Chapter 26
Samantha
The kiss changed shape.
One moment, we were standing in the weight room with the hum of the HVAC, the smell of rubber mats, and his forehead resting against mine.
The next, his mouth was on my neck, my back was against the wall, and the very professional, very controlled version of Samantha Cole was being dismantled by a man whose hands shook when they touched her.
That was the part I could not stop noticing.
His hands.
These were hands that controlled a hockey stick in traffic. Hands that had gripped a Zamboni railing at four years old and never let go. Reliable hands. Hands that had never, as far as I could tell, been uncertain about anything.
They were trembling now.
Not from nerves. From restraint.
I could feel it in the way his fingers spread across my ribs: deliberate, careful, the pressure of a man who knew he was built for impact and was choosing, with every piece of discipline he had, to be gentle.
“Evan.” My voice came out lower than I recognized. “You don’t have to be careful.”
His forehead dropped to my shoulder. A breath shuddered out of him, warm against my collarbone, unsteady in a way I had never heard from him on or off the ice.
“Yeah,” he said roughly. “I do.”
“Why?”
“Because when I stop being careful, I don’t know how much control I’ll have left.”
That was unfairly effective.
I pulled his face up to mine and kissed him in a way that made my position on the matter clear.
His control cracked. Not shattered. Cracked. The hands that had been trembling found a new certainty. One slid into my hair. The other found the hem of my shirt and stopped there, fingertips against bare skin, a question asked without words.
I answered by pulling the shirt over my own head, because waiting for a man who communicated through defensive positioning to ask permission for every escalation would have taken the rest of the evening, and I had plans for the rest of the evening.
His eyes tracked down my body the way they tracked the ice: assessing and memorizing. But there was nothing clinical in his expression. What I saw on his face was the same thing I had seen on the rink at dawn: focus stripped of performance, so direct it made my chest ache.
“Christ, Sam.” The words were barely audible.
“Less talking,” I murmured. “More of this.”
He lifted me. Not dramatically. Efficiently, the way his body did everything, with an economy that should not have been as devastating as it was.
My legs wrapped around his waist, and he carried me toward the small training office off the weight room with the focused intent of a man running a breakout drill with no intention of being stopped.
The door clicked shut behind us.
The office was dark except for the light bleeding in from the hallway, a thin stripe across the floor. No camera. I knew because I had spent six weeks learning where this building watched people and where it did not.
My photographer’s brain catalogued the composition automatically: tight frame, low light, two people choosing the part of the building where no one could turn them into evidence.
Then his mouth found the curve of my neck, and my photographer’s brain shut down entirely, replaced by a system with fewer opinions and better priorities.
He set me on the edge of the desk. His hands bracketed my hips, thumbs tracing the line of my waist with a slow precision that made my breath catch.
I pulled at his shirt, still damp from the workout, clinging to muscle my hands had been aching to map for weeks. He helped me, shrugging out of it with a motion that revealed the body underneath by degrees.
I ran my palms across his chest.
Scars I had not seen before. A raised line along his ribs from a skate blade. A faded mark on his shoulder from something he would probably dismiss as nothing. Evidence of a career spent absorbing impact so other people did not have to.
My hand found his and turned it over.
There was a groove worn into the heel of his right palm where his stick tape rolled against it: a permanent ridge in the skin from years of the same grip, the same motion, the same devotion repeated until it had become part of him.
The calluses around it had shaped themselves to the stick whether or not the stick was in his hand.
I rested my thumb on the groove.
Read it.
His breath caught in a way I did not think he had intended, and I understood that nobody had done that before. Nobody had looked at the mark of his whole life inside his hand and recognized it.
He watched me touch him with an expression that undid me. Not only want, though that was there, heavy in his eyes. Something underneath it. Wonder. Like he had spent so long defended that someone choosing to enter gently felt impossible.
“Stay with me,” I whispered.
Not a request about tonight.
About everything.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I believed him.
That was the dangerous part.
I kissed the scar along his ribs, and his hand closed around the edge of the desk hard enough to make the wood complain. The sound went straight through me.
“Sam.”
My name in his mouth had changed again. Not warning. Not question. More like the last piece of control he had left was using my name as a handhold.
I looked up at him.
The hallway light cut across one side of his face, leaving the rest in shadow. He looked too controlled for what was happening between us, except for the pulse moving hard at his throat and the way his breath kept breaking before he could catch it.
I reached for him.
He caught my wrist gently.
Not stopping me.
Slowing me.
His thumb moved over my pulse, the same place he had touched in the parking garage, and the memory of that concrete pillar and his mouth at my neck hit me with enough force to make my knees tighten around his hips.
His eyes sharpened.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
The question should have cooled the room.
It did the opposite.
Because Evan McKinney, with every muscle in his body locked down and his mouth still hot from kissing me, had stopped to ask. Want was not the problem. He had too much of it, and he still cared what I chose.
I slid my wrist free and brought his hand to my mouth.
“Yes.”
The word barely cleared my lips before his control slipped another notch.
He kissed me harder.
Not careless. Never careless. But no longer distant from what he wanted.
His hand went into my hair, angling my face to his, and the desk edge pressed into the backs of my thighs as he stepped closer.
My hands found his shoulders, then his back, following the flex of muscle under skin as he moved against me with the same exactness he brought to the ice.
Only this was not a game.
There were no boards. No whistle. Just Evan, breathing like control had become a job he was tired of doing, and me, deciding I liked him better when the job started to fail.
His mouth moved down my throat.
I gripped his shoulders and let my head fall back.
The ceiling tile above us had a water stain shaped like Texas, which was exactly the kind of detail my brain would choose to notice while a professional hockey player’s mouth was making a very convincing argument against higher thought.
“Focus, Cole,” I muttered.
His mouth paused against my skin.
Then he laughed.
Not much. Barely a sound. But I felt it against my collarbone, and that small break in him hit harder than another kiss would have.
I pulled him back to me.
He came willingly.
The next kiss had no patience left in it.
My body shifted toward his before I could plan it. His hands settled at my hips again, holding me with enough pressure to make the desk feel less like furniture and more like a bad decision we had both agreed to pursue. He looked down between us, expression tight, then back at me.
There was a question in his face.
There was always a question in Evan when it mattered.
I answered by pulling him closer.
He made a rough sound and pressed his forehead to mine.
For a second, neither of us moved.
That was when I felt how much he was holding back. He wanted to cross the line with me watching him do it.
The realization landed low and hot.
“Evan,” I said.
His eyes opened.
“I am not fragile.”
“I know.”
“Then stop treating me like I might break.”
His hand tightened at my hip.
“I’m not worried about you breaking.”
The room went very still.
Then I understood.
He was worried about himself.
The control. The man who had built an entire life around keeping every part of himself contained because contained things could not hurt anyone.
I touched his face.
“You are not going to hurt me.”
His eyes held mine.
“I know that in my head.”
“Good.” I kissed him once, slow enough that he felt every word I did not say. “Let the rest catch up.”
That did it.
Not all at once. Evan did not fall apart in one motion. He came undone the way he did everything else: with effort, with attention, with the last of his discipline spent on making sure I was with him at every step.
His hand slid up the inside of my thigh and stopped there, palm warm, thumb moving in one slow stroke that made my whole body tense.
“Sam.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“Yes.”
His fingers found me, and the sound that left me was not a word.
He watched my face the entire time, face intent, breathing unsteady, his free hand braced on the desk beside my hip like he needed the wood to hold him in place.
He learned what made me move. He stayed there until my hands fisted in his hair. Then he stayed there longer.
“Evan.”
“I’ve got you.”
“I need—”
“I know.”
When he finally moved, it was with the same precision he used everywhere else, the same control, except the control was for me now and not against the want. He pressed his forehead to mine and let me feel him slow.
“Look at me.”
I did.
“Still yes?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
He pushed into me, and the sound he made was rough enough to scrape. My hands found his shoulders. His found my hips, lifting, adjusting, settling me against him until there was no space left to disappear into.
“Fuck,” he breathed against my temple. “Sam.”
The word landed differently in his mouth than it would have in anyone else’s. From a man who never swore, it sounded like something coming out from under pressure that had been building for weeks.
He moved.
Slow at first, the same way he did everything: testing the angle, reading what I gave back, adjusting.
Then less slow. The desk shifted beneath us.
His mouth found my throat, my collarbone, the soft place below my ear that made my back arch every time he hit it.
I did not know I had a place that did that until he found it.
“There,” he said, low. “Right there.”
I lost track of language.
What I remembered after, in pieces: the heat of his chest under my palm.
The way his hand slid into my hair and held.
The sound he made when I tightened around him, like the discipline he had spent his whole life building had finally found something it could not contain.
My name in his mouth in three different registers—careful, then urgent, then wrecked.
When he came, he buried his face in my neck and held on like the room would tilt if he let go.
I held on because he needed me to.
Afterward, we stayed tangled together on the narrow desk that was absolutely not designed for this purpose, our breathing slowly finding a shared rhythm.
The office hummed around us. The stripe of hallway light had moved farther across the floor.
Time had passed. The world was still turning outside this room even though it felt like it had stopped.
His hand rested on my hip, thumb tracing absent circles he did not seem aware of. His breathing had finally steadied.
“I don’t know what happens now,” he said quietly.
“Me neither.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me.
In the low light, his expression was stripped of every defense I had ever seen him wear.
No walls. No calculated blankness. Just a man who had let someone past every barrier he had spent a lifetime constructing and was now standing in the open, terrified and unwilling to go back inside.
I touched his face. His cheek was warm under my palm.
“We don’t have to figure it out tonight,” I said.
“Okay.”
“But you should know, I’m not going to pretend this didn’t happen.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smile. The architecture of one. The closest thing he had to a promise.
“Good,” he said. “Neither am I.”