Chapter 25
Penny Correa POV
The pale winter moonlight sliced through the high casement window of the carriage house, casting sharp, silver-blue squares across the dark hardwood floor and the tangled charcoal linen sheets.
Outside, the Adirondack night was fifteen below zero, the frost creeping four inches up the glass, freezing the world into brittle stillness.
Fifty-eight days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
I lay on my side in the dark, my ear pressed flat against Justin’s bare chest.
Beneath my cheek, his heart beat with a slow, heavy rhythm, steady as an iron pendulum swinging in an empty tower.
One of his massive, heavily corded arms was draped over my waist, his broad palm resting flat against my lower back, his heat soaking through the thin cotton of the gray athletic shirt I had stolen from his dresser drawer.
A subtle, persistent flutter of nausea turned in my lower belly, accompanied by a bone-deep exhaustion that had clung to my limbs for three days.
I swallowed against the sour dryness in my throat, forcing the sensation down, blaming it on skipped meals, eighteen-hour clinical shifts, and the stress of finishing my Vanderveer Fellowship drafts before the New Year.
My fingers rested on his ribs, my skin sensitive to the faint, raised texture of old skate-blade cuts and crosscheck scars etched across his torso.
My mind was locked on the way he had come home twenty-four hours ago.
He had walked through that front door looking like a man who had barely survived an ambush.
His jaw had been locked tight enough to crack bone, his hands shaking with an unhinged, violent adrenaline, his eyes black with a feral terror I had never seen in him.
He had pulled me off the sofa and crushed me against his chest, burying his face into my neck, begging me never to leave him as if the ground were giving way beneath his boots.
He hadn't told me what happened. He had buried it deep, throwing his massive body between me and whatever ghost had stepped out of the dark.
He was bleeding in silence to keep my world clean.
A sharp ache tightened beneath my collarbones.
A fortress where only one person took the hits wasn't a partnership; it was a cage. I had spent four weeks letting him shield me from boosters, carrying my books across campus, and rubbing the cold out of my feet.
If I wanted him to put down his weapons, I had to be brave enough to strip away my own.
I shifted slightly against his side, my fingertips tracing a thin, white scar curving along the margin of his seventh rib.
The muscle beneath my hand flinched, then softened.
Justin stirred, his chest expanding on a deep, gravelly inhalation, his jaw shifting against the curls at the crown of my head.
* * *
"Penny," he rumbled in the dark, his voice thick and rough with sleep. "Why are you awake, sweetheart?"
His hand on my lower back moved, his calloused thumb smoothing in slow, soothing circles across my spine, pulling me half an inch closer until my thighs rested flush against his.
I didn't answer right away. I let my forehead rest against the hard plane of his collarbone, breathing in the scent of cedarwood, clean soap, and the dark heat of his skin.
"I was thinking about my father," I whispered, the words dropping into the quiet bedroom like small stones into deep water.
Justin’s thumb stilled.
He didn't interrupt. He didn't tense up. He simply lay there in the silver moonlight, his breathing steady, waiting for whatever I was ready to give him.
"When Hector walked out, I was fourteen," I said, my throat tightening as the old, familiar knot of humiliation rose in my chest. "He didn't leave a note.
He just packed three duffel bags into the bed of his truck while my mother was at her shift at the nursing home.
He took the checkbook, he took the cash from the emergency jar behind the flour bin, and he left thirty thousand dollars in unpaid gambling debts tied to our address. "
My fingers curled into the hair on his chest, holding onto the muscle to steady the tremor in my voice.
"The collection agencies started showing up at our front door three days later," I continued, staring at the moonlight on the floorboards.
"Men in dirty coats pounding on the glass, threatening to take our furniture, calling my mother at two in the morning.
I watched her break down on the kitchen linoleum, weeping because she couldn't afford heating oil. "
"Penny," Justin murmured, his voice laced with a dark, dangerous edge that rumbled against my cheek.
"That was the day I decided I would never be weak," I whispered, the tears burning hot and silent behind my eyelids.
"I made myself into a machine. I studied until four in the morning.
I earned every scholarship, I memorized every biomechanical equation, I took every extra clinical shift Vance offered.
I convinced myself that if I was useful—if I was indispensable, if I was the best researcher in the building—nobody could ever discard me. "
A tear escaped, tracking down the bridge of my nose to soak into the hair over his sternum.
"And then you happened," I pushed out, my voice cracking on a ragged, fragile breath.
"You broke your shoulder, and I was useful to you.
I had a job to do. But now..." I swallowed against the constriction in my throat, the deepest, most humiliating fear of my life finally breaking through my lips.
"Now your shoulder is healed. The draft is coming.
You're going to Boston, and you're going to be an NHL star.
And I'm terrified that when you don't need my hands on your shoulder anymore, you’ll look at me and realize I’m just an anchor dragging you down. "
* * *
The silence in the room was absolute.
Justin didn't offer an easy reassurance. He didn't tell me I was being ridiculous.
He moved with a slow, terrifying deliberation.
He shifted his weight, rising onto his left elbow, towering over me in the pale winter light. His massive, scarred frame blocked out the window, his shadow falling warm and heavy across my face.
His right hand rose.
His broad, calloused palm cupped the side of my jaw with an unyielding, gentle authority that knocked the breath clean out of my lungs. His fingers spread wide across my cheek, his thumb pressing firmly beneath the angle of my chin, lifting my face toward his.
"Look at me, Penny," he commanded.
The voice wasn't gentle. It was the low, gravel-scraped roar of an enforcer drawing an absolute, immovable line in the dirt.
My eyelashes fluttered, tears blurring my vision, but I forced my eyes to open.
His dark irises were dilated black, burning with an unhinged, ferocious intensity that pinned me to the pillow. The masseter muscle in his jaw was locked like iron, his chest heaving in ragged, shallow bursts above mine.
"Look at my damn eyes," he rasped, his thumb smoothing over the wetness on my cheekbone, pressing hard enough to ground the trembling in my bones. "Good girl. Listen to my voice."
I held his gaze, my lips parted, my lungs pulling in the hot draft of his mint-scented breath.
"You think you're useful to me?" he whispered, each word a heavy, deliberate blow against my doubts. "You think I brought you into this bed because you know how to read an isokinetic graph?"
"Justin—"
"Shut your mouth and listen," he rumbled, leaning down until his lips were a fraction of an inch from mine, his dark eyes boring straight into my soul.
"I have spent five years being useful, Penny.
Coaches use my fists. Teammates use my size.
My family leans on my paychecks. Everyone in this world looks at me and sees a hammer. "
His voice broke, dropping into a rough, destroyed cadence that made my chest ache with sharp tenderness.
"You're the only person who ever looked at me and saw a man," he whispered, his forehead pressing against mine, his large hand tightening on my jaw.
"You stood between me and Arthur Shaw when you had everything to lose.
You put your hands on my skin and didn't ask for a single damn thing in return. "
He slid his hand down to the nape of my neck, his fingers tangling into my dark curls, pulling me half an inch closer until our lips brushed with every word he spoke.
"You are not an anchor, Penny. You are the only reason I am not rotting in a penalty box somewhere. You are my home. You hear me? You are everything."
A shattered sob tore from my throat, the last wall of my lifelong defense crumbling into dust.
"Justin," I breathed, my hands reaching up to clutch his bare shoulders, my fingers digging into the hard, bunched muscle.
He didn't let me speak.
He leaned down and kissed the tears from my cheeks, his mouth warm, slow, and devastatingly tender against my damp skin. He kissed the corner of my eye, the line of my jaw, and the racing pulse point at the base of my throat, his rough stubble rasping over my sensitized skin.
He moved over me, his massive two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound frame settling between my parted thighs, taking his time, using his heavy body weight to press me deep into the charcoal mattress.
There was no rush, no violence, no rough impatience.
It was a slow, reverent worship of skin against skin.
His hands slid beneath my hips, lifting me to meet the slow, rhythmic glide of his body against mine, holding me anchored in the center of his heat. His lips moved over mine in a deep, all-consuming claiming that tasted of salt, cedar, and unconditional surrender.
"Good girl," he rumbled against my mouth, his chest heaving against mine, his hips setting a cadence so deep, so profound, that every remaining shadow in my mind dissolved into the dark. "Stay right here with me, Penny. You're never going to be alone again."
My arms locked around his neck, my heels resting against the backs of his calves, pulling him closer, letting the solid, immovable weight of his love crush the ghost of my father into nonexistence.
We moved together in the moonlight, our heartbeats colliding through the dark, bound by a vow that no contract, no scout, and no storm could ever sever.