Chapter 8
Mauricio POV
The steel edge of my left skate bit into the ice, shaving off a spray of white powder that hit the dasher boards with a sharp hiss.
One in the morning.
The St. Jude Ice Arena was drowned in gloom, save for two amber utility lights suspended sixty feet up in the iron girders. The temperature on the ice floor hovered at seventeen degrees. My breath plumed from my mouth in thick, ragged bursts, freezing instantly in the dry air.
I was skating in black practice pants and a sleeveless compression shirt. My bare shoulders and upper arms were soaked in sweat that chilled against my skin, sending a violent shiver across my traps before the heat of another sprint burned it away.
I drove into the neutral zone, pivoting hard onto my right outside edge. The hairline fracture in my fibula screamed, a vicious, throbbing ache that dug into the bone like an auger.
I leaned into the pain. I wanted it. I needed the mechanical agony to crowd out the noise inside my skull.
For twenty-four hours, my brain had been stuck on a continuous loop: Kiyomi Blake sitting beside me in the sports science annex, wearing my oversized wool hoodie, her small wrist resting in my palm while her pulse beat against my thumb.
The smell of her—bitter orange, almond, and clean rain—had soaked into the fleece of that sweater, and when I walked back to my truck at two in the morning, the cab had smelled of her skin.
I couldn't wash it out of my head. I had spent ninety minutes running lateral transition drills until my quads shook, trying to purge her face from my retinas.
It hadn't worked.
I lined up three black vulcanized pucks at the center dot, dragged the first one across the blue line, and fired a slap shot with everything I had left in my back.
The puck slammed into the top right corner of the empty net with a violent, echoing crack that sounded like a rifle shot in the cavernous building.
Before the sound died, a metal latch clicked open sixty feet away.
The heavy door from the south runway swung wide, and the squeak of rubber soles on the floor matting cut through the hollow silence.
I stopped dead at the top of the face-off circle.
Steam rose off my bare chest in pale, drifting clouds, catching the dull amber light. My ribs heaved against my lungs, dragging in the frigid air in harsh, whistling draws.
Across the dark expanse, standing at the open bench gate, was a slender silhouette.
Kiyomi.
* * *
I didn't rush. I let my blades glide over the scarred ice, the sound of steel cutting frozen water slow and deliberate in the empty barn.
I stopped two feet from the boards, resting both forearms on the red dasher cap.
The contrast between us was ridiculous. She was bundled against the Maine frost in a heavy charcoal wool coat, a cream scarf wrapped thick around her neck, and black leather gloves.
Her cheeks were flushed a bright, stinging pink from the wind outside, her dark hair tucked neatly under a knit beanie.
I stood there half-naked, drenched in sweat that was already turning to frost on my collarbones, heat rolling off my torso in waves.
Her honey-brown eyes tracked the steam rising off my shoulders before snapping up to my face. The pulse at the base of her throat jumped once, visible above the wool of her scarf.
"You're going to give yourself hypothermia, Leal," she said. Her voice was too loud in the dead quiet of the arena, small and slightly breathless.
"I'm warm enough," I rasped. The gravel in my voice scraped against my dry throat. "What are you doing here, Blake?"
She reached into her coat pocket, pulling out a heavy, encrypted external hard drive, along with a folded sheet of paper. Held neatly under her other arm was my black wool team hoodie, washed and pressed flat.
"Vance received the clearance verification from the NCAA portal at midnight," she said, holding the drive out over the boards. Her chin had that familiar, defensive tilt. "The dossier passed without an audit flag. You're rostered for the weekend series against Vermont."
I didn't reach for the drive. I stayed planted on my skates, leaning forward until my chest was six inches from her face.
"You could have left the drive in the department mailbox," I said, my voice dropping lower, vibrating against the red plastic cap between us. "You could have handed me the hoodie at five-thirty on Monday."
She didn't lower her hand, but her fingers tightened on the metal casing of the hard drive.
"I was finishing my fellowship abstract in the library," she countered, the lie thin and fragile in the freezing air. "The arena was on my way home. I didn't want the hardware sitting in an unsecured office over the weekend."
"The arena is four miles south of the campus library, Kiyomi."
The use of her first name caught her off guard. Her lips parted slightly, her breath puffing out in a tiny, hurried cloud of white that brushed against the bare skin of my chest.
"Take the drive, Mauricio," she whispered.
"Come inside and give it to me."
* * *
Her eyes narrowed, a flash of her usual defiance cutting through the uncertainty in her posture.
Before she could step back onto the runway, I reached down with my right hand, popped the brass latch on the bench gate, and shoved the door open.
My left hand shot out.
My calloused, freezing fingers wrapped around the thick wool of her sleeve, and with one smooth, effortless pull, I hauled her through the opening onto the rubberized floor of the player box.
The gate clicked shut behind her.
She spun around to shove at my chest, but I was already there, crowding her space, my two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound frame backing her up until the back of her wool coat struck the thick acrylic partition separating the box from the penalty area.
The space was suffocatingly small.
My chest rose and fell in heavy, ragged intervals, the scorching heat of my skin hitting her face like an open oven in the seventeen-degree barn. Her eyes were blown wide, pupils swallowing the gold in her irises, staring up at me with a shock that locked her joints.
She held the folded hoodie against her stomach like a shield.
"You don't listen, do you?" I murmured.
I reached out. My bare right hand came up, my thumb and index finger catching the sharp, delicate curve of her jawline. My skin was rough from friction tape, my fingers freezing cold against the burning flush of her cheek.
She inhaled sharply, a hitch catching in her lungs, her hands clutching the black fleece tighter.
"Mauricio—"
"Look at me."
The command was low, absolute, scraped raw from the back of my throat.
Her gaze snapped to mine, locked by the pressure of my thumb tilting her chin up. She was trembling, but it wasn't from the bitter draft blowing off the ice. It was the wild, erratic thrum of her heart hammering beneath her layers, matching the hard, heavy beat pounding in my own ears.
"You drove across town in the middle of a blizzard because you wanted to see me," I said, my thumb stroking slowly over the soft skin beneath her lip. "Admit it."
"I came to return your equipment," she breathed, her voice shaking, refusing to surrender.
"Liar."
I leaned down, closing the last remaining distance until my mouth hovered a fraction of an inch from the curve of her jaw, right over the frantic, jumping rhythm of her carotid artery.
My lips brushed the warm, flushed skin beneath her ear.
The contact was brief, a glancing friction of mouth against flesh, but it sent a violent shockwave tearing straight down through my hips.
The bitter orange and almond scent of her hair filled my senses, drowning out the stink of sweat and ammonia.
"Keep coming to me in the dark, Blake," I whispered into her skin, my voice a rough, broken promise that rattled against her jawbone. "Keep pushing your way into my space. See what happens when I stop caring about the rules."
Her hands let go of the folded sweater.
The black wool dropped between us, falling onto the rubber floor. Her gloved fingers came up, resting flat against the bare, sweat-slick muscle of my ribs, not pushing me away, just holding on as her head tilted back against the cold acrylic glass.
I stared down at her parted mouth, my teeth grinding together, my knuckles white where my hand braced against the wall beside her ear.
The control was gone.
And if she took one more breath against my skin, I was going to ruin us both.