Page 254 of Wild Card 13

Her tail swept the floor.

Ty crouched outside the office and set Dottie’s pup cup on the floor. The sticker readDOTTIE GIRLin Naomi’s neat block letters. Dottie lowered her face into it with immediate, undignified joy.

Ty stood and held my coffee out.

I got up to take it. The old version of me would have stayed behind the desk and made him cross the room. The old version of him would have done it before remembering he had promised not to.

I reached for the cup. Our fingers did not touch this time. His gaze dropped briefly to the desk behind me, then returned to my face.

“You’re drawing,” he remarked.

My heart lurched hard enough that I almost lost my grip on the coffee.

On the right side of my desk, half tucked beneath an event binder, lay the sketchbook I had opened before either of them arrived. I had meant to make a list. That was all. A practical list. A useful list. A list of vendor deadlines or roster availability or the latest playoff scenarios that made everyone in hockey operations talk like people discussing weather damage.

Instead, I had found myself drawing the lake.

Not Alder Lake.

Not the river trail.

The view from his living room windows, the one I had seen the night everything changed and nothing got fixed. The dark sweep of frozen water. The distant tree line. The low edge of the porch cutting across the foreground. I had drawn it from memory, lightly at first, so lightly I could have pretended the lines were nothing.

I looked at the sketchbook as if it had betrayed classified information. “It’s nothing,” I said.

Ty’s gaze held on the page, but not greedily. Not like he was taking it from me. More like he had stumbled across a quiet animal in the woods and knew better than to move too fast. “I always liked your pencil sketches,” he said.

“You say that like you have refined artistic opinions,” I mocked.

His mouth curved. “I have one refined artistic opinion.”

“Which is?”

“That you make quiet things look like they’re keeping secrets.”

The room tilted slightly.

Bea coughed into her hand.

I stared at Ty.

He stared back for one beat, then lifted his free hand just a little. “I am not even sorry for that one.”

“You should be.”

“I know.”

The restraint bothered me more than the flirting. The flirting Iknew what to do with. I could deflect it, flatten it, roll my eyes until it lost power. The restraint left me alone with the fact that I wanted him to stay.

Ty glanced toward Bea. “Sorry for interrupting wedding diplomacy.”

Bea lifted the pencil. “If you have strong feelings about whether Ezra Thomas and Rafa Ribeiro should be seated within stabbing distance of the same bread basket, now is the time.”

Ty considered this with visible seriousness. “Depends on the bread.”

I pressed my lips together.

Bea pointed at him. “That was unfortunately helpful.”