Chapter 4
Thirty Seconds
~MATTEO~
An hour into the rounds, the entire team is breathing like a busted radiator, and not one of us has put a puck past her.
Not one.
I want that on a plaque somewhere.
We have thrown everything the playbook has at that right-side net, and a fair amount the playbook would frankly disown, and every single attempt has come back to us in pieces. Wristers, snipes, a slap shot from Hargrove that could have demolished a small shed.
They all die the same death.
Against a goalie who treats her crease like a country with closed borders and absolutely no interest in tourism.
The rink smells like our failure, which is to say it smells incredible and terrible at once.
Sweat gone sharp in the cold. Wet leather.
The hot-rubber stink of overworked tape and the chemical pine of whatever Jimmy floods the floor with, all of it stirred together with the scorched-mineral bite of fresh ice that scrapes down the back of your throat with every breath.
Twenty-some Alphas running hard for sixty minutes makes a perfume you could bottle and sell to no one. Add the particular tang of a team being quietly, methodically embarrassed by a stranger, and you have the exact air I am currently choking on.
I check the bench.
Coach Declan stands at the boards with his arms folded and his jaw set in a line. I have learned, over two seasons, to read like a weather report, and the forecast is not good.
He is not impressed.
Not impressed with our half of this team, the sector that is supposed to be the polished one, the one with the captain, system, and depth he’s invested time and skills in training, only for us to be failing so fucking hard in his face.
Pure mockery clearly…
His expression alone shows the specific stillness of a man deciding how many laps the afternoon owes him.
That should bother me more than it does.
It would, on a normal day.
Today, my attention has a defect, and the defect has pink hair.
I am not the only one with the defect. That is the part I keep circling back to, the way your tongue keeps finding the chipped tooth.
Jude is locked on her. Rémi is locked on her.
The three of us, the men who are supposed to be running this scrimmage like a clinic, keep drifting our eyes to the same fixed point on the ice.
The way compass needles drift north, and the point is her: and she has no idea, because she is too busy using her entire body as a weapon against us.
And I mean her entire body.
All of it.
Two minutes ago, she took a puck off the top of her own head.
On purpose.
That is the thing I cannot get my brain to fold up and put away.
The shot was rising, headed for the top corner, in a spot her glove was never going to reach in time because she is, under all that gear, not a tall woman, and instead of conceding the goal like a sane person, she tipped her chin up into it, let the cage take the hit, killed the puck stone dead with her skull.
The crack of it rang the whole rink like a struck bell.
Impressive does not cover the move. That’s simply a word you reach for before you seek an honest one, which is dangerous, a word that put a cold little drop in the pit of my stomach and left it sitting there to rot.
I did not enjoy that drop.
I want to be clear about it with myself, because this drop in the pit of my stomach is a problem.Just like the thick erection pressing on my guard that’s making merely skating on the ice fucking uncomfortable…
Here is the math that does not work.
She is a stranger.
I met her this morning, in a room that smelled of mops, for the length of one conversation and one near-disaster.
A stranger is not something a person feels a hot, irrational, full-body need to throw himself in front of.
You do not develop a protective instinct toward a woman whose middle name you could not guess at gunpoint.
And yet there it is, low in my gut, this absurd standing order that has filed itself without my signature, the one that goes if anything in this building comes for her, it goes through you first.
Stupid. Feral. Inconvenient.
Aka Pinky.
Fine. I will say it where only the inside of my own head can hear it.
I like Pinky.
I like Pinky hard, and the liking arrived with no warning, receipt, and absolutely no regard for the timing, which is appalling, because the timing is day one.
First, I am a simple creature, so we start simple.
She is hot.
Brutally, inconveniently hot, in the way that has nothing to do with being delicate and everything to do with looking like she could put you on the floor and might. The kind of sizzling attractiveness that rearranges a man’s priorities mid-sentence.
Second, is the thing I am desperately, heroically trying to convince myself I imagined. A trick of bad cupboard lighting. A fiction my own filthy brain manufactured and screened for me without permission.
When she was pulling that chest plate down over her head this morning, fighting the gear the way everyone fights the gear, the wet fabric of her shirt pulled tight for half a second across her chest.
And there were two small, deliberate shapes pressing back against the cloth.
Two neat barbells.
Not a wrinkle, not a seam, not a thing the rational part of me can argue them down into being.
If her nipples are pierced, I am going to lose my entire mind.
I do not get to choose this about myself.
A man’s weaknesses are assigned to him at birth, and mine were filed under ink and metal. Tattoos undo me, always have, the sleeve of dark work running down her left arm that I clocked in the closet had me composing sonnets I will never admit to.
But ink is a soft spot.
Piercings are a death sentence.
The true judge putting on the black cap. And I have no proof, none, just a half-second of damp cotton and a vivid imagination, and it is going to haunt me straight through the back nine of this scrimmage.
Reason the third has no business being a reason at all, and it is the one that is quietly turning me feral.
I have never, in twenty-five years on this earth, met a woman who does not, somewhere, somehow, give a little.
Bend a knee.
Soften a corner.
Drop her eyes when an Alpha holds the stare a beat too long.
It is not a criticism of them; it is just the water I have always swum in.
And then there is Iris O’Shea, who walked into a building that did not want her and has not given a single inch of ground all morning. Not to the chirps, the cold, a coach with a jaw like a closing door, and the novelty of it is doing something to me I do not have the vocabulary for.
Nor would I say out loud if I did.
The clock on the far wall reads thirty seconds, and our sector still has nothing on the board, and that simply will not do.
I decide to take the lead.
It is the kind of decision I make often and apologize for rarely, and I make it knowing Jude will read my body before I have finished committing to it and back the play without needing a word, because that is what eighteen years of knowing a man buys you.
A bad pass coughs the puck loose near the boards, one of the opposing-sector defensemen completely whiffing his read, and I am on it before it has finished feeling sorry for itself.
And here, briefly, is my professional complaint.
The men we are scrimmaging against, the other half of this fractured team, are playing defense like it personally insulted them this morning.
Sloppy gaps. Lazy sticks. Bodies a full beat behind where bodies need to be.
We are going to have to fix that, all of it, before this club plays anyone who matters, and I file the thought even as I am gliding straight through the evidence of it, slipping the first checker like he is a traffic cone someone left out.
I send it to Jude.
He is already moving; the captain’s curse and gift.
He takes my pass in stride and eats up ice the way he eats up everything, unhurried and total, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch Rémi sliding into the high lane behind us. The picture assembles itself in my head all at once, gorgeous and obvious.
The three of us.
The puck.
One last goal in the final breath of the rounds, stitched together by the men who are supposed to be the spine of this team, right in front of a coach who needs reminding why he keeps us.
Jude drops it to Rémi, who does what Rémi does best: make a complicated thing look like a decision the puck made on its own, absorbing a lazy stick-check without so much as a hitch and feathering the puck back to Jude at the precise instant the lane cracks open.
Jude does not even look at me. He does not have to.
He sends it across, hard and flat and perfect, onto my tape in the one pocket of ice where I can do something unforgivable with it.
I see the opening. Glove side, high, a window the size of a mail slot.
And I hit it with far too much force for a practice round.
I know it the instant it leaves my blade.
The puck does not travel so much as depart, a black blur with somewhere urgent to be. It is absolutely going in, and I have already started the small private celebration in my chest, the one with the fireworks and the brass section, because there is no human alive who reaches that.
Then the human alive materializes directly in its path.
She does not glide into the spot. There is no time to glide. One blink, she is set deep in her crease, and the next, she has simply arrived, flung her whole compact body across the lane on pure instinct and faith, and the puck buries itself in her.
Low. Center mass. In a region of the human anatomy that makes every man on the ice produce the exact same noise at the same time; a collective, involuntary, full-throated wince that you could have scored for orchestra.
For a suspended, surreal half-second, the puck seems to hang there against her, weightless, glued to the spot by sheer disbelief, before gravity remembers its job and it drops and clatters dead to the ice.