Chapter 3
Ben
The bass was a physical assault.
It vibrated through the floorboards of the attic, traveling up the walls like a subterranean tremor, rattling the framed jersey of Bobby Orr I had hanging above my desk.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It was the heartbeat of stupidity.
I sat at my desk, the glow of my laptop screen the only light in the room.
On the screen, the intermission report for the Bruins’ last game against Cornell was paused.
I had been trying to analyze the breakdown in our penalty kill for the last hour.
I had watched the same thirty-second clip of a defensive lapse seventeen times.
I hadn’t seen a single frame of it.
My eyes were on the screen, but my mind was downstairs.
Specifically, my mind was fixated on the blonde headache who had invaded my house twenty-four hours ago and turned my disciplined, monastic existence into a circus.
Ivy.
Just the name irritated me. It sounded like a weed. Something that crept in, wrapped itself around your foundation, and strangled you slowly while looking pretty doing it.
I leaned back in my chair, the leather creaking under my weight. I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling the tension headache that had taken up permanent residence behind my eyes since she’d climbed through my kitchen window.
"Ignore it," I told the empty room. "They’ll pass out eventually."
But they wouldn't. I knew my team. And I knew Jax.
The blizzard had buried Burlington under four feet of snow.
The campus was closed. The roads were impassable.
The power grid was flickering like a dying strobe light.
For normal people, this was a state of emergency.
For the Blackstone University men's hockey team, it was an excuse to drag a keg out of the basement, crank the speakers to a structural-failure level, and invite every stranded student within a three-block radius to "The Ice Box" for a hurricane party.
Or a blizzard party. Whatever.
I should have gone down there hours ago and shut it down. I was the Captain. It was my job to ensure we didn't destroy the house or get the cops called (though the cops weren't getting through this snow anytime soon).
But I stayed in my room. Because if I went downstairs, I would see her.
And seeing her was becoming a problem.
I closed my laptop with a snap. I couldn't focus. The discipline I prided myself on—the iron-clad mental fortitude that made me the best defenseman in the conference—was cracking. And the crack was shaped exactly like a five-foot-three ballerina with a mouth that needed to be taped shut.
Or used for something else.
The thought was intrusive, dark, and immediate. It hit me low in the gut, a heavy, curling heat that had nothing to do with the radiator rattling in the corner.
"Fuck," I swore, standing up.
I grabbed a black t-shirt from the floor—one of the few I owned that didn't have a team logo on it—and pulled it over my head. It pulled tight across my chest and biceps. I caught my reflection in the dark window.
I looked like I wanted to murder someone.
Good. Maybe that would clear the living room.
I unlocked my door and stepped out onto the landing. The noise hit me instantly. The smell followed—a thick, humid cocktail of cheap beer, melting snow, damp wool, and too much body spray.
I descended the stairs, moving like a shadow. I wasn't going down there to join the festivities. I was going down there to assert dominance. To remind them that while they were drinking Pbr and grinding on the furniture, the NHL scouts were watching me.
Or they would be, as soon as the snow cleared.
The living room was a war zone.
The furniture had been pushed to the walls. The rug—a vintage Persian thing that had been in the house since the nineties—was rolled up. In the center of the room, twenty or thirty people were packed together, moving to the rhythm of some trap remix that made my teeth ache.
It was hot. Suffocatingly hot. The radiator heat was blasting to combat the storm outside, and the body heat of three dozen college students was doing the rest. Condensation dripped down the windows in long, weeping trails.
I stood on the bottom step, my hand gripping the banister. My knuckles were white.
I scanned the room, my eyes moving with the calculated precision of a predator scanning a herd.
There was Rook, sitting on top of the fridge in the kitchen (visible through the open archway), wearing his goalie mask and drinking from a red solo cup through a straw. Weirdo.
There was Fitz, standing on the coffee table, leading a chant that seemed to be about the superiority of Canadian bacon.
And then, I saw her.
The air in my lungs seized.
She was standing near the fireplace, the only spot in the room that wasn't a mosh pit. She wasn't hiding. She wasn't cowering in the corner like a displaced princess.
She was holding court.
Ivy was wearing... my clothes.
Rage, hot and irrational, flared in my chest. She was wearing one of my gray Blackstone Hockey hoodies.
But because she was tiny, and apparently an agent of chaos, she had taken a pair of scissors to it.
She had cropped it raw at the bottom, leaving the hem frayed just below her ribs, exposing a strip of pale, creamy skin and a belly button pierced with a small diamond.
The sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, swallowing her delicate arms.
She was wearing black leggings that looked painted on, disappearing into thick wool socks.
She looked comfortable. She looked sexy. She looked like she belonged in my shirt.
And she was laughing.
She was holding a solo cup—though knowing her, it was probably filled with water or something equally boring—and she was looking up at Tyler "Tank" Russo, a sophomore linebacker from the football team who had apparently trekked through the drifts to get here.
Tank was huge. Not as big as me, but big. He was leaning in close, his hand resting on the mantelpiece just above her head, effectively boxing her in. He was smiling that stupid, lopsided smile that girls usually swooned over.
He was flirting with her.
And she was letting him.
She tossed her head back, laughing at something he said. The movement exposed the long, elegant line of her throat. I watched Tank’s eyes track the movement. I watched his gaze drop to the exposed skin of her stomach.
A growl built in my throat, low and involuntary.
It was a territorial instinct so sharp it made my vision blur at the edges. Mine.
The thought was absurd. She wasn't mine. She was a nuisance. She was a squatter. She was the daughter of a man who represented everything I hated about the privileged elite.
But seeing Russo’s eyes on her made me want to break his fingers.
I stepped off the stairs and waded into the crowd.
I didn't push people; they moved. There was an energy coming off me, a wave of "get the fuck out of my way" that parted the sea of drunken sophomores.
I kept my eyes locked on Ivy.
She must have felt it. The weight of my stare. Because her laughter cut off abruptly. She stiffened. Her eyes shifted, scanning the room, until they collided with mine.
The connection was instant. Electric.
Her eyes widened slightly. Her lips parted. She didn't look away.
Russo was still talking, oblivious to the fact that the Grim Reaper was approaching from his six o’clock. He leaned closer to her, whispering something in her ear.
That was it.
I closed the distance in three strides.
"Russo," I barked, my voice cutting through the bass like a whip crack.
The linebacker jumped, spinning around. He spilled a little of his beer on the floor. When he saw me, the color drained from his face.
"Oh. Hey, Ben. Captain. Didn't know you were... participating."
"I'm not," I said, my voice dead flat. I didn't look at him. I looked at Ivy. "You're spilling on the floor. Clean it up."
Russo looked at the three drops of beer on the hardwood. "Uh, right. My bad, man. I'll get a towel."
He scrambled away toward the kitchen, happy for an excuse to escape the blast radius.
That left us alone. Or as alone as we could be in a crowded room.
Ivy didn't retreat. She leaned back against the mantel, crossing her arms over her chest. The movement pulled the cropped hoodie up another inch, exposing the curve of her waist.
"You cleared the room," she said, her voice cool, though I could see the rapid flutter of her pulse in her neck. "Nice party trick. Do you do children's birthdays, too? Or just exorcisms?"
"What are you wearing?" I demanded, ignoring her snark. I stepped into the space Russo had vacated. I was close enough to smell her now. Vanilla. Expensive flowers. And underneath it, the scent of my detergent on the hoodie.
It was maddening.
"It’s called fashion, Benjamin. Look it up." She plucked at the frayed hem of the hoodie. "I found it in the laundry pile. I assumed since it was on the floor, it was trash. I upcycled it."
"You cut up my team gear," I said, grinding my teeth. "That’s property of the athletic department."
"Send me a bill," she countered, tilting her chin up. "My dad will pay for it. Oh, wait. He won't. I guess you'll have to take it out of my security deposit."
"You don't have a security deposit. You're a squatter."
"Then I guess you're out of luck."
She took a sip from her cup, her eyes dancing with amusement. She was enjoying this. She liked pushing me. She was a brat, through and through.
"You shouldn't be down here," I said, lowering my voice so only she could hear. "This isn't your crowd, Princess. These guys... they aren't looking for conversation."
"I know what they're looking for," she said, her gaze flicking over my shoulder to where a group of guys were watching us. "I'm not an idiot. I grew up in this world, remember? High-performance athletes with too much testosterone and not enough brain cells? It’s my natural habitat."