Chapter 21
Penny Correa POV
The winter break had emptied Garrison University of its undergrads, leaving Plattsburgh locked under three feet of hard-packed Adirondack crust.
The dormitories stood dark and silent, but inside The Forge, the schedule ran without mercy. Two-a-day practices, ninety minutes of video analysis, and forty minutes of dryland conditioning before the sun had even cleared the frozen ridge across Lake Champlain.
Seventy days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
I stood in the shadowed runway behind the home bench, wearing my black Garrison Athletics parka with the hood pushed back. In my hands, I clutched my tablet, logging rotational torque and skating stride mechanics for Dr. Marcus Vance’s department audit.
The air temperature above the ice was fourteen degrees, carrying the biting sting of freshly scraped frost, zinc tape, and hot motor grease from the ice-resurfacer idling in the bay.
Out on the ice, Coach Bradley Hauer’s whistle shrieked through the empty rafters.
"Cycle it back! Shaw, move your feet or sit on the pine!"
Justin took the feed at the center-ice red line.
Number four moved with that smooth, devastating economy that made two hundred and twenty-eight pounds look weightless.
When Garrett Shaw pushed up from the half-wall trying to poke-check the disc, Justin didn't bite.
He lowered his center of gravity, absorbed Garrett's forward momentum with his left shoulder, and cleanly pinned him into the dasher boards with a heavy, hollow thud that shook the plexiglass six inches from my face.
Garrett bounced off the wood, swearing under his breath, but Justin didn't look at him. He gathered the loose puck on his backhand, fired a crisp, sixty-foot tape-to-tape pass to Declan Ward cutting through the slot, and glided backward toward the blue line.
Eighty-eight hours of our mandatory rehabilitation were officially logged in the binder. The right acromioclavicular joint held without a microscopic tremor; his bilateral strength symmetry had hit eighty-eight percent on Friday’s dynamometer test.
He looked untouchable. Cold, brutal, and thoroughly detached from the human beings around him.
Then he circled past the home bench.
Through the clear acrylic visor of his black helmet, his dark eyes lifted. Over the heads of three assistant coaches and thirty players, his gaze locked directly onto mine.
He didn't smile. He didn't alter the stone line of his mouth.
He raised his composite stick and tapped the heel of the blade twice against the toe of his right skate—a quiet, private rhythm that nobody else in the arena noticed.
A sudden, scalding flush rushed up my neck, warming the cold air against my throat. My fingers tightened around the edge of my tablet, my heart thumping a heavy, irregular cadence against my ribs.
The secret lived in the space between our breaths, an unspoken current running beneath the ice.
* * *
At 2:15 PM, Subterranean Lab 04 was a warm, humid cell beneath the freezing arena.
The heavy steel door stood open four inches according to the clinical protocol Vance had reiterated before the break. Across the hall, the brine chiller hummed its constant, low-frequency vibration through the concrete foundations, vibrating up through the soles of my sneakers.
Justin sat on the black vinyl examination plinth, stripped to his gray athletic shorts and a sleeveless black Ironclads compression top that left his broad, heavily corded shoulders bare.
I stood between his parted knees, holding the plastic arms of the goniometer against his right humerus.
"External rotation," I said, keeping my voice clipped, professional, and loud enough to carry into the empty corridor. "Take it to ninety degrees and hold."
Justin moved the joint slowly, the healed ligaments gliding smoothly beneath the skin, the muscle of his pectoral flexing as he hit the marker.
"Ninety-two," I noted, jotting the number on the clinical chart with my black pen.
"How's the angle look, Correa?" he rumbled, his deep voice thick with gravel, dropping into that private register that made the hair on my arms stand up.
"The angle is compliant," I murmured, stepping half an inch closer to palpate the insertion point of his trapezius.
My fingers pressed into the scalding skin of his shoulder, finding the spot where his neck met the broad sweep of his collarbone.
Beneath my touch, the hard, athletic muscle softened instantly.
His head tilted back against the white cinderblocks, his eyelids fluttering shut as he let out a long, slow exhale that washed warm against the fabric of my scrub top.
"Good girl," he rumbled under his breath, the praise barely a whisper, meant only for me. "Your hands are warm today."
"I washed them in hot water before you came down," I whispered back, my thumb tracing the faint ridge of scar tissue along his clavicle.
The heavy door groaned on its hinges, swinging inward.
"Hey, Correa, Vance said you had the roll of three-inch cohesive—"
The change in Justin was instantaneous, violent, and seamless.
In a fraction of a second, his body snapped rigid as iron. Before Declan Ward could clear the threshold, Justin pivoted his massive torso on the plinth, swinging his long legs around to plant his feet on the floor between me and the doorway.
He effectively walled me off with the full, intimidating width of his back, shielding my frame from Declan's view.
His dark eyes fixed on Declan with a flat, lethal stillness that froze the junior winger mid-stride.
"Knock before you walk into a clinical session, Ward," Justin said, his voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying frequency he used when he was three seconds away from dropping his gloves.
Declan pulled up short, holding a dented can of sports drink in one hand, his blue eyes wide.
He looked at Justin's defensive posture, then his gaze flicked over Justin's shoulder, catching the flush burning across my cheeks and the faint, reddish mark on Justin's neck where his shirt collar didn't quite hide my work from Saturday night.
A sharp, calculating awareness flickered across Declan's face.
The easygoing smirk on Declan's mouth slowly flattened out. He set the sports drink on the small shelf by the door, raising both hands in a slow, placating gesture of surrender.
"Cohesive tape," Declan said, his tone careful, stripped of its usual locker-room bravado. "Bottom drawer by the sink. I'll grab it myself."
He reached down, pulled the beige roll from the cabinet, and backed out into the corridor without taking his eyes off Justin’s face.
"Got it, Cap," Declan murmured, lingering in the doorway for three brutal heartbeats. "Just... make sure you two keep the door open. Vance is doing rounds with the ski coaches on the third floor."
Declan pulled the heavy door shut, the latch catching with a hollow click that left the room in ringing silence.
My lungs finally released the breath I had been holding behind my teeth. My fingers dug into the edge of the examination plinth, my pulse pounding so violently against my collarbones that my throat ached.
"He knows," I breathed, staring at the painted metal door.
Justin turned slowly on the table, reaching out with his left hand to catch my wrist, his thumb smoothing over the frantic thrum of my pulse.
"Ward won't say a word," Justin rasped, pulling me gently against his side until my hip rested against his thigh. "He's loyal to the room. But we stay smart, Penny. We give nobody a reason to ask questions."
* * *
By 8:30 PM, the silence on Cumberland Avenue was so deep you could hear the frost snapping in the spruce trees.
Inside Justin’s brick carriage house, the only light came from the dancing amber flames in the fieldstone hearth and a small iron reading lamp in the corner. The room was warm, filled with the aroma of roasted garlic, seared chicken, and the dry cedarwood crackling on the grate.
I sat curled sideways on the charcoal leather couch, wearing a pair of his soft, washed-out flannel sweatpants with the waistband rolled three times, my bare feet tucked beneath my thighs.
On the cedar coffee table sat my open laptop, displaying lines of kinematic velocity equations for my Vanderveer Fellowship thesis.
Justin emerged from the galley kitchen carrying two wide ceramic bowls of pasta and roasted chicken.
He didn't ask if I was hungry. He set one bowl in my lap, handed me a fork, and sat down directly beside me, crowding my space with the effortless, comfortable familiarity that had settled between us over the last ten days.
He wore only dark gray fleece pants, his bare torso glistening with faint heat from the stove, the broad muscles of his back relaxing against the leather cushions as he leaned back.
He reached over, picked up my bare left foot from beneath the blanket, and pulled my leg across his lap, his large, calloused hand settling firmly over my ankle.
His skin was fever-hot, his thumb tracing slow, rhythmic circles against the delicate bone beneath my fleece cuff.
"Stop looking at the velocity equations, Penny," he commanded quietly, taking a bite from his bowl. "Eat your dinner."
"I have to submit the second draft to Vance by Thursday," I said, but my voice lacked any real resistance.
I took a forkful of the pasta, the rich, savory garlic melting on my tongue, soothing the hollow ache in my stomach. For three years, dinner had been cold granola bars eaten between clinical shifts or dry toast over open textbooks in the library basement.
Having someone cook for me—having a two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound enforcer sit in the dark and rub the chill out of my foot while I worked—felt like an intoxicating, dangerous dream.
"The draft is solid," Justin rumbled, his dark eyes sweeping over the glowing screen before settling on my face. "Your numbers on my AC joint proved that unilateral stabilization prevents secondary impingement. Vance knows you're the only candidate who actually understands high-load kinematics."
I swallowed the food, setting the ceramic bowl down on the table, and looked at his hand resting heavily on my ankle.
His thumb hadn't stopped moving, a steady, possessive caress that anchored me to the couch. Beside my laptop lay his leather-bound team playbook, open to defensive zone coverage against Harvard's power play.
Our lives were tangled together across the cedar wood—biomechanics and hockey systems, forty-five-thousand-dollar fellowship stipends and nine-hundred-thousand-dollar NHL contracts, bleeding into each other behind drawn velvet curtains.
"What happens when the season ends, Justin?" I asked softly, the question slipping into the quiet room before I could bite it back.
Justin’s thumb stilled against my bone.
He set his empty bowl on the floor, turned his massive torso toward me, and reached out with both hands. He caught my waist, lifting me effortlessly across the leather cushions until I was sitting straddled across his thighs, my bare knees bracketing his hips.
My hands came up on instinct, flattening against his bare, scarred shoulders, feeling the slow, heavy thud of his heart beating against his ribs.
He leaned in until his forehead rested against mine, his breath washing over my lips, smelling of mint and cedarwood.
His hands settled on the small of my back, beneath the fleece of my top, his rough palms hot against my skin, holding me flush against his chest.
"We finish this season," he whispered, his voice a low, gravel-scraped promise that vibrated straight through my sternum. "I sign in Boston. You take that fellowship check, and you set up your clinic where I can see you every damn night."
"Justin—"
"I'm not letting you go, Penny," he rasped, his thumb rising to tilt my chin upward, his dark, dilated eyes searching mine in the firelight. "I told you that on the lake road. Outside those doors, they can have the enforcer. But in here? In here, you're the only thing that matters."
My throat tightened on a knot of tenderness so sharp it stole the air from my lungs. My shoulders slumped, the lingering tension of the sixteen-hour day draining out of me in a single, trembling exhale against his neck.
I buried my face into the crook of his collarbone, wrapping my arms around his neck, holding onto the immovable mass of his frame.
The trap had closed around us, sweet and terrifying and absolute.
And as the fire popped in the hearth, I closed my eyes and leaned into the weight of his hands, knowing that I would rather drown in him than ever be free again.