Page 36 of Offside

“Eli set a very high bar.”

“What does second get me?”

“More patience when you don’t ice your shoulder.” I came around to face him and the reminder of what a distraction he was. Right there, close, looking up at me with those blue-gray eyes. “Almost done.” I was affected by him in the same way I always was, but there was also an ease establishing between us.

“Take your time,” he said. I looked back down at my clipboard and finished the assessment with focused professionalism.

I walked him through two modifications on the exercise sheet, demonstrating, and he watched my hands the whole time. Not my face. My hands. Why is that so sexy?

“Same time next week,” I said.

He took the sheet, studied it, then looked at me, and I thought, not for the first time and not for the last, about what it would be like if none of the reasons to stay away were reasons at all. If Griffin weren’t Griffin. If I didn’t work here. If we had met some other way in some other life and there was nothing stopping either of us from just kissing in a kitchen and seeing what happened next.

“Thanks, Maren,” he said.

“Don’t forget the ice.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, then gave a slight wave, and a wink as he left my office.

I stood in the treatment room after the door closed and breathed for a minute.

I stared at the ceiling and had it completely under control.

The Sidewinders beat San Jose 3–2 in overtime.

Ryan got the winner at four minutes on a feed from Cole, top corner, clean as anything. I was on the bench and I knew before it happened. I’d watched him do it in practice enough times to recognize how he set his feet, the weight transfer, the almost imperceptible pause, and I had half a second to think yes before the puck hit the net and the arena noise arrived all at once like a wave breaking. Griffin came all the way from the other end of the ice and grabbed Ryan around the neck, and Ryan caught his arm and held on.

On his way off the ice Ryan peered through the glass and found me and winked.

It went directly to my core and took up residence there.

I was still buzzing on the plane home. I was sitting between Griffin and Ryan at Griffin’s insistence. Part of me thought he didn’t want me sitting with any other guys from the team, but we were also chatting a bunch before takeoff. Griffin and Ryan always sat together. Griffin had the window, obviously I had the middle, Ryan had the aisle because he needed the legroom. Griffin talked through the overtime save sequence in technical, loving detail until somewhere over Nevada he decided he was done, headphones on, ball cap pulled low, asleep inside three minutes the way he’d been able to sleep anywhere since we were kids.

Griffin passing out left me four inches from Ryan Lindqvist in the low hum of a red-eye cabin with nowhere to look that wasn’t him or the seat back in front of me.

I pulled out my Kindle.

I was four chapters into The Long Way to Lakeview, which I’d been saving for a travel day, and I’d hit the scene where the hero finally said the thing we’d all been waiting for him to say for two hundred pages when I became aware that Ryan was reading my screen.

Not obviously. Just there. I felt it before I saw him.

I tilted the Kindle slightly toward him without looking up. “Do you want to read it or just hover?”

“Dani Cade,” he said.

I turned to look at him. “You know her books,” I said.

“My mom and Anna had a theory. About what men needed to read to understand women.” He said it without any defensiveness, which made it funnier. “They were right.” He shrugged.

He reached into the bag under the seat in front of him and came up with a paperback. The Innkeeper’s Terrible Idea by Cal Beckett, the cover a watercolor of a snow-covered building with warm light in the windows. The spine was cracked in three places. There was a boarding pass stub sticking out somewhere in the middle.

I considered it for a moment, then looked at him. “Small town.”

“Small town,” he confirmed.

“I cannot decide if that’s the most or least surprising thing about you.”

“I find it restful.” He set it on his knee. “You read sports romance.”