Chapter 33
Catherine Celia
By mid-September, I had officially moved in with Taylor, unofficially memorized the inside of Hunter’s apartment, and learned that falling in love with a single dad meant my calendar now included school, residency prep, research hours, exhibition games, and very serious ice cream negotiations with a ten-year-old.
My official internship with the Blaze was done.
I was still at the arena twice a week for my research project, but the boundaries were cleaner now.
Dr. Patel supervised my research. Wren supervised my sanity.
Dad stayed out of anything that had my name attached to it, and Hunter and I didn’t hide.
At the arena, he was still Captain Russell.
I was still Catherine Davis, fourth-year medical student, trying to finalize my residency application without having a nervous breakdown over personal statements, reference letters, and the fact that my entire future apparently needed to fit into a polished little paragraph about why internal medicine mattered to me.
But away from the arena, he was Hunter. The man who texted me good luck before early hospital rounds.
The man who showed up after exhibition games with tired eyes, damp hair, and bruises blooming along his ribs but still wanted to make me dinner.
The man who kissed me in his kitchen like he had been waiting all day to breathe.
Tonight, I sat beside Isla in the family section while the Blaze played their third exhibition game. She wore Hunter’s jersey over a long-sleeve shirt and had glitter stickers on both cheeks because her grandma had very little self-control in team stores.
“Do you think Dad can see us?” Isla asked.
“He knows where we are,” I assured her.
I glanced down at the ice, where Hunter was circling near center, black helmet low, stick loose in his gloves. As if he felt me looking, his gaze flicked up.
Isla gasped. “He just looked at us.”
Hunter tapped his stick once against the ice. Isla waved both hands like she was directing an aircraft, which made a stupid smile bloom on my face. His eyes stayed on me for one extra second before he turned back toward the faceoff circle, and my stomach did something deeply embarrassing.
“Catherine,” Isla whispered.
“What?”
“You’re smiling weird.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. It’s your dad smile.”
I looked at her. “My what?”
“The smile you do when you look at my dad,” she noted. Yup. I had it bad for Hunter.
Sloane leaned over from Isla’s other side. “She loves him, honey. It’s a good thing.”
My cheeks must have turned a hot shade of pink.
I had known Sloane Russell since I was a kid.
It was weird that I was now in a serious relationship with her son and hanging out with her and her granddaughter like she was my own.
The game was sloppy in the way preseason hockey always seemed to be.
New guys trying to prove themselves. Veterans trying not to get hurt.
Coaches looking calm while radiating stress.
In this case, I knew all my dad’s tells.
The way he gritted his jaw. He also gave Isla and me a chin tilt and a wink.
Hunter played limited minutes, but every time he was on the ice, the whole team seemed to settle around him.
That was the part I had not fully understood before.
I knew he was good and an important part of the team.
But watching him in season mode was different.
He wasn’t just Isla’s dad or the man who made me coffee and kissed my shoulder while I studied.
He was the center of something bigger. A captain. A leader. The person men looked to.
And after all of that, after the final horn and the press and the showers and whatever pain he would pretend didn’t exist, he still texted me before he left the locker room.
Hunter: Ice cream?
I looked at Isla. She was already watching my phone.
“Is that Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Does he want ice cream?” she asked. It wasn’t that Hunter wanted ice cream. He didn’t eat ice cream during the season. It was that he knew his daughter wanted ice cream, and maybe I did too, because he was kind and considerate.
Me: We’re definitely up for ice cream.
An hour later, we were in a booth at a small ice cream place ten minutes from the arena. Hunter sat across from me, baseball cap low, one knee brushing mine under the table. Isla sat beside him, building something terrifying out of vanilla ice cream, sprinkles, gummy worms, and hot fudge.
“That’s a whole lot of sugar, Bug,” Hunter said, looking at her bowl.
“I don’t do it often, so it’s okay, right?” she asked. Hunter laughed and nodded.
I laughed into my spoon. This was what we had become.
A little family. Not officially. Not in a way anyone had labeled out loud.
But a routine had formed around us so quietly I hadn’t noticed until I was already inside it.
Dinner after games when Hunter was home.
Homework at Hunter’s kitchen table while Isla did math and I edited my residency personal statement.
Movie nights where Hunter pretended to be annoyed by animated soundtracks and then hummed them two days later.
Sometimes I went back to Taylor’s after Isla went to bed.
Sometimes Hunter walked me down the hall, kissed me outside Taylor’s door, and looked like he was considering whether the security cameras were worth respecting.
And sometimes, when he had a babysitter at his apartment after Isla was asleep, he came to me.
Like tonight. Taylor was in her room pretending she didn’t know exactly what was happening, even though she absolutely did because subtlety had never been one of Hunter’s strengths when it came to me.
My laptop was open on my bed, my residency personal statement staring back at me.
I had written the same sentence six different ways.
None of them sounded like me. I am passionate about internal medicine because…
My phone lit up beside me.
Hunter: You awake?
My pulse tripped.
Me: Unfortunately. My personal statement is trying to torture me.
Hunter: Let me in.
My stomach flipped so hard it was embarrassing.
I climbed off the bed and padded barefoot down the hall.
The apartment was quiet except for the low hum of Taylor’s white noise machine behind her bedroom door.
I unlocked the front door and opened it.
Hunter stood in the hallway in black sweats and a dark T-shirt, hair damp from the shower, jaw rough with stubble, one hand braced against the doorframe. He looked tired.
“Hi,” I whispered.
His gaze dropped to my oversized T-shirt and bare legs.
“Hi.”
“You look exhausted,” I said.
“I am.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
His eyes lifted back to mine. “Because I want you.”
There were things a woman could survive. That sentence, in that voice, was not one of them. I stepped back and let him in. He closed the door softly behind him, because Taylor was down the hall. He turned the lock. The small click went through me like a touch. His eyes met mine.
“Bedroom,” I whispered.
He followed me down the hall, close enough that I could feel him behind me.
Heat at my back. His clean soap smell. The tension in the quiet.
The second my bedroom door closed, he was on me.
His hands found my waist, and he backed me against the door, his mouth coming down on mine like he had been holding himself together for hours and had finally found the place where he could fall apart.
I grabbed his shirt and pulled him closer.
He groaned into my mouth, low and deep, and the sound went straight between my thighs.
“Missed you,” he said against my lips.
“You saw me two hours ago,” I laughed, but it came out breathless because his mouth had moved to my jaw, then my neck, and his hands were sliding under my shirt. His palms spread over my ribs. I arched into him.
“Hunter.”
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I know, baby.”
He lifted my shirt slowly, dragging the cotton up my body, his knuckles brushing my skin in a way that felt almost cruel.
I raised my arms, and he pulled it over my head, tossing it somewhere behind him without looking.
Then he stopped. His eyes moved over me, and the look on his face made me hotter than his hands ever could.
Like he wanted to ruin me and worship me at the same time. Then he dropped to his knees.
My breath caught.
He looked up at me from the floor of my bedroom, hands sliding up the backs of my thighs, mouth dangerously close to the place where I was already aching for him. His fingers hooked into the waistband of my underwear.
“I love you.” He pressed a kiss to my hip. “I missed you.” Another kiss, lower. “And I’ve been thinking about getting my mouth on you since you smiled at me from the stands.”
My knees went weak.
He noticed. His hand tightened on my thigh. “I’ve got you.”
He dragged my underwear down and put his mouth on me. I slapped a hand over my mouth. The sound that almost escaped me would absolutely have woken Taylor and the neighbors.
Hunter laughed against my skin. “Quiet, Catherine.”
I glared down at him, or I tried to, but then he did something with his tongue that made my head hit the door.
“Hunter,” I hissed.
He looked up, eyes dark and wicked. “That was not quiet.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You love me.”
“I do,” I moaned. “Very much.”