Chapter 25
Tallulah POV
The blue-gray moonlight cut through the hemlock branches outside the panoramic bedroom window, slicing across the dark pine floorboards in cold, clean diagonals.
I lay on my side beneath the heavy down comforter, wearing Coast’s faded gray Garrison long-sleeve.
The soft cotton had been washed a hundred times, frayed at the cuffs, hanging loose over my shoulders and pooling around my hips.
My right ear was pressed flat against the bare skin of his left breastbone, right above the three-inch skate scar that marked his collarbone.
Beneath my cheek, his heart was a deep, rhythmic pump.
Forty-eight beats per minute. Heavy. Immovable. An anchor dropped straight into the center of my life.
My body felt unusually heavy, weighted down by a strange, dragging fatigue that had lingered in my limbs since Tuesday morning.
My sense of smell seemed dialed to an intolerable sharpness—the cedar oil in the floorboards, the laundry detergent in the flannel sheets, the faint, clean mineral tang of his skin all filled my head with a vivid clarity that made my stomach churn with a mild, fleeting flutter.
I swallowed it down, blaming the nausea on three consecutive twelve-hour days split between the motion-analysis lab and my thesis draft.
I didn't close my eyes.
I kept thinking about the way he had come through the front door yesterday afternoon.
The gray pallor beneath his stubble. The violent tremor in his scarred hands.
The way he had dropped to his knees on the woven rug and buried his face in my neck, begging me not to let go as if the world were sliding off its foundation.
I hadn't pressed him. I hadn't demanded the name of the ghost that had followed him home from the arena underpass. I knew what it was like to carry a family debt that made you feel contaminated.
My fingers twitched against the sheets.
Slowly, keeping my movements soft so I wouldn't startle him, I raised my right hand. My fingertips brushed over the raised white tissue of his collarbone scar, tracing the jagged line down to the dense, heavy plate of his pectoral muscle.
Coast’s breathing hitching was the only warning.
His large, calloused left hand came around my waist beneath the comforter, his thick fingers splaying wide over the small of my spine, hauling my hips an inch closer until the front of my body was pressed flush against his heat.
"You're awake," he rasped into the dark, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that rattled through my ribs.
* * *
"I couldn't sleep," I whispered, keeping my palm flat against his sternum.
Coast shifted his weight, propping himself up on his right elbow. The moonlight caught the sharp angle of his jaw, the thick dark hair falling across his forehead, and the pale green of his irises, shadowed with a protective vigilance that never seemed to leave him.
"Ankle throbbing?" he asked, his thumb smoothing over the cotton bunched at my hip.
"The ankle is fine," I said softly. "You're cleared, Coast. You skated sixty minutes of five-on-five yesterday without a single kinetic deficit."
"Then what is it?" he murmured, leaning down until his stubble brushed the sensitive skin of my temple. "Talk to me, Tallulah."
The silence in the room stretched, thick and fragile, broken only by the hiss of the cast-iron radiator in the corner.
My throat tightened, a dry ache pulling behind my tongue. For four years, I had treated my life like a high-speed projectile: keep moving, keep producing, keep scoring top marks, and never let anyone see the cracks in the casing. Contempt had been easy. Professional distance had been a fortress.
Giving him my body on Valentine’s night had been terrifying.
Giving him the rot beneath my armor felt like stepping out onto rotten ice without a stick.
"When I was sixteen," I began, my voice barely carrying above a breath, "my parents’ sports clinic went into involuntary liquidation. A private equity group bought the medical mortgage, doubled the interest rate overnight, and sued my father for non-performance when the billing system crashed."
Coast didn't move. His hand remained steady on my waist, his thumb continuing its slow, rhythmic stroke against my spine.
"I came home from track practice on a Tuesday afternoon," I whispered, my fingers curling slightly into the hair on his chest. "There were two Essex County sheriff's deputies standing on our front porch with clipboards.
They had orange seizure notices taped to the front windows.
They gave my mother forty-five minutes to pack three suitcases while they changed the deadbolts on our doors. "
A dark, sharp intake of air hissed past Coast’s teeth.
"My father stopped speaking," I said, a tear escaping my lash to run hot and silent down my cheek, soaking into the dark flannel pillowcase.
"He sat in a rental kitchen in Saratoga and stared at the linoleum for fourteen months.
My mother took three tailoring jobs. Toby was fourteen, and his track spikes were duct-taped together because we couldn't afford twenty dollars for replacements. "
I took a shallow, ragged breath, my chest aching with an old, familiar constriction.
"I took eighteen credit hours every semester because the scholarship required a three-point-nine GPA," I confessed, the words cracking with a humiliation I had never spoken out loud.
"I worked thirty hours a week at the campus print shop.
I graded papers until three in the morning.
Because I convinced myself that if I wasn't indispensable—if I wasn't the smartest person in the room, if I wasn't the one carrying the money, if I became a burden for even five minutes—people would put an orange notice on my door and throw me out. "
I closed my eyes, my chin dropping toward my chest.
"I'm terrified of being disposable, Coast," I wept, the truth tearing out of my throat in a broken whisper.
"I spent four weeks fighting you because I knew the second you saw how small my life is—how much debt I have, how broke my family is, how desperate I am to keep my fellowship—you would realize I'm just a technician you can replace with an NHL trainer in Boston. "
* * *
Coast didn't let me finish.
His large, calloused hand came up from my hip, his thick fingers sliding under my jawline, tilting my face upward with an unyielding, deliberate pressure that left zero room for retreat.
He didn't speak with empty comfort. He didn't offer soft pity.
His jaw was set in stone, the masseter muscle jumping in sharp, violent spasms, his pale green eyes burning with an unmasked, terrifying fury that seemed to consume the moonlight.
"Look at me, Tallulah," he growled.
The command was a low, rough rumble that bypassed my ears and vibrated straight against my dental fillings.
I opened my eyes, my vision blurred with tears.
"Look at me," he repeated, his thumb pressing firmly into my chin, forcing my gaze to lock with the unblinking intensity of his. "Good girl. Listen to my voice."
He leaned down until his breath was scalding against my parted lips, his chest pressing heavy and immovable against mine.
"You listen to every word I am about to say to you," he rasped, each syllable driven home like an iron bolt through timber. "You are not an employee. You are not a technician. And you will never be disposable to me. Not in this lifetime. Not in the next."
My breath hitched on a ragged gasp.
"You think your worth is in that clipboard?
" he whispered, his voice cracking with a fierce, absolute devotion that made my ribs ache.
"You think I care about your tuition balance?
I watched you stand in a ballroom foyer in front of four hundred people and tear Derek Mercer's throat out to protect my name.
I watched you put your bare hands on my ruined ankle when I was so broken I couldn't stand on my own ice. "
His hand shifted into my hair, thick fingers tangling in the dark curls at the nape of my neck, pulling my face an eighth of an inch closer until our lips brushed with every word.
"You are everything, Tallulah," he rasped against my mouth. "You hear me? Everything. Every stride I take on that ice belongs to you. Every contract Boston offers me belongs to you. You don't have to carry the world by yourself anymore. You don't have to prove a goddamn thing to me."
A choked, broken sob tore from my chest.
Coast’s thumb moved, wiping the wet tracks off my cheekbones with rough, trembling reverence.
"You let me carry the weight now, sweetheart," he murmured, his voice dropping into a thick, possessive cadence that made my knees feel weak beneath the sheets. "You're my girl. You hold onto me, and I'll keep the wolves off the porch. Understand me?"
"Yes," I breathed, my hands flying up to wrap around the thick, muscular breadth of his neck, my fingers burying themselves in the dark hair at his collar. "Yes, Coast."
"Good girl," he whispered against my lips.
He leaned down, his mouth catching mine in a slow, deep, devastating kiss.
It was completely stripped of haste. It wasn't the starved, furious claiming of Valentine's night; it was an act of sacred, unhurried worship.
His lips tasted the salt on my skin, his tongue sweeping slowly against mine, drawing out the residual poison of five years of panic and replacing it with the heavy, golden heat of his presence.
He moved over me with deliberate care, his 228-pound frame settling gently between my parted thighs, bracing his full weight on his forearms so he didn't crush my smaller frame.
The friction of his bare chest against my thin cotton shirt sent a long, continuous wave of liquid warmth rushing through my pelvis.
He kissed the hollow beneath my jaw. He kissed the wild, fluttering pulse in my throat. He kissed the sharp curve of my collarbone, his stubble grazing my skin, his breath hot and steady against my neck.
"I've got you, Tallulah," he murmured between kisses, his hips rocking into mine in a slow, grounding cadence that anchored my body to the mattress. "I've got you."
I clung to the dense slabs of his shoulders, my fingers digging hard into his skin, my hips rising to meet his rhythm as the tears finally dried on my cheeks.
The cold draft whistled against the window glass, the Adirondack freeze locking the hemlocks into ice outside, but inside the timber bedroom, tangled in his dark flannel sheets, every single defense I had ever built was gone.
I was his. He was mine. And for the first time since the deputies stood on my mother's porch, I knew I was home.