Not enough to look like anything.
Enough to anchor me.
Hold,the touch says.
“Coach.” My voice comes out admirably normal. “Anything you need me to do? Should I stick around for any otherinterviews, or can I get out of these pads before I marinate in my own glory?”
Declan’s mouth twitches.
Barely.
“You did phenomenally,” he says.
A simple sentence in the simplest possible voice, and somehow it crashes through my sternum like a Zamboni.
His palm leaves the boards and lands on my shoulder, broad, warm even through the chest plate, and squeezes once.
He leans in.
His scent finds me before his mouth does.
Cedarwood. Black coffee, hours old. Winter whiskey, even though I know he hasn’t had a drink tonight; it just lives in him. Cold leather. The clean, bracing bite of fresh snowfall lifts off a wool coat. It hits my reptile brain, and I have to actively, consciously not lean my whole face into the line of his throat like a feral idiot.
“Everything is fine,” he murmurs against my temple, voice pitched for me alone. “I’m handling some inquiries. You go enjoy the night. Have a drink on me.”
I tilt my head a fraction so my temple nearly grazes his jaw.
“One drink, or, like,severaldrinks?”
“If you get drunk,” he warns, with that buried-pride tone I have been borderline obsessed with since I was eighteen, “you are in considerable trouble.”
“So you’re telling me I’m getting shit-faced.”
The exhale that ghosts past my ear isalmosta laugh.
“O’Shea.”
“O’Rourke.”
He pulls back, just enough to give me his eyes. Emerald, exhausted, and proud, with that flicker behind them that no camera will ever catch.
“Thanks, Coach,” I whisper, dropping my voice so it stays between us, “for believing in me.”
His jaw works.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
He just nods, taps the boards once like a benediction, and tips his chin toward the tunnel.
Go.
Behind me, I hear his voice drop back into that low, glacial register as he turns to the suit.
I don’t catch the words, and truthfully don’t feel the need to.
The cold-eyed man can stew in whatever Declan’s about to feed him.
The rink ice is rougher now after sixty-plus minutes of carnage—chipped to hell near the crease, slushy at the blue line—and my blades chatter over it like teeth in a cold mouth. I aim for the tunnel. My pads slap my thighs with every stride. My braid swings against my back, half-disintegrated, releasing whiffs of pink cotton candy body mist and the vanilla protein powder I dry-shampooed into my roots that morning when I overslept.
