He grinned like a monster and stepped out of the compromised pants, tossing them toward a chair with a resignation usually reserved for broken sticks.
“Backup pants,” he announced, pulling them out of his bag. “Always prepared for an emergency.”
“This was not the kind of emergency they were meant for,” Holly chirped at him, checking her hair and makeup in the mirror quickly.
“Disagree.”
“Three minutes,”she warned him.
Those three minutes devolved into chaos.
Nate nearly lost his balance hopping into his fresh pants, freeballing because hedidn’thave emergency boxers. Holly blotted the floor with tissues like she was trying to erase a crime scene. A bottle of hairspray rolled dramatically under the table, and neither of them had time to retrieve it. He tried to fix his hair using the reflection in his phone and somehow made it ten times worse.
Another knock. Louder this time.
“Two minutes!”
“Tell them we’re stretching!” Holly called back, voice pitched an octave higher than usual as Nate snorted unhelpfully at her choice of words.
Eventually, they both rushed for the door, arriving there at exactly the same time. And there, in the back of his surprisingly romantic head, Nate thought that had to be a sign. He stepped in front of her, reaching up to smooth a strand of hair away from her cheek. Her breathing was still uneven but her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed from everything they’d just done, and said, andsurvived.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
She nods. “Yeah. You?”
He leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to her lips without giving a fuck who was waiting for them or why.
“Best I’ve ever been,” he murmured, smitten. “Let’s go win ourselves an episode, Martinez.”
Walking back into the studio felt different.
Not ‘maybe the lighting changed’. Full-body, bone-deep different. Nate’d skated back onto plenty of rinks after a fight with adrenaline still in his veins, jaw aching, crowd roaring, but this was something else. His pulse wasn’t spiking from nerves. It was humming and warm, like he’d just won something no scoreboard could measure.
Holly’s hand stayed linked with his as they stepped out under the lights again, and he could feel the shift in the room almost instantly. No one pointed, but conversations stalled mid-sentence. A boom mic operator suddenly found the ceiling deeply fascinating. One of the backup dancers coughed suspiciously into her hand while trying not to grin. Nick gave them both a stoic once-over, then raised a brow in what passed as the Brit edit of a thumbs-up.
It was the exact same energy as a locker room when a player and his girl had clearly disappeared for ‘strategy talks’ and came back looking suspiciously satisfied. No one said it.Everyoneknew it.
Holly squeezed his fingers once in a sharp warning. He squeezed back, slow and smug. They walked to their mark beneath the scoreboard like two people who absolutely had notjust turned a dressing room upside down.Totallynormal. Completelyprofessional.
Not.
The studio lights flared overhead, and Indie swanned into position like she’d personally engineered every ounce of tension in the building. She held her cue cards to her chest and gave them both a look that was ninety percent host professionalism and ten percentI am going to dine out on this energy for weeks.
“Well,” she sang, drawing the word out with theatrical relish, “our couples certainly brought the heat tonight!”
Her gaze lingered on Nate and Holly just long enough to make one of the other male pros snicker.
Nate didn’t react. Not even a twitch. Internally? He was grinning like anidiot.He’d played in arenas with twenty thousand screaming fans. He’d scored in overtime. He’d been revered for knocking men flat and skating away without looking back.
This was better.
Indie lifted the first card, and the room quieted like someone had turned down the volume on the world.
“The couple leavingTake The Floortonight is…”
The pause stretched, delicious and cruel.
“Marco and Lila.”
