sound broke in the back of her throat. Her brow furrowed once before smoothing out, her eyelashes fluttering against my chest as she stretched. Her toes pointed under the duvet, the movement pressing her bare hips firmly against the hard line of my thigh.
Her dark eyes opened.
There was no sudden panic. She didn't gasp; she didn't yank the dark charcoal linen up to her chin or scramble for the edge of the mattress.
She lay there with her cheek on my chest for five long seconds, her gaze drifting over the surgical scar on my collarbone before lifting slowly to meet mine.
Her pupils were soft in the morning glare, the dark brown irises flecked with bright gold. A slow, delicate flush bloomed across her cheekbones, but her gaze was steady, unguarded, and open.
"Morning," she whispered, her voice husky and rough with sleep.
The sound of her voice did something dangerous to the rhythm in my chest.
"Morning, Marie," I murmured, my baritone low and gravel-rough.
I slid my hand up to cup her jaw, my thumb dragging across the swollen, tender line of her lower lip. She tilted her face into my palm, her eyelids fluttering half-shut as a quiet, contented sigh slipped through her parted teeth.
"The storm stopped," she noted, her voice muffled against my fingers.
"Sun's up," I said. "Roads will be plowed by noon."
She didn't move to get up. Instead, her small, bare hand slid across my stomach, her fingers tracing the hard contour of my ribs before resting flat over my heart, feeling the heavy, steady thud beneath the skin.
I shifted my weight, rolling onto my side to face her.
The mattress dipped as I pulled her closer, throwing my heavy thigh over her hips, bracketing her against the pillows. The linen slid down to her waist, exposing the pale, smooth curve of her shoulders and the delicate line of her collarbone in the snowlight.
I leaned down, pressing my lips to the hollow beneath her ear.
Her breath hitched in a soft, fractured gasp. Her fingers tightened against my back, digging into the dense muscle beneath my shoulder blades as I dragged slow, lingering kisses down the slender column of her throat.
She tasted of sleep, warm skin, and the sweet lingering ghost of the night before.
"Chosen," she breathed, her head tilting back into the dark linen, offering me the arch of her neck.
"Look at me, Marie," I murmured against her skin, the command soft, gravelly, and laced with quiet possession.
She opened her eyes, dark and dilated, her chest rising in rapid, shallow hitches against mine.
"You slept in my bed," I whispered, my lips brushing the corner of her mouth, my thumb stroking the crest of her hip beneath the duvet. "You wore my sweater. You let me take every piece of you."
Her throat worked on a dry swallow, the flush on her cheeks deepening to vivid rose. "I did."
"You belong to me now," I growled, my mouth slanting over hers in a slow, deep kiss that stole the air straight from her lungs.
It wasn't the ravenous, starved hunger of last night.
It was an unhurried, devastating claiming that promised everything I had left to give.
Her lips parted beneath mine, her hands tangling into the short hair at the back of my head, pulling me down until our bodies were locked together in an unbroken line of heat and friction.
When I finally pulled back, resting my forehead against hers, both of us were breathing hard, our chests rising and falling in unison against the sheets.
"Good girl," I rasped, my thumb wiping a stray trace of moisture from her lower lip. "That’s my girl."
* * *
In the living room, the sharp, rhythmic vibration of my smartphone rattled against the granite kitchen island.
Three short bursts. A pause. Three more.
The outside world was waking up.
Marie’s body went slightly rigid beneath mine, the soft warmth of the morning giving way to the cold reality waiting beyond the cedar walls. Her gaze shifted toward the hallway, her jaw setting into that familiar, defensive line.
"That's probably Vance," she whispered, her voice regaining a trace of its clinical precision. "Or Knox. The athletic department is going to be digging out the arena."
I reached down, caught her chin in my hand, and turned her face back until she was looking directly into my eyes.
"Let it ring," I said.
"Chosen, we have forty hours of compliance logs left," she said, though she didn't pull away from my palm.
Her thumb reached up, brushing over the split corner of my lower lip.
"Sterling is still the athletic director.
Halloway is still circling the roster. If someone sees my car at your place, or if the compliance board audits our travel logs—"
"Listen to me," I commanded, cutting through her panic with a low, unshakeable certainty.
I took her left hand, lifting it between our faces, pressing a firm, lingering kiss to the silver signet ring on her pinky before flattening her palm directly over the center of my sternum.
"We go back to campus," I said, holding her dark eyes with mine. "You carry your clipboard in the clinic. You measure my joint angles in The Vault. We keep our mouths shut in the hallways so Sterling doesn't have an excuse to touch your fellowship."
Her eyelashes fluttered, her breath hitching as she felt the absolute, unyielding hammer of my pulse under her fingers.
"And then?" she whispered.
"And then we finish this season," I growled, leaning down until my mouth was a millimeter from hers, my voice dropping into a dark, sacred promise that vibrated through her bones.
"I take that knee onto the ice, I win Carver a national championship, and I sign an entry-level deal that puts Julian's trust away forever.
And when the draft is over, Marie, I am putting you in front of the entire world, and nobody will ever question who you belong to. "
A single, silent tear broke from the corner of her eye, tracking a hot path over her cheekbone.
She didn't argue. She didn't offer a single logical objection.
She lifted her head from the charcoal linen, her arms wrapping tight around my neck, and pressed her mouth to mine in a fierce, unyielding kiss that sealed the covenant between us.
Outside the panoramic glass, the Adirondack sun climbed above the frozen pines, blinding and brilliant over the snow. The storm had cleared. The lines were gone.
And as I held her against my chest in the morning quiet, I knew that whatever war was waiting for us on the ice, we were going to fight it side by side.