Chapter 1
Ice, Interrupted
Riley
Blood frecklesmy gloves before the whistle even finishes screaming.
The bench rocks under the weight of bodies slamming down, sticks rattling like teeth in a jar. The crowd is a single roaring animal, hot breath rolling over the boards. I don’t look up. I peel open a packet, the sharp sting of antiseptic cutting through the stink of sweat, skate leather, and cheap cologne. “Don’t move,” I tell our winger, who is absolutely moving.
“Just a scratch,” he grits out through blood-slick teeth.
“Congratulations, you’re bleeding from a ‘scratch.’ Hold still.” I press gauze to his cheekbone. He hisses. I don’t flinch. The ref’s arm goes up at center ice, a penalty we can’t afford, and the bench erupts in profanity that rolls right over me. I have a job. I always have a job.
Tape. Steri-strips. Check pupils. My world narrows to the tidy square of his face and the rhythm of my breath. I’m the calm in the storm. I’m always the?—
A body slams the boards behind me so hard the quake shivers up through my knees. The glass booms. I spin in time to see a blur of dark hair and fury shouldered toward the opening in the boards.
Jason Maddox doesn’t so much step into the bench as get shoved into it.
The collision makes the Gatorade bottles jump. For a fraction of a second, everything inside me does the same. He tears off a glove with his teeth, jaw flexing, eyes scanning for the linesman he wants to murder. Then his gaze snags on me. Catches. Holds.
Blue, colder than fresh ice and just as dangerous. I know that look like a scar I pretend not to have.
“Hey,” my patient croaks. “Am I good?”
I tear my eyes away. Professional. Efficient. Untouchable. “You’re good.” I press the gauze into his palm, add, “Tell Coach you need two shifts off.” He nods and staggers away. I toss the bloody pads into the biohazard bin and rip open a fresh kit with more force than necessary.
Jason’s wrist is swelling under the tape, angry and wrong. He’s breathing like he sprinted a mile uphill, visor fogged at the edges. The trainers on the other teams call him a freight train masquerading as a man. I call him a complication with a perfect slap shot.
“Sit,” I say, already crouching in the narrow strip of floor between his skates. The word comes out steady. My pulse doesn’t.
He drops onto the bench. Sweat rolls from his hairline to the hollow of his throat, disappearing into the neckline of his jersey. He smells like cold air and adrenaline and the kind of trouble I’ve outlawed from my life.
“Wrist?” I ask, gloved fingers testing along the taped joint. I keep my touch clinical, even as memory crowds the edges of myvision—hotel sheets, neon bleed, a door that clicked in my face years ago.
“Stick got yanked,” he grinds out. “Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” I angle his hand, thumb steady at his scaphoid. His breath hitches. “Don’t be a hero.”
His mouth tips, the ghost of a smirk that used to mean I was about to break a rule on purpose. “That a medical opinion, Lane, or a personality review?”
“Both.” I don’t look up. If I do, the heat in his eyes will knock me off my axis. “You’ve got a game to finish. Let me do my job so you can do yours.”
The bench squeezes in around us—knees, blades, barked line changes. A stick clacks inches from my ear. Someone mutters about the ref’s mother. A helmet thuds down, rattling the board. I shut it out. I’m needle, thread, tape. I’m the metronome in a song that’s all drumline and chaos.
His pulse beats against my fingertips, too fast. Mine matches it, stupid traitor. I tell myself it’s the noise, the pressure, the ten thousand eyes above us.
It’s not.
“Look at me,” I say, because I need him still, because I am not remembering the taste of his name. He obeys, chin dropping, those eyes locked. The electricity of it crawls over my skin like static under a wool sweater.
The trainer down the line shouts for alcohol swabs. I already have them. Of course I do. I snap a cap, the antiseptic bite sharp enough to water my eyes. Jason doesn’t flinch. He never did—on the ice, at least.
“Deep breath,” I murmur, and when he takes it, it’s like the whole bench does too. The horn blares. The crowd surges. My hands don’t shake.
They never shake. Not for him. Not anymore.
I glove up fresh and reach for the suture kit. The cut along his wrist isn’t pretty—ragged from a skate blade, shallow but angry. He shouldn’t go back out with it open, not with sweat pouring like this. I brace his forearm on my thigh to steady him. Bad idea. Heat leaps across denim to skin, and memory tries the door again.
