Chapter 13
Penny Correa POV
My boots barely touched the concrete floor when his mouth finally tore away from mine.
If Justin’s left forearm hadn't been locked around my waist like an iron band, my knees would have buckled beneath me.
The glazed cinderblocks behind my shoulders offered no warmth, only a hard, unyielding plane that kept me upright. The two moist heat packs lay cooling on the floor by my heels, smelling of lavender and damp mineral linen, forgotten the second his mouth had claimed mine.
Ninety days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
Forty-eight clinical hours were logged in the binder on the desk.
None of those numbers mattered. The entire architecture of my life—the Vanderveer Fellowship, the clinical boundaries, the sixteen-hour study days designed to outrun my father’s predatory collection notices—had just detonated inside my chest.
My hands were shaking. I pressed my palms flat against the black cotton covering his bruised ribs, trying to lever myself backward, trying to find five inches of breathing room.
"Justin," I rasped, my vocal cords frayed, my throat dry as chalk. "Let go. Let me—"
"Look at you," he murmured, his voice a low, ruined vibration that scraped across the exposed nerve of my jaw.
He didn't release his grip. His thumb stayed pressed beneath the angle of my chin, his fingers splayed across the side of my neck, mapping the violent, erratic thud of my pulse point jumping against his palm.
"We broke the rule," I whispered, the words coming out in small, frantic puffs of vapor that mingled with his. "Dean Sterling. The compliance board. If someone walked down that corridor—"
"The bolt is thrown, Penny," he rumbled, his dark eyes fixed on my mouth, watching my lower lip tremble. "The only person in this room who knows what happened is you. And me."
I tried to pull my chin away, tried to snap the rigid mask of clinical authority back into place, but the muscles in my neck refused to obey.
A scalding flush crept from the hollow of my throat, staining the skin beneath my collar, hot and humiliating.
My fingers curled into tight fists against his chest, knotting the fabric of his sleeveless compression shirt.
I was unmoored. I had spent twenty-one years maintaining absolute control over my perimeter, keeping every man at a clinical arm’s length because proximity meant leverage, and leverage meant destruction.
And in less than two minutes against a basement wall, Justin Ibarra had stripped that control down to the bone.
* * *
Before I could find my balance, Justin’s hands shifted.
His large, calloused palms hooked under my thighs, lifting my hundred and twenty-two pounds off the concrete as easily as if I were a bag of laundry. He turned, carrying me two strides across the room, and set me down on the edge of the high stainless-steel examination table.
The cold metal bit through the thin fabric of my medical trousers, sending an involuntary jolt straight up my spine.
I moved to slide off, but Justin stepped into the notch between my parted knees, his massive, two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound frame sealing me into the table. He leaned in, his broad hands planting flat on the cold steel on either side of my hips, caging me between his arms.
"Stay," he commanded softly, the gravel in his voice brooking no argument.
My breath caught in a sharp, shallow hitch.
With slow, deliberate movements, his fingers reached up to the wool beanie clinging to my hair. He pulled it from my head, tossing it onto the rolling utility cart behind him. My dark curls tumbled down over my shoulders, loose and wild.
Then his knuckles brushed the zipper of my heavy black parka. He drew the metal slider down, parting the down-filled jacket, pushing the heavy material off my shoulders until it pooled behind my lower back on the examination table.
I sat there in my charcoal-gray scrub top, exposed to the yellow hum of the fluorescent lights, my chest rising and falling beneath the thin cotton in frantic, shallow bursts.
On pure defensive instinct, my arms crossed over my ribs, my fingers knotting into the sleeves of my scrub top. My chin tilted up, exposed and defiant, but my gaze darted away from his, fixing on the crack in the cinderblock wall near the hydrocollator.
Justin went dead still.
The predatory arrogance that usually governed his posture vanished. His dark, hooded eyes narrowed, sweeping over the rigid tension in my shoulders, the tight lock of my crossed arms, and the rapid, visible thrumming of the artery in my neck.
He didn't push forward. He didn't demand another kiss.
Slowly, his left hand rose, his knuckles brushing against my forearm where my fingers were desperately clutching my own clothes.
"Penny," he said, his voice dropping into an unfamiliar register—low, quiet, and searching.
I kept my eyes fixed on the wall. "We need to run the isokinetic protocol, Justin. The dynamometer needs to be calibrated before nine."
He didn't look at the machine. His thumb slid beneath my wrist, gently, inexorably uncurling my white-knuckled fingers from my sleeve.
"You're shaking," he murmured.
"The basement is twelve degrees," I lied, the words trembling around the edges.
"It's seventy in here from the boiler lines," he countered softly.
He leaned closer, his chest blocking out the glare of the strip lights, his shadow falling warm and heavy across my lap. His fingers slid from my wrist to the side of my jaw, his thumb hooking beneath my chin, gently but firmly turning my face until my eyes were forced to meet his.
His pupils were dilated, the dark brown irises ringed with thin bands of gold under the light.
He studied my face with a terrifying, forensic intensity—the flushed heat along my cheekbones, the swollen softness of my mouth, the way my eyelids fluttered when his thumb traced the delicate skin beneath my lower lip.
A sudden, sharp comprehension flickered across the brutal lines of his face.
The masseter muscle in his jaw clenched hard, then relaxed. His breath left him in a slow, ragged exhale that brushed warm over my eyelashes.
"Nobody's ever touched you like that, have they?" he whispered.
The question hit my chest like a cold blade.
My throat clamped shut, my mouth opening, but no sound came out. The humiliation burned hotter, scalding the back of my neck. I tried to twist my face away from his grip, tried to salvage whatever pathetic shred of pride I had left.
"That is none of your business, Ibarra," I forced out, my voice cracking on his surname.
Justin didn't let go of my jaw. His grip tightened by a fraction of a millimeter—not hurting me, but anchoring my head so I couldn't look away from the dark, unhinged intensity in his gaze.
"Answer me, Penny," he commanded, the bass in his voice scraping low and rough against my ribs. "Has anyone ever had you up on a table? Has anyone ever had their hands on you?"
"I've been busy," I spat, my hazel eyes flashing with defiant tears I refused to let fall. "I've been working seventy hours a week to keep a roof over my head and pay off a father who walked out six years ago. I didn't have time for varsity frat boys looking for a quick score between road games."
The words hung in the humid air, raw and stripped of all armor.
* * *
The enforcer died right in front of me.
The cold, arrogant stone of Justin’s expression dissolved, replaced by something dark, terrifying, and profoundly reverent.
His jaw worked as if he were trying to swallow hot coals. A violent shudder rippled through the corded muscle of his broad shoulders, his chest expanding as he took in a deep, unsteady inhalation of the almond soap on my skin.
"No one," he breathed, the word torn from the deepest hollow of his lungs, heavy with an awe that bordered on feral.
"Don't look at me like that," I whispered, my fingers fluttering against the cold steel of the table beside my thighs. "Don't look at me like I'm something fragile."
"You're not fragile, sweetheart," he rasped, his voice dropping into a thick, guttural gravel that vibrated straight through the bones of my hips. "You're the strongest damn thing in this building. But you're mine now."
He didn't take. He didn't push.
Instead, Justin reached out with both hands and gently took my trembling wrists. He pulled them forward, drawing my arms away from my body, and laid my palms flat against the warm, bare skin of his neck, right above his collarbones.
Under my fingers, his pulse was pounding—heavy, rhythmic, and thunderous as a freight train.
"Feel that?" he murmured, leaning down until his forehead came to rest against mine, his hot, shallow breath washing over my parted lips. "You did that to me, Penny. You're the only one who's ever gotten inside my head like this."
My fingers curled into the short, dark hair at the nape of his neck, clinging to him because the room was spinning. The sheer physical gravity of him was an anchor holding me against the surface of the earth.
His large, scarred hands settled firmly on the curves of my hips, pulling me half an inch forward on the metal table until my thighs rested flush against the hard, muscular planes of his waist.
"Good girl," he rumbled against my skin, the praise dark and low, vibrating against the side of my neck like a physical caress. "Hold onto me."
A soft, helpless sound caught in my throat. The heat pooled low in my belly, heavy and sweet, stripping away the last remaining resistance I possessed.
"Justin," I breathed, my forehead pressing deeper into his. "I don't know how to do this."
"You don't have to do a damn thing," he whispered, his lips brushing the sensitive, heated skin just beneath my earlobe. "You just stay right here. You let me take care of you."
His mouth moved slowly down the curve of my jaw, pressing a slow, aching, worshipful kiss to the hollow beneath my cheekbone, then to the racing pulse point at the side of my neck.
Every touch was measured, reverent, and devoid of the brutal impatience he showed on the ice. He handled me like something precious, something he would tear the world down to protect.
My breath hitched in a sharp, shuddering gasp as his mouth grazed the sensitive junction where my neck met my shoulder. My hands tightened in his dark hair, holding him against me, my back arching off the cold steel of the table.
"Good girl," he rasped again, his voice thick with a dark, possessive hunger that made my toes curl inside my boots. "Give it all to me, Penny. Every single piece."
I closed my eyes, letting the darkness of the subterranean lab swallow us whole.
The rules were dead. The fear was buried under the weight of his hands.
I had spent my entire life running from the risk of being known, terrified that vulnerability would leave me broken on the floor.
And now, sitting on a stainless-steel table in a locked basement with Justin Ibarra’s mouth against my skin, I realized with terrifying clarity that I didn't want to be safe anymore.
I just wanted him.