Chapter 8
Chase POV
The black vulcanized rubber puck left the blade of my stick with the crack of a rifle shot.
Sixty feet down the sheet, it struck the reinforced plywood target bolted inside the top-right corner of the empty net. The concussion echoed through the empty arena, a sharp, violent report that bounced off eight thousand vacant plastic seats and rattled into the rafters.
The puck dropped to the ice with a hollow clatter, joining sixty others scattered across the blue line like spent shell casings.
My breath plumed in the freezing air, thick gray clouds billowing past my mouth and vanishing into the gloom.
Kehoe Pavilion kept the ice surface at twenty-two degrees overnight.
The main bank of arena floodlights had been powered down hours ago, leaving only a single high-bay utility lamp burning directly over the center circle.
It threw harsh, cold light onto the rutted ice, cutting the cavernous building into stark angles of white glare and pitch-black void.
I was skating in black team track pants and a sleeveless gray compression shirt soaked through with sweat.
The sub-zero air bit into the bare muscle of my shoulders, turning the sweat along my neck to frost. My left shoulder was screaming, a dull, grinding heat where the labrum pulled against the joint capsule every time I snapped through a wrist shot, but I welcomed the pain.
Pain was simple. Pain was a physical variable with clear parameters.
It was the only thing capable of dulling the memory of last night in the biomechanics lab.
For twenty-four hours, my mind had refused to purge the sensory imprint of Nola Wagner’s wrist under my thumb.
The frantic, leaping flutter of her blood.
The scent of rain-soaked wool and warm skin rising from her sweater.
The way she had looked up at me in the glow of the monitors and admitted that without the hostility, she didn't know what we were doing.
We're surviving, I had told her.
A lie. A weak, pathetic deflection to keep from hauling her out of that rolling chair and taking her mouth right there on the laboratory floor.
I scooped another puck out of the plastic bucket with the toe of my blade, dragged it back to my hip, and snapped my wrists.
Crack.
The puck dented the iron crossbar, ricocheting fifty feet into the air before slamming into the protective netting.
A heavy thud echoed from the north concourse.
The magnetic crash-bar on the auxiliary entrance clicked open, followed by the slow, pneumatic hiss of the door closer.
I stopped. My skate blades shaved a two-foot furrow into the frost as I wheeled around, my stick resting flat across my thighs. My chest rose and fell in ragged, heavy bursts, the cold burning the lining of my lungs.
Across the dark expanse of the arena, beyond the shadowed visitor bench, a silhouette moved past the glass.
* * *
She walked down the concrete steps of the lower bowl with measured, hesitant strides.
Her heavy winter boots made a quiet, rubbery squeak against the cold concrete. She was wrapped in a charcoal wool coat buttoned to her throat, a thick black scarf looped twice around her neck, her hands jammed deep into her pockets.
I pushed off with one blade, gliding forty feet across the dark ice without making a sound.
The steel edges hummed against the sheet, carrying me straight toward the home bench. I came to a halt two feet from the boards, towering over the dasher. The steam rolling off my bare shoulders met the draft coming off the concourse, wrapping around my chest in a pale, swirling mist.
Nola stopped on the other side of the yellow dasher cap.
The cold outside had painted her skin in high relief. Her cheeks were flushed a deep, wind-burned rose, her nose tipped in pink, while her eyes—wide, hazel, flecked with sharp bits of gold—searched my face in the dim utility light.
A heavy manila envelope was tucked beneath her left arm.
In her right hand, she held a heavy stainless steel mechanical stopwatch—the vintage Heuer my brother Declan had given me the day I made the varsity roster.
I had left it sitting on the corner of the lab desk next to her keyboard at two in the morning.
"The side loading door was unlocked," she said.
Her voice was quiet, stripped of its usual razor-sharp volume, but the acoustics of the empty arena amplified every syllable, bouncing it off the distant luxury boxes.
I didn't reach for the watch. I rested my forearms on the top of the dasher boards, leaning my weight forward until my chest was hovering eighteen inches from hers, trapping her within the perimeter of my shadow.
"Night crew leaves the latch taped open so the ice resurfacer can dump the snow scrape," I said, my voice coming out as a low, gravelly rasp that rasped against the freezing silence.
Nola held out the watch. The heavy steel casing gleamed beneath the single utility lamp.
"Miller’s office sent the stamped receipt this afternoon," she said, her chest rising in a tight, visible hitch beneath her coat. "The compliance committee accepted the baseline dossier without a single correction. The audit is closed. You're cleared for the weekend series in Grand Forks."
She paused, swallowing hard. The pale line of her throat moved with the motion.
"And you left this by my mouse pad."
I looked down at the stopwatch resting in her bare palm, then dragged my gaze slowly up the length of her arm, over the dark wool of her scarf, until I locked onto her mouth. Her lips were parted slightly, her breath pluming in short, uneven puffs of white vapor.
"You didn't walk through a negative-ten-degree wind chill at one in the morning to drop off a watch, Wagner."
She stiffened, her chin tilting up on instinct, but the defiance didn't have its usual venom. "I knew it was important to you. The engraving on the back has your brother's initials."
"You could have put it in my locker tomorrow morning."
"I was still in the lab," she countered, her voice dropping, losing its clinical edge. "I saw the service lights on over the rink. I thought..."
"You thought what?"
I leaned down another inch over the boards. The scent of her—cold Minnesota night, bitter wool, and that intoxicating, clean warmth of her skin—cut through the smell of freezing ice and sweat, tightening every muscle in my abdomen until my breathing hitched.
"I thought you shouldn't be alone in the dark after what happened yesterday," she whispered.
* * *
The air in my throat locked down like an iron gate.
My left hand moved. I reached down, slapped the brass latch on the players' box gate, and shoved the half-door open with a violent metallic click.
Before she could process the movement, my right hand shot out.
My fingers clamped around the lapel of her wool coat, not hurting her, but using my mass to haul her through the opening and onto the rubber matting of the players' box.
Nola gasped, the sound sharp and echoing, her boots stumbling on the elevated flooring. Her manila envelope dropped to the bench, the watch clutched tightly in her fist as she tried to catch her balance against my chest.
I didn't let her back away.
I crowded her back against the seamless Plexiglas partition separating the bench from the stands.
The heavy plastic groaned under the shift of our weight.
I stepped into her space, my boots planted on either side of hers, boxing her against the wall with two hundred and twenty pounds of bare, sweat-sheened muscle.
The heat radiating off my torso was an inferno against the freezing chill of the arena, washing over her face in waves.
Her eyes blew wide, the black pupils swallowing the hazel until only a thin ring of gold remained. Her back was pressed flat against the glass, her fingers coming up to rest flat against the bare, burning skin of my upper chest, right over my breastbone.
Her hands were freezing. The cold shock of her palms made every tendon in my neck pull taut.
"Don't do that," I rasped, dropping my head until my mouth was level with hers.
"Do what?" Her voice was a breath of white mist against my chin.
"Don't look at me like you care what happens to me."
I brought my right hand up. My fingers, calloused and rough from years of leather hockey gloves, cupped the side of her jaw. The skin beneath her cheekbone was soft as silk, burning hot despite the wind chill outside.
My thumb hooked under the point of her chin, applying slow, unyielding pressure, tilting her face up until she had no choice but to look straight into my eyes.
"Look at me, Nola."
It was a command, low and scraped raw, vibrating through the bone of her jaw into her skull.
She didn't look away. Her throat hitched on a ragged swallow, but she held my stare, her lips trembling slightly in the freezing draft.
"You think you can just walk in here?" I whispered, my thumb tracing the sharp, delicate line of her jawline, feeling the wild, runaway percussion of her pulse hammering beneath her ear. "In the middle of the night? Standing in my space, holding things that belong to me?"
"Chase—"
"I've spent forty-eight hours trying to tear you out of my head," I cut in, my voice dropping to a gravelly, dangerous murmur that brushed against the curve of her ear.
"I came out here to freeze my blood until I couldn't feel anything.
And you walk through that door smelling like rain, looking at me with those eyes. "
I leaned in another fraction of an inch. My lips brushed the curve of her jaw, right where her pulse was leaping against her skin.
A violent, shuddering breath tore out of her lungs. Her fingers curled into the hair on my chest, gripping tight, anchoring herself to my heat instead of pushing me away.
"You keep seeking me out in the dark, sweetheart," I rasped against her temple, my teeth grazing the shell of her ear, "and I'm going to stop caring about your fellowship. I'm going to stop caring about my draft. I will take you right here against this glass, and I won't let you go."
Nola’s eyes shuttered closed for half a second, her head tilting back against the Plexiglas, exposing the long, pale line of her throat to my mouth.
She didn't run. She didn't scream.
Her fingers tightened on my chest, holding me against her, balanced on the razor's edge of absolute ruin.