Page 65 of The Grumpy Defenseman
My photographer’s brain catalogued the composition automatically: tightframe, low light, two people choosing the part of the building where no one could turn them into evidence.
Then his mouth found the curve of my neck, and my photographer’s brain shut down entirely, replaced by a system with fewer opinions and better priorities.
He set me on the edge of the desk. His hands bracketed my hips, thumbs tracing the line of my waist with a slow precision that made my breath catch.
I pulled at his shirt, still damp from the workout, clinging to muscle my hands had been aching to map for weeks. He helped me, shrugging out of it with a motion that revealed the body underneath by degrees.
I ran my palms across his chest.
Scars I had not seen before. A raised line along his ribs from a skate blade. A faded mark on his shoulder from something he would probably dismiss as nothing. Evidence of a career spent absorbing impact so other people did not have to.
My hand found his and turned it over.
There was a groove worn into the heel of his right palm where his stick tape rolled against it: a permanent ridge in the skin from years of the same grip, the same motion, the same devotion repeated until it had become part of him. The calluses around it had shaped themselves to the stick whether or not the stick was in his hand.
I rested my thumb on the groove.
Read it.
His breath caught in a way I did not think he had intended, and I understood that nobody had done that before. Nobody had looked at the mark of his whole life inside his hand and recognized it.
He watched me touch him with an expression that undid me. Not only want, though that was there, heavy in his eyes. Something underneath it. Wonder. Like he had spent so long defended that someone choosing to enter gently felt impossible.
“Stay with me,” I whispered.
Not a request about tonight.
Abouteverything.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I believed him.
That was the dangerous part.
I kissed the scar along his ribs, and his hand closed around the edge of the desk hard enough to make the wood complain. The sound went straight through me.
“Sam.”
My name in his mouth had changed again. Not warning. Not question. More like the last piece of control he had left was using my name as a handhold.
I looked up at him.
The hallway light cut across one side of his face, leaving the rest in shadow. He looked too controlled for what was happening between us, except for the pulse moving hard at his throat and the way his breath kept breaking before he could catch it.
I reached for him.
He caught my wrist gently.
Not stopping me.
Slowing me.
His thumb moved over my pulse, the same place he had touched in the parking garage, and the memory of that concrete pillar and his mouth at my neck hit me with enough force to make my knees tighten around his hips.
His eyes sharpened.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
