I let the moment stretch.
I am, above most other things, a man who understands timing.
“Pierced,” I say. “Yes or no.”
She stares at me.
For a full, magnificent ten seconds, she just stares, brow creased, genuinely lost, and I get to watch in real time as the question travels the distance as it lands; comprehension breaks across her face like a slow sunrise.
And right behind the comprehension comes the thing she is too late to lock down.
A flash of pure, undiluted mischief, lighting those storm-grey eyes from somewhere deep, there and bright and unmistakable before she manages to wrestle her expression back to neutral.
“Observant Motherfucker,” she says.
I fucking knew it. I am a genius, and a martyr, and the universe is real.
“Pinky.” I clasp a hand over my chest, mortally wounded, delighted, gone. “You are going to have me on my knees. Begging. Today. This is what you’ve done.” I am a shamelesscreature, and I have made peace with it. “I hope you understand that.”
It is, statistically, the kind of line that turns a woman off, far too fast, an Alpha showing every card in his hand. I brace for the eye-roll, the cold front, or the polite little wall.
Instead, she fights a smirk.
I watch her lose the fight. The corner of her mouth wins, tugging upward against her clear and stated wishes, and she tilts her head and looks up at me through those damp pink strands, and she says, with a slow, lazy, devastating evenness:
“I happen to like a man who isn’t afraid to get on his knees.”
The ice does not literally open and take me.
It only feels that way.
I tell myself I hallucinated it. I tell myself my pickled, piercing-obsessed brain manufactured the line and fed it to me as a kindness. But she is still looking at me, and there is a taunt fighting to live at the edge of her mouth, and her eyes have that bright, wicked spark turned all the way up.
I know, with a certainty that arrives low and hot and absolute, that Iris O’Shea was not joking.
Not even slightly.
She said exactly what she meant, and she is watching me cope with it.
Oh, I am in a staggering amount of trouble.
A whistle splits the rink in half.
“SANTORI.” Coach Declan’s voice rides the blast straight to me, and there is gravel in it now, the patience worn through. “Unless you are flirting with our goalie in some desperate bid to mine her for sympathy points after that loss, I strongly suggest you bring your bulk over here.”
And I should let it go.
Skate over. Take the laps. Be a professional, briefly, as a treat for everyone.
I do not do that.
I turn, and I grin at him across the ice, and I say it loud enough for the cheap seats.
“Oh, I was definitely flirting, Coach.” A beat, while I enjoy myself far too much. “And I genuinely don’t care what the other sector has to say about it. O’Shea’s on our team.”
“WHAT?”
The word goes off in roughly nine throats at once, a ragged, shocked chord, and it is not only the men.
