Mara pressed her hand over her face. She was smiling and trembling and her heart was hammering and she was forty-eight years old lying in her own bed at five thirty in the morning with a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had just woken her up with her mouth and done things to her body that Mara hadn't known she wanted. The absurdity of it. The glory of it.
"You're going to kill me," Mara said.
"What a way to go."
Lex's arm wrapped around Mara's waist and pulled her close, and they lay tangled together in the grey morning light while Goldie slept on her dog bed in the corner, undisturbed. From the window, Mara could hear the first birds of the morning and the distant sound of the ocean, the same two-note rhythm that had scored every morning of her life in Phoenix Ridge. The house smelled like coffee from the automatic timer and the salt air that crept through the old window frames and the warm scent of Lex's skin that had become as familiar to Mara as her own.
Mara turned in Lex's arms and faced her. She studied the strong jaw, the dark lashes, the small scar on her knuckle, the tattoo of the compass rose that peeked above the edge ofthe sheet. Every detail was becoming memorized. Catalogued. Precious.
"Does anyone know?" Mara asked. "On the team?"
Lex's fingers continued their patterns on Mara's hip. "No one knows. But I think Elise suspects."
"How much does she suspect?" Mara's fingers stilled on Lex's collarbone.
"Enough that she stopped asking where I go at night and started leaving the hotel room door unlocked."
Mara's stomach tightened. The warmth of the bed, the afterglow of the orgasm, the golden safety of lying naked with Lex receded slightly as the professional part of her brain woke up and began running its calculations. Elise suspecting meant the locker room might suspect. The locker room suspecting meant it would reach ownership. Ownership meant Astoria. Astoria meant scandal. Scandal meant the end of everything Mara had rebuilt over years of careful, disciplined, wall-building work.
"We have to be more careful," Mara said.
"Or we could stop being careful."
Mara's stomach clenched. She knew that tone. She had heard it in team meetings when Lex was about to push back on a drill she thought was pointless, in press conferences when a reporter asked a question she thought was stupid. The tone of someone who had decided to say the hard thing and was not going to be talked out of it.
Lex shifted onto her side, her dark eyes finding Mara's with an intensity that made the bedroom feel smaller. "I want to be open about this, Mara. I don't want to sneak around and pretend you're just my coach during the day and then come to your bed at night like it's shameful. I hate leaving before dawn. I hate not being able to touch you at the rink. I hate the way you flinch every time someone walks past your office when I'm inside."
"I don't flinch." Mara pulled the sheet higher, a reflex as automatic as the denial.
"You flinch. Every time." Lex's hand stilled on Mara's hip. "I understand why. I respect your reasons. But I want more than stolen hours and locked doors, and I think you want more too."
"What I want doesn't change the reality of what we are." Mara heard her own voice go flat, professional, the coaching voice she used when a player was pushing past a boundary. She hated it. She hated using it with Lex, in her bed, with the sheets still warm from sex. "I'm your coach, Lex. The power dynamic alone would end my career."
"You're the woman I'm falling in love with."
The silence that followed was enormous. Mara felt the impact radiate through her chest, through her ribs, through the tender, terrified center of her heart that had been bracing for this moment since Boston. She had known it was coming. She had seen it building in the way Lex looked at her when they were alone, the shift from desire to devotion, from wanting to needing. She had seen it in the locker room after the game, in the way Lex held her against the equipment lockers and laughed with her face pressed against Mara's hair, in how her arms tightened as if she was afraid Mara might disappear if she let go.
Falling in love. Lex Landry, who had arrived in Phoenix Ridge with a reputation for short-lived flings and tabloid appearances and a rotating cast of beautiful women, was falling in love with her forty-eight-year-old coach in a town that smelled like salt water and construction dust.
The words she wanted to say pressed against the back of her teeth. Three words. Simple and true and terrifying and she swallowed them whole because saying them out loud would make this real, irreversibly real. She had built her life on control. On the careful management of risk and exposure and vulnerability. SayingI love youwould be handing Lex a weaponthat could destroy everything Mara had spent years rebuilding, and the fact that she trusted Lex not to use it made the terror worse, not better, because trusting someone that completely meant the loss would be total if it went wrong.
"Lex." Her voice cracked. "We can't go public. You know what would happen. The media would eviscerate us. The league would investigate. Astoria might support it or she might not, and if she doesn't, I lose my job. Not just this job. Every job. No one hires the coach who took advantage of her player."
"So we hide forever?"
"We hide for now. Until the season ends. Until we figure out what this is and how to protect it."
Lex's jaw tightened. The disappointment in her eyes was raw and unconcealed and Mara hated putting it there. Hated being the one who drew the lines, who built the walls, who couldn't say the three words pressing against her ribs because she was too afraid of what would happen when they escaped.
"I know this isn't what you want to hear," Mara said. She reached out and touched Lex's face, her thumb following the hard line of her jaw. Lex's skin was warm under her fingers. The morning stubble along her jawline was soft. "But I need you to trust me. I'm not saying never. I'm saying not yet. When the season ends, when the power dynamic changes, we'll figure it out. Together. But right now, going public could destroy both of us, and I refuse to let what happened with Sara happen again."
The mention of Sara hit home. Mara watched the frustration in Lex's eyes shift, soften, as it always did when Mara's history surfaced. Lex knew enough. She knew about the firing, the four years of rebuilding, the cost. She didn't push when Sara's name came up. It was one of the things Mara loved about her, the ability to be fierce and stubborn and demanding and then, in the space of a breath, gentle. Patient. Willing to wait because she understood what the waiting was protecting.
"And if I'm tired of hiding?"
"Then let me make it worth the wait."
Mara shifted down the bed. She positioned herself between Lex's thighs and looked up at the woman who had just told her she was falling in love, and the expression on Lex's face, frustrated and wanting and softening despite itself, made Mara's chest ache with a fierceness that stole her breath.
