Chapter 4
Chase POV
Steam hung three feet thick under the galvanized ceiling of the varsity shower room, carrying the stench of damp wool, wet friction tape, and pine disinfectant.
I sat on the wooden bench in my stall, the raw skin of my left shoulder throbbing under a fresh bag of crushed ice.
Every breath scraped against the bruised intercostal muscles beneath my ribs, a sharp ache from an open-ice collision with a freshman defenseman who thought he had something to prove during scrimmage.
He was currently sitting in the corner with a swollen jaw; I was sitting here with my knuckles split across the knuckles of my right hand.
Three stalls down, Silas Vance kicked his skate guards into his locker with a dull metallic crash. He was stripping off his practice sweater, a towel draped over his neck, humming along to the distorted bass vibrating through the locker room speakers.
"Hey, Cap," Silas said, wiping a line of gray ice sludge from his chin.
I didn't look up from unwrapping the tape on my wrists. "What."
"Who was the brunette down by the auxiliary tunnel this morning?
" Silas leaned his shoulder against the painted metal partition, his grin wide and loose.
"Dark gray jacket, ponytail, legs that go all the way up to her neck.
Had that little attitude in her step like she was ready to hit somebody.
Miller bringing in student trainers from the clinic now? "
My hands stopped moving.
The air in my windpipe locked up hard. A sudden, violent surge of heat hit the back of my neck, so hot and sudden the skin behind my ears burned. My molars clicked together with enough pressure to send a spike of pain through my jaw.
Wagner.
The image of her standing on the rubber runner—her honey-brown eyes spitting sparks, her small frame braced against mine like she was ready to trade punches—flashed across the back of my eyelids.
And behind that came the phantom memory of her hand pinned over my sternum in the basement, her knuckles pressing into my chest while my heart betrayed me.
"She’s an academic fellow," I said. The words came out of my throat like gravel dragged through a chute, low and scraping.
Silas chuckled, reaching into his locker for a dry shirt. "Well, that academic fellow has got it going on. I might need to tell Miller my groin is acting up again. Get her to check my range of motion."
My left hand closed into a fist. The plastic ice bag on my shoulder crunched under the sudden twitch of my trapezius.
I stood up. The bench beneath me groaned under the shift of two hundred and twenty pounds.
Silas stopped reaching for his shirt. The easy grin on his mouth died, replaced by a sudden, sharp stillness as he took in the look on my face.
"You take one step down that basement stairwell," I whispered, stepping into his personal space until my chest blotted out his locker, "and I will have you skating blue-line suicides until you puke blood through your face mask. Keep your eyes on the sheet and keep your mouth off her."
The locker room around us went dead quiet. Two sophomores unlacing their boots across the aisle froze, staring at the floor.
Silas held both hands up, palms out, his dark eyes narrowing with an edge of surprise that quickly turned calculating. "Easy, Guzman. Just talking."
"Don't talk," I rasped, the pulse in my neck knocking so hard I could hear it in my ears.
I grabbed my dry gray hoodie off the hook, shoved my arms through the sleeves, and walked out into the corridor before I did something that would give Miller an excuse to take my letter away.
* * *
The keypad on the Vault door beeped four times.
I shoved the heavy steel barrier open with my forearm. The space was eight by twelve, lit by the same buzzing fluorescent strip, but the minute the door clicked shut behind me, the air turned dense.
She was already there.
Nola Wagner sat on a low rolling stool in front of the laminate work counter, her back to me.
She was wearing dark plum scrubs today, the cotton fabric pulling taut across the neat, straight line of her shoulder blades as she typed into her department tablet.
Her auburn hair was pinned up again, a few loose, wispy strands resting against the pale curve of her nape.
My nostrils flared on an involuntary inhalation.
The basement smelled of her. Not the industrial floor wash or the menthol wax, but that same clean, rain-soaked skin and bitter black coffee that had been stuck in my throat all afternoon.
Her shoulders hitched half an inch when the deadbolt engaged. She didn't turn around immediately. I watched her left hand drop to her lap, her thumbnail aggressively spinning the thin silver ring on her thumb.
One. Two. Three rotations.
A nervous tell. She was armoring up before she looked at me.
"You missed post-skate cool-down with the training staff," she said, her voice crisp, flat, and clinical as she turned the rolling stool toward me.
"I was in the ice tub," I said, dropping my gear bag into the corner. The canvas hit the concrete with a heavy thud.
"The protocol requires active cool-down telemetry within twenty minutes of leaving the ice." She tapped the screen with the tip of a stylus, her chin tilted at that same sharp angle. "You're thirty-five minutes late. That's a strike on the compliance log."
I walked forward. Two strides cleared the distance between the door and her desk.
I didn't take the examination table. I stepped directly into her pocket of space, planting my left hand flat on the laminate surface six inches from her tablet, and dropped my other forearm along the curved plastic back of her stool.
I leaned down, caging her between my body and the counter until my shadow swallowed her whole.
"Go ahead and log it, Wagner," I murmured, dropping my voice until the vibration rumbled between us. "Tell Miller I was late because I had to ice the shoulder your sensors keep crying about."
She didn't lean back. She refused to let her spine touch the plastic rest of the chair, keeping herself rigid, suspended in the air inches from my chest.
Up close, the faint spatter of gold in her hazel eyes caught the harsh tube lighting overhead. Her lips parted, a quick intake of breath lifting the neckline of her scrubs. The scent of her—warm skin, clean soap, pure defiance—hit the back of my throat like neat whiskey, hot and burning.
"Your shoulder isn't crying, Guzman," she said, her voice dropping into a tight, focused register that did things to my groin I had no business feeling.
"It's compensating. Your left deltoid is taking thirty percent more load during lateral movements because the joint capsule is unstable.
You keep hitting people with that side, and that capsule is going to tear clean off the bone before the regional final. "
"I don't need a medical lecture from an undergrad."
"You need someone who knows what they're looking at," she countered, her gaze locking onto mine without a tremor. "Because right now, you're playing like a man who wants to get hurt."
* * *
The words hit a tripwire behind my ribs.
My knee shifted forward, the heavy fabric of my gray sweatpants brushing against the denim covering her thigh beneath the desk.
Neither of us moved.
The contact was small—just the pressure of bone and fabric pressed together in the cramped gap under the counter—but the heat from her leg sank straight through my pants. Her breath hitched in her throat, a sharp, audible click of air that she tried and failed to suppress.
I watched the hollow at the base of her neck. The skin there was pale, translucent, and right in the center, her carotid artery was jumping at a wild, erratic tempo.
She wasn't indifferent. She wasn't clinical.
Her body was screaming under the same pressure that was making the veins stand out on my forearms.
"You think you know why I play?" I rasped.
My hand moved from the desk, my fingers curling around the outer edge of the tablet in her grip. My knuckles grazed the soft, hot skin on the back of her hand.
She flinched, just a fraction of an inch, but she didn't pull away. Her fingers tightened on the plastic casing, holding her ground.
"I know what the data says," she whispered. Her voice was losing its sharp edge, turning slightly hoarse, her chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven strokes against the space between us.
"To hell with the data."
I leaned down another two inches. My mouth was level with hers now, close enough that I could feel the faint, warm mist of her exhalations brushing against my bottom lip. Her pupils were wide, eating up the gold in her irises, reflecting the black line of my scar.
"You're shaking, Wagner."
"I'm not shaking," she breathed, her lips barely moving, her gaze dropping to my mouth for half a second before snapping back to my eyes.
"Your pulse is running near a hundred." I pressed my knuckle slightly harder against the back of her hand, feeling the electric heat radiating through her skin. "And you haven't taken a full breath since I walked through that door."
She swallowed. The movement was hard, visible along the pale column of her throat. But instead of shrinking into the chair, she tilted her chin up another fraction of an inch, her mouth so close to mine I could taste the dark roast on her tongue.
"Then finish the assessment, Captain," she whispered, the defiance in her eyes flashing like steel in the dark. "Or are you afraid of what happens when you get too close?"
The air in the room vanished.
My jaw locked so tight my molars screamed. Every protective instinct, every rule I had drilled into my skull about keeping my hands off the people in this building, fractured down the middle.
I looked at the stubborn curve of her mouth, the slight flush spreading across her cheekbones, and realized the truth.
I didn't want to run her out of this barn anymore.
I wanted to back her onto that cold examination table, strip that professional mask off her face piece by piece, and find out exactly what it took to make her beg.