Chapter 38
Tallulah POV
The white enamel kettle on the cast-iron stove produced a thin, melodic whistle that died away as I lifted it from the heat.
My mother’s cottage on Maple Street smelled of dry cedar kindle, steamed peppermint leaves, and the lavender beeswax she used on her tailoring thread.
Outside the bay window, the Adirondack foothills were blurred beneath a heavy, freezing mist, wet snow clinging to the dark boughs of the hemlocks like wet wool.
My mother was at her alterations shop down on Broadway until six o'clock.
The house was still.
I wore an oversized cream wool cardigan over a soft gray thermal shirt, thick wool socks warming my feet on the scrubbed pine floorboards. My left hand held a heavy ceramic mug of peppermint tea by the handle, the steam rising in gentle spirals against my chin.
My right hand rested flat, motionless, and heavy over the denim of my trousers, right above my pelvic bone.
Beneath my palm, the dragging fullness hummed with a quiet, steady life.
For nine days, I had lived in a vacuum. No campus compliance officers. No sports reporters speculating on draft slots. No six-foot-four defenseman filling my doorway with the scent of cedar and the threat of ruin.
My autonomic system had begun the slow, agonizing process of resetting itself.
The violent morning nausea had softened into a persistent, low ache that arrived at dawn and faded by noon; the static in my vision had cleared into a sharp, protective clarity.
I was sleeping ten hours a night in my childhood bed, teaching my nervous system that the panic was over.
I was building a fortress inside my ribs. A fortress that had only one resident.
A sudden, concussive rumble shook the frosted glass of the bay window.
The sound of heavy tires crushing frozen gravel ripped through the quiet yard.
My pulse jumped into my throat, a sharp, hard thump that made my fingertips go numb against the ceramic mug.
I set the tea on the windowsill, stepping to the glass.
Through the blur of wet snow and pine needles, a heavy black Ford truck stood idling in the center of the driveway, sixty-four miles south of Lake Placid.
White steam poured in thick, billowing clouds from the front grille; the diesel engine rumbled like an earthquake against the foundation stones.
The driver's door flew open.
* * *
Coast Stuart stepped out into the freezing slush.
The breath locked behind my teeth.
He had no winter coat. He wore only a black thermal crewneck, soaked through with road spray and freezing rain, the damp cotton clinging to the massive, brutal breadth of his chest and shoulders. His dark trousers were splattered with gray highway mud, his heavy leather boots unlaced at the ankles.
His dark hair was plastered to his forehead in jagged, dripping spikes.
He didn't move like the captain who owned the blue line.
He walked up the gravel path with a slow, staggering stride, his broad shoulders hunched forward, his hands hanging loose and open at his sides. As he neared the porch steps, the gray daylight exposed his face.
My fingers clenched into the wool of my cardigan, dragging the thick knit tightly across my stomach.
He looked ruined.
His cheekbones were hollowed out, the skin stretched tight and gray over bone, violet shadows carved deep beneath his bloodshot eyes.
A thick, dark stubble covered his jaw, unwashed for days, masking the jagged scabs where his lip had been split against Harvard.
A fine, continuous tremor ran through the dense slabs of his forearms, his teeth clicking together in rapid, spastic shudders from the sub-zero Adirondack drizzle.
He reached the base of the three wooden porch steps and stopped.
I walked to the front door, turned the brass deadbolt, and pushed the heavy wooden slab open.
I stayed behind the wooden storm screen, my spine locked into an iron rod, my chin tilted at that sharp, unyielding forty-five-degree angle.
The draft hit me—cold, wet, carrying the sharp scent of cedar shavings, bitter diesel fuel, and the raw, salt tang of his skin.
Coast looked up.
His pale green eyes found my face.
There was no arrogance in his gaze. No enforcer sneer. No defensive hostility.
His eyes were completely stripped of armor—wide, bloodshot, swimming with a raw, shattered agony so profound it knocked the air straight out of my chest.
For three seconds, neither of us breathed.
"Tallulah," he rasped.
The word was a cracked, bleeding sound that tore from his throat like rusted metal dragged across stone.
I didn't answer with his name.
I looked down at him through the screen, my features carved from ice, my right hand anchored firmly beneath my cardigan over my lower abdomen.
"You're trespassing, Stuart," I said.
My voice was quiet. It was steady, polite, and stripped of every ounce of warmth, dropping between us like a sheet of plate glass.
Coast flinched as if I had driven a composite blade into his throat.
A sharp, ragged hitch caught in his chest, his jaw trembling violently beneath his stubble.
"This is private property," I continued, each syllable measured, cold as winter shale. "My mother will be home in an hour, and I will not have an athlete causing a scene in her driveway. Get back in your truck and drive back to Lake Placid."
* * *
Coast didn't turn around.
He didn't offer a defense. He didn't cite the compliance audit, or mention his father, or use his 228-pound frame to crowd my space.
Instead, his legs simply gave way.
The massive, unyielding defenseman who had put twenty men through the plexiglass collapsed.
His knees slammed into the wet, freezing wooden porch steps with a sickening, concussive thud that rattled the cedar railings.
He stayed there.
He knelt in the slush on the bottom riser, the freezing rain soaking through his trousers into his skin, his head bowed so low his forehead nearly touched the wet wood.
His large, scarred hands fell flat against the porch boards on either side of his knees, his palms turned upward toward the gray sky in an absolute, total posture of physical surrender.
"Coast," I whispered, the name slipping past my teeth before my pride could stop the reflex.
He didn't raise his head. He trembled violently, his broad shoulders heaving in short, shallow, suffocating gasps that rattled through his ribcage.
"Mercer is in the back of a police cruiser, Tallulah," he rasped, his voice breaking into raw, ruined pieces that bled onto the wet cedar.
"Thorne signed the exoneration at eight o'clock this morning.
Your fellowship is back on your account.
The grant is cleared. Thorne wrote the letters to Boston and Northeastern. "
The words hit my sternum, but I kept my posture locked, my palm pressing harder against my stomach.
"I don't care about the fellowship, Coast," I said softly.
"I know," he choked out, lifting his head.
The rain ran down his face, washing over the scabs on his lip, mingling with the scalding, unchecked tears that burned red paths through the dirt on his cheekbones.
He looked up at me from the dirt, his green eyes ruined, stripped down to bare bone and marrow.
"I burned the boardroom down," he whispered, his voice shaking with a desperate, hollow agony that made my knees feel weak.
"I told Hayes I don't give a damn about the Frozen Four.
I told Wesley to shred my draft papers. I told them I would burn the entire program to the ground if they didn't clear your name. "
He crawled forward six inches on his knees, his wet palms gripping the edge of the second step, his face upturned to mine like a starving man begging for water.
"I was terrified someone would break me, Tallulah," he wept, the confession tearing out of his chest in ragged, shattered gasps.
"My old man spent four years telling me I was a blunt instrument who ruined everything I touched.
And when I saw those papers... I thought you had looked at my scars and decided I was garbage. "
He hit his own breastbone with his calloused fist, a dull, hollow thump that shook his torso.
"I broke the line," he cried out, his voice cracking on the syllables. "I swung the hammer. I said things to you in that underpass that I should be shot for."
He reached out, his wet, freezing fingers coming to rest flat against the wooden kickplate beneath the storm screen, inches from the toes of my wool socks.
He didn't try to pull the screen open. He stayed on his knees in the slush, the freezing sleet piling on his bare shoulders, his body shaking with an unyielding, terrifying resolve.
"Tell me to crawl to Boston, Tallulah," he begged, his voice dropping into a ruined, broken rasp that rattled the floorboards.
"Tell me to walk into the lake until the water covers my head.
Tell me how to bleed for you, and I will do it.
But don't make me leave. I will sit on these steps until the freeze takes my lungs, but I am not walking away from you ever again. "
I stood above him on the dry threshold, staring down at the titan of Garrison hockey kneeling in the dirt at my feet.
The wind howled through the hemlocks, biting at my face, but inside my coat, beneath the heavy cream wool of my cardigan, my fingers pressed tight against the secret growing beneath my heart.
My pulse thudded with a heavy, terrifying rhythm against my ribs.
The enforcer was gone. The captain was ash.
There was only Coast Stuart, broken wide open in the snow, waiting for my judgment.