Small. Involuntary. A breathy little half-purr from the back of my throat I have absolutely zero authorization for.
Matteo’s eyes flicker. The hunger I have been trying to ignore since the moment he walked in surfaces for one undisguised second behind his pupil, and then he physically, visibly, talks himself out of acting on it. The wrist of his glove tightens against my jaw. He breathes out through his nose.
Noted. Filed. Filed in a folder for later research, ideally in a private room with no witnesses.
“Santori.” Coach Declan, behind me, voice level. “We need to get back to drills.”
Matteo’s eyes do not leave mine. “Do you want me to stay, Pinky? I can sit on the bench. I will be no trouble.”
“Go.” I push the bouquet back into his hand, gentle. “You were going to run. With the boys. Yes?”
“Jude and Rémi. Eight-mile loop. We will swing back and pick you up at the rink when you are done.”
“Go,” I repeat. “I am fine. Drink already done. Coach will be done with me in an hour and you can punish me into a calorie surplus afterward.”
He grins.
Then his grin, the lazy unrepentant rom-com grin of him, slides a quarter inch toward something with much sharper teeth, and he leans across the boards toward me one more time — close enough that the cedar-and-snow of Coach Declan, behind me, has nothing to do with the burnt-orange-and-cinnamon-sugar that is, suddenly, the only thing in my entire respiratory system — and he pitches his voice just loud enough that the man at center ice can perfectly clearly hear every syllable.
“And Pinky.”
“Mm.”
“Next time you decide to skip breakfast for an unscheduled goalie practice, sweetheart, I will not hesitate to put you over my lap and turn that perky little ass of yours pink to match the hair. Yes?”
MY ENTIRE FACE GOES VOLCANIC.
In this kitchen. In this rink. With my coach. Listening.
“SHOO,” I splutter, both palms flat against his chest, shoving him with the full force of a woman who is, at this moment, technically being held together by adrenaline and bouquet fumes. “SHOO. GO RUN.”
He laughs. Properly laughs. He leans his forehead briefly against mine, presses his mouth to the corner of my temple, and murmurs against the small soft place under my ear, “Be good. Drink the smoothie before you get back on the ice. Promise me.”
“I promise. Get off me. Run. Have your hobby.”
“Hobby,” he repeats, delighted, and disappears off the boards toward the rink exit, the bouquet tucked carefully into the crook of his arm.
The rink exit door swings shut behind him.
I do not turn around. I do not, in any visible way, react to the fact that Coach Declan is still standing somewhere behind mewith whatever expression his face has decided to assemble in the past three minutes.
I lift the strawberry banana smoothie. I peel the wrapper off the straw with my teeth. I take a long, slow, deliberate pull.
It is, in the small petty private chamber of my chest, the best thing I have put in my mouth since I crossed customs at the airport.
Because Matteo Santori has, in the past nine minutes, done a thing that I am, only now, sitting on the boards of an empty pre-dawn rink with a borrowed bouquet still warm from his hand, realizing was a thing at all.
He stopped what he was doing.
He was in fitness gear. He was on his way to an eight-mile loop with the rest of his pack. He had a route. He had a schedule. He had a thing he was already in the middle of. And, somewhere between learning I was on the ice at four and arriving at the rink at four-twenty-seven, he detoured to a closed floral boutique, stood on a sidewalk in the cold rapping on the front window of a woman he had never met, paid for an extravagantly thought-out small bouquet, swung past a smoothie counter, and delivered both items to me at the gate of a hockey bench because, on the running tally inside his head, the calorie intake of a small pink-haired Omega had become a thing his morning would not feel correct without.
That is not the bare minimum.
That is intention.
The slow, deliberate, accumulating intention of an Alpha who has decided, without any visible deliberation, that the small comforts of the woman he is choosing are now standing instructions in his own daily routine.
Behind me, the silence of a coach who has just been thoroughly, deliberately, publicly out-Alphaed by his ownwinger at four in the morning rolls in the air like the residue of a hit nobody has yet acknowledged.
