Chapter 13
Thin Ice
Riley
The elevator doors slide shut and the world shrinks to brushed steel and our breathing.
Metallic cleaner stings my nose, and the cold from the rink still clings to Jason’s hoodie—ice and sweat and something that’s always been him.
I jab the button for our floor with more force than necessary, pretending my hands aren’t shaking.
He doesn’t pretend. He’s already turned toward me, shoulder blocking the panel, eyes dark like the space between periods when the arena goes black. “Riley.”
My name in his voice lands low, right where my composure lives. I swallow hard, count the floor numbers lighting up: 7… 8…
He reaches past me and taps the red button.
The car shudders, a soft mechanical groan, and then stillness. The emergency stop. Of course he does.
“Jason.” My tone is a warning—trainer voice, policy voice, the voice that makes rookies sit down and ice their egos. It would work on him too, if he didn’t already know every way around it.
He leans in, not touching, that infuriating restraint of his that makes heat curl under my skin. “Say stop,” he murmurs, warm and quiet, like this is the only room left in the building and maybe the city. “If you want me gone, say it.”
I should. God, I should. The rulebook in my head flips to the right tab all by itself: staff-player boundaries, ethics clauses, the words you could lose everything scrawled across the margins. Instead, I hear my own heartbeat ticking time with the elevator’s soft hum.
I don’t say stop.
Something flickers in his eyes—relief, hunger, I don’t dare label it—and the little distance he’s left between us evaporates.
Not a slam, not that. He’s careful, always careful with me, like he learned the hard way what happens when he isn’t.
His knuckles skim my jaw, a question asked in skin, and then his palm slides to my cheek and I’m moving before I make the decision, crossing the last inch because gravity is real and apparently so is muscle memory.
His mouth finds mine like a secret remembered.
Heat licks up my spine, crowding out the cold.
I curl a fist in his hoodie, tugging him closer until my back meets steel.
We bump the mirror—soft thud, my breath ghosting on glass—and the reflection catches us: my ponytail askew, his lashes lowered, two reckless people caught between a past we burned down and a future we have no business wanting.
He breaks the kiss long enough to rest his forehead to mine. “Say stop,” he whispers again, and it’s not a dare. It’s a lifeline he’s handing me. The fact that he offers it makes me fall a little more and I hate that.
I don’t say it.
His hands bracket my hips, warm through the thin fabric of my team polo, the heel of his palm pressing against the jitter in my pulse.
I feel him breathe, slow and careful, like he’s trying not to spook me.
I’m not a skittish colt; I’m a woman who knows exactly how much trouble she’s inviting in.
My rules slam back, hard enough to rattle my teeth: job, policy, consequences.
Nolan’s arctic stare. Julia’s clipped tone.
Miles’ too-quiet disappointment. The headlines practically write themselves.
Jason’s chest rises under my palm. Solid. Human. Mine, my traitor brain supplies, and I press my hand flatter, feel the steady thud beneath the armor he wears for the rest of the world. “This is a terrible idea,” I whisper, voice unsteady. It sounds like please don’t stop.
His mouth curves against my temple. “Most of the best ones are.”
“Don’t go poetic on me,” I mutter, because banter is safe, and safety is a lie I am choosing anyway. My fingers slide up, catching at the edge of his hood, and he exhales like I’ve got my hand around something fragile and vital.
The car is too warm now. Or I am. My skin prickles with the awareness of every place we touch—his thumbs stroking slow circles, his thigh braced between mine, the faint rasp of stubble when he tilts to kiss the corner of my mouth again.
I taste the adrenaline and the mint he chews to keep his mouth from going dry in scrums. It tastes like games won at the buzzer and hotel rooms with thin curtains and the ache that followed when I walked away.
“Riley,” he says, softer, the sound sending a shiver through all the steel in me. “Tell me if—”
“I’ll tell you,” I cut in, and it’s true. I will. I always have.
For a beat, the only sounds are our breathing and the distant hum of the shaft, a low mechanical heartbeat under the mess of mine.
I let my head tip back against the mirror and I let him kiss me like we aren’t about to pay for this in a currency I can’t afford.
I let myself remember—his patience, the care that the tabloids never write about, the way he listens with his body when he’s not listening to anyone else.
Then the rulebook shoves its way between us again, hard and necessary. I press a hand to his chest, not pushing him away, just—anchoring. “Jason,” I say, and my voice is steadier now, trained. “We can’t—”
“I know,” he answers, and the way he says it tells me exactly how much he knows and how little he cares. His pulse thrums under my palm, and mine answers, traitorously in sync.
I draw a breath, trying to gather my scattered professionalism like towels off a locker room floor.
The elevator walls throw our reflections back at us.
I look like a woman breaking every rule she wrote.
He looks like the man I never stopped wanting, swearing he’ll behave while his hands memorize the geography of my hips.
“Say stop,” he repeats, last time, and I hate him for making it my call and love him for it in the same breath.
I still don’t say it.
The elevator doors part with a theatrical hush, and we step into noise.
Voices bounce down the hotel corridor—two staffers debating towel counts, someone laughing near the ice machine, the distant squeak of a cart’s wheel that needs WD-40 yesterday.
The hallway smells like citrus cleaner and industrial coffee.
A housekeeping cart blocks most of the passage, a linen mountain teetering on top. A sign clipped to the handle reads SORRY FOR THE MESS in cheerful font that does not match my current pulse.
“Evening,” the housekeeper says, stepping out of a room with a bag of trash and the kind of weary smile that knows exactly what kind of guests sports teams become after a win.
Her eyes flick over Jason—hood up, hands shoved into sleeves, six-foot-three of famous—and widen just a fraction.
Heat flashes under my skin. I’m suddenly aware of the rawness around my mouth, the too-bright look in his eyes that I hope only I can read.
“Hey,” Jason answers, easy and gravel-soft, the polite tone he saves for service staff and small children. He tips the cart a few inches with two fingers so we can pass. The simple gentleness almost undoes me.
I slide by first, shoulders angled, brushing a stack of neatly folded towels. The cotton smell hits like a cue: act normal. “Thanks,” I say, meeting the housekeeper’s gaze with my best I-have-clipboards-and-boundaries smile. “Long night.”
She grins. “Looked like a good game.” Her eyes flick toward Jason’s hands. “Good hands.”
My brain short-circuits for one humiliating beat. Jason coughs—an actual cough, because he’s a coward right now—and nudges the cart the rest of the way aside. “Team effort,” he says, and I mentally award him a medal for the least helpful answer possible.
We move, not quite fast enough to be suspicious, not slow enough to be casual. The carpet muffles our steps. Behind us, the housekeeper hums and the cart squeaks its complaint.
“Recovery intervals,” I say under my breath, picking up the thread from the elevator in case anyone is listening. “Forty-five on, fifteen off tomorrow. Mobility first.”
“Of course,” he murmurs, the corner of his mouth tipping like he’s trying not to smile. “I’ll double the mint supply.”
“Don’t be cute.”
“Can’t help it.” He’s walking close without touching, a narrow current of heat at my side, and the not-touching is a worse temptation than contact.
We pass a cluster of team staff near the ice machine—Jessie from PR among them, frowning at her phone like it insulted her ancestors.
She glances up, clocking us, and offers a distracted nod.
My heart lodges in my throat. Smile. Neutral.
Trainer brain. “Jessie,” I say, breezy. “Hydration station working okay?”
“It better,” she says without looking up, thumbs flying. “Seven AM sponsor call. Don’t burn the internet between now and then, okay?” She says it to the hallway at large, but it lands like a warning. Jason’s inhale is so quiet I only hear it because my whole system is tuned to him.
“We’re good,” I answer, meaning it like a vow and hating that it feels like one.
The cluster dissolves back into their screens. We keep moving. The hallway bends, quieter here, the noise falling away until it’s just the familiarity of hotel art and the low rush of the HVAC. My shoulders ease a centimeter.
“Riley.” Jason’s voice is low, meant only for me. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For getting us out of there before I did something we’d both regret.”
A laugh slips out, breathless and a little savage. “Speak for yourself.”
He huffs, and the sound is almost a smile. We share it for two steps that feel dangerously like peace.
Then the suite numbers pop into view: our block. The players’ floor is split—singles down one side, shared suites down the other. Ours is at the end, past a potted plant trying and failing to be a tree.
“Almost home,” I say, and the word tastes complicated. The keycard burns in my pocket like a secret I shouldn’t hold. I quicken my pace, professionalism strapped back on like gear.
We round the corner toward our door, the quiet thickening into a new kind of tension—the kind with walls, an address, and choices waiting on the other side.
Our suite door waits at the end of the corridor like a finish line I’m not sure I want to cross. My sneakers go quiet on the carpet as I slow, buying a few more seconds of neutrality before we’re alone with what we almost were in that elevator.
Jason’s gait matches mine, just close enough that I feel the brush of air when his arm swings. We’re both pretending not to notice. I fish the keycard from my pocket—plastic edges damp from the heat of my hand—and aim for the reader.
“Hey,” he says, low. The sound skims down my spine, a promise or a plea, I can’t tell. Maybe both.
“I know,” I answer, because I do. About the line. About what waits if we cross it. About how easy it would be to take one more step over thin ice and listen to it sing as it cracks.
The potted plant rustles as the HVAC kicks on. Somewhere behind us, an elevator dings and doors hush shut. The floor feels empty except for us and the hum of what we haven’t said.
I lift the keycard.
A bright electronic chirp snaps the moment in half.
Not from my hand—from the other side of the door.
My brain stutters. The small LED above the handle flashes green, and the latch gives a tidy, traitorous click.
Jason’s hand shoots out on instinct, bracing the door before it swings fully open. The force of it knocks us both closer, his shoulder shielding me without thinking, all reflex and muscle memory. His eyes cut to mine, sharp and asking: Do we want to be seen together, right here, right now?
No. Not like this. Not with heat still left on my mouth and my pulse still arguing with common sense.
“Maintenance,” a voice mutters from the hall side of the door—muffled through wood and the wedge of space Jason’s forearm keeps. Or maybe it’s “Housekeeping.” It’s impossible to tell over the racket in my chest.
My mind sprints through contingencies. Room mix-up. Security sweep. PR ambush. Miles. God—Miles. If it’s him, if he sees Jason and me aligned in this doorway like we’re one problem, the fallout will be nuclear.
I paste on the kind of calm they train into surgeons. “One second,” I call, bright and professional, even as I press two fingers to the back of Jason’s wrist. He understands the push: steady. Not a fight. Just… time.
He eases pressure but doesn’t yield, the muscles under my fingers coiled and ready. I flatten my free hand over my shirt to make sure I look put together and not freshly kissed, which feels like trying to hide a fire with a glass of water.
“Ma’am?” the voice comes again, closer now, definitely on our side of the door. There’s the soft squeak of shoe rubber on carpet and the whisper of fabric, like someone shifting their weight. Another keycard chirp. Whoever it is owns this beeping like a badge.
I shoot a look down the corridor. Empty. Jessie’s cluster is gone. The housekeeper and her cart are around the bend. No witnesses—yet. That should be a comfort. It isn’t. Without an audience, the truth gets louder.
Jason’s jaw flexes. “Riley,” he murmurs, barely a sound, but I hear the question tucked inside my name: Ready?
I inhale, square my shoulders, and shift just enough to be the face whoever-it-is sees first. If there’s fallout, it should hit me, not him. I’m the staff member. I’m the one with rules scrawled on my bones.
The latch clicks again. The door pushes inward against Jason’s steady arm, an inch, two—
—and then it stops, hanging open on a breath of recycled hotel air, the gap just wide enough for a shadow to fall across the carpet.
“Hello?” I say, voice bright as a scalpel.
The shadow moves.
The door swings open on Jessie. Her press badge glints under the hallway light, and a hotel engineer stands half-hidden behind her, a master key still in the reader.
“Maintenance,” she says brightly—to the hallway, for the record—then drops the act the second her eyes hit us. “Inside. Now.”
Jason eases back; I step forward, clipboard up like armor. Jessie enters, gives the room a single sweep—bed made, lights off, nothing incriminating—and exhales through her nose.
“You’re both very lucky I check incident alerts before the front desk calls security,” she says. “Next time, I won’t beat them to it.”
My pulse crawls up my throat. “Jessie—”
“Save it.” Her tone is professional, not unkind. “You,” she points at me, “go to your room. You,” at Jason, “report to the coaches’ suite in fifteen. Danvers is already asking questions. Don’t make me write this up.”
The engineer shifts awkwardly. Jessie flashes him a PR smile. “Thanks for the quick response.” He nods and leaves.
The door shuts, clean and final. Jessie lingers one breath longer, eyes flicking between us. “If either of you wants to keep your jobs, you’ll stay visible for the rest of the night.”
Then she’s gone, heels sharp against the carpet. The latch clicks—a line drawn with precision and mercy.