Cassie felt her stomach drop. “We were just talking about tomorrow’s piece,” she said, too quickly. Luke coughed and nodded, turning back to Cassie. “Right, uh… as I was saying, Detroit thrives on odd-man rushes. We’ve got to tighten that up before we play them.”
Connor’s grin widened.
“Sure you were,” he said, drawling out the syllables. “Just don’t let Coach catch you two strategizing without him.” He winked at Cassie, then sauntered toward the elevators, whistling. Luke wanted to melt into the hotel carpet.
Later, as players crammed into the elevator to head upstairs, Connor sidled up next to Luke. The doors slid shut and the carriage lurched upward. Connor bumped his shoulder lightly. “Didn’t take you for a man of mystery, Anders,” he murmured under his breath, keeping his voice low enough that only Luke could hear over the buzz of conversation.
Luke shot him a warning look. “Drop it, kid.”
Connor just chuckled. “Relax. I’m not going to tweet about it. Hell, I kind of respect it. She’s smart, she asks good questions and she didn’t flinch when I told her my pre-game meal is three chocolate chip cookies. Could do worse.” His tone was teasing,but his eyes were earnest. Luke realized this was Connor’s way of saying he was on his side.
“You got a big mouth,” Luke muttered, but a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Only when I’m chirping,” Connor replied. “Seriously, though, heads up. The vets gossip more than you think.” The elevator dinged, and Connor clapped Luke on the back as he stepped out. “See you at dinner, secret agent.”
As the doors closed, Luke exhaled. The kid was cocky, but there was substance beneath the swagger. It dawned on Luke that Connor was part of the new generation of players who grew up with social media, reality TV and a different sense of privacy. He seemed to navigate the attention with a shrug. Luke, meanwhile, felt suddenly ten years older. He also felt oddly relieved — if Connor knew and wasn’t making a fuss, maybe their secret wasn’t as bad as he feared. He texted Cassie later: “We may have been caught. Connor says hi.” She sent back a string of eye-roll emojis and a laughing one, her ability to find humor in the tightrope act making his chest lighten.
Sixteen
Cassie’s flight back from Vancouver was mercifully quiet. The storm that had stranded them an extra night had cleared, but the runways were still fringed with snow. Cassie secured a window seat near the back, pulled her hood over her hair and let the hum of the engines drown out the chatter of exhausted passengers. Through the glass, the city lights receded and the endless black of the Pacific gave way to cloud banks lit by the moon. With no Wi-Fi and no interviews to conduct, she had nothing but time and the ache in her chest to occupy her.
The past few weeks had been a blur of near misses and quick smiles in hotel hallways, of texts typed and deleted and of late nights replaying every interaction. It had been thrilling, yes, but also consuming. Connor’s grin in the lobby haunted her; he’d treated the moment like a joke, but it wasn’t funny to her. The more she turned it over, the more it dawned on her that Luke risked very little by bending the rules. He was a multi-million-dollar defenseman with a contract that spanned years. If they were caught, he might get … what, a talking-to from the Renegades’ public relations manager? He wouldn’t lose his livelihood. Teams didn’t cut cornerstone players over a relationship. She, on the other hand, would be hung out to dry. She’d seen what happened to colleagues who were accused of conflicts of interest: reassigned, demoted, whispered about. In afield where there were so few women to begin with, the margin for error was razor thin.
As the plane arced east, Cassie thought about the years that had led her here—the nights spent watching Renegades highlights with her father, the mornings she spent as a young girl waking up at dawn to play pickup at the local rink, the college papers filled with game summaries marked up by professors. She’d fought for internships, scraped together enough to travel to minor-league tournaments and endured condescending comments in locker rooms because she loved the sport and because she believed her words mattered. The beat wasn’t just a job; it was the realization of a childhood dream. Was a secret romance worth gambling that dream? Was Luke worth it?
She closed her eyes and saw his smile when he was genuinely happy, the way his hair stuck to his forehead after a game, the tenderness in his voice when he whispered her name. She also saw the look in Stan’s eyes when he reminded her about ethics. The scales tipped back and forth. By the time the captain announced their descent into Pittsburgh, she hadn’t arrived at an answer, but she knew she couldn’t keep pretending that the risks were equal.
Back in her Mount Washington apartment, the first thing she did was drop her bags and text Luke: “Home. Long flight. I’m…freaking out a little about this. Can we talk later?” The three dots appeared almost instantly.
“Of course,” came his reply. “We’ll make this work. I don’t want you to lose anything because of me.” A moment later: “I’m sorry about Connor. He’s a good kid but he runs his mouth. I’ll talk to him.”
She stared at the screen, a mixture of relief and frustration pooling behind her ribs. “It’s not just Connor,” she typed. “You’re bulletproof. I’m not.”
A pause. Then, a reply from Luke: “Maybe not bulletproof, but I get it. I know what you’ve built. I respect it. We can slow down if you need. I’ll follow your lead.”
Cassie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. It wasn’t a solution, but it was something she needed to hear—that he understood the imbalance and was willing to adjust. She texted back a single word: “Okay.” After a moment, she added a heart. He sent one in return.
Luke stood in the middle of his loft with his phone in his hand, staring out at the river without really seeing it. The lights along the Allegheny blurred together, reflections stacking on top of each other like something he should recognize but couldn’t quite name. He replayed the last twenty-four hours on a loop: Connor’s grin in the elevator, Cassie’s careful tone, the way she’d laughed it off too easily. He’d taken comfort in the idea that if a teammate noticed, it couldn’t be that dangerous. That had been selfish. Comfort was a luxury he could afford. She couldn’t.
He thought about consequences the way hockey players were trained to—two minutes in the box, a talking-to from the coach. He had been coached through worse. He had survived worse. The realization landed heavily: if this blew up, his life would be bruised, not broken. Hers could be dismantled quietly, efficiently, by people who would swear they were only protecting standards. That wasn’t theoretical. He’d seen it happen to women around the league, their access slowly evaporating, their credibility questioned.
Luke ran a hand through his hair and exhaled. He cared about her more than he cared about being comfortable, more than hecared about how badly he wanted her next to him instead of on the other end of a phone. Wanting her wasn’t the problem. Letting his want outweigh her safety would be.
He looked down at his phone again, thumb hovering over her name. If he was going to do this right, he needed to say it out loud. He needed her to know he saw the imbalance clearly now—and that if they were going todo this, he wasn’t going to make her carry it alone.
Cassie set her phone down on the arm of the couch and stared at it as if it might buzz again on its own. The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant whine of traffic on Bigelow. She told herself she should unpack, should shower, should do something productive to shake off the fog of travel and emotion. Instead, she stayed where she was, knees pulled to her chest, replaying the words she’d sent and the ones she hadn’t.
Her phone rang.
She flinched, then picked it up before she could overthink it. “Hey,” she said, keeping her voice neutral.
“Hey,” Luke said. He sounded tired. Not postgame tired—something heavier. “Do you have a minute?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I do.”
There was a brief pause, the kind that felt deliberate. Cassie imagined him standing in his loft, phone pressed to his ear, pacing the length of the windows that overlooked the river.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Luke began. “About the flight. About risk.”
