I’d said something about the chair being fine.
He’d made a sound that might have been disagreement and turned over, and I’d gone back to the chair like I’d done twice before, except this time when I’d sat down, I’d registered—actually registered—that my back was complaining in the specific way backs complained when you were over two hundred years old and had spent ten years playing professional hockey before spending another twenty standing behind benches, and the chair was designed by someone who’d never considered that a body might need to occupy it for longer than the time it took to put on shoes.
I’d lasted another forty minutes before my spine had made an executive decision about acceptable tolerances, and I’d moved to the far edge of the bed—on top of the covers, fully dressed,maintaining every possible boundary that could be maintained while still being in a position to hear if something went wrong in the night.
That had been the reasoning. The clear, professional, entirely defensible reasoning.
What I had not reasoned through—what I had specifically avoided reasoning through—was what my dragon would do with that proximity.
It had done what it always did when it decided something. It had made its case quietly, persistently, through channels I’d spent two centuries learning to monitor and ignore. The warmth in my chest that had started in the hospital parking lot. The hyperawareness of his breathing, his position, the small movements he made in sleep. The way my body had oriented itself toward his without consulting me about the decision, the way a plant turned toward light.
And now he was curved against my arm, and my dragon was making an argument that had nothing to do with concussion protocol and everything to do with the rightness that proximity to him produced—a sense of fit, of inevitability, that I recognized with the sick certainty of someone who’d felt it exactly once before and knew precisely what it meant.
No.
I said it internally, with the flat finality of someone delivering a verdict. My dragon stirred—not in protest, but in that patient, persistent way it had when it knew I was wrong and was prepared to wait me out.
I’d been wrong about Clara. I’d been catastrophically, irreversibly wrong in a way that had cost her everything and left me with one hundred years of scar tissue and the certainty that I would never, ever make that mistake again. I would never again allow someone close enough to become a target. I would never again trust my dragon’s certainty about bonds and mates andthe feeling of rightness that was currently radiating through my chest like heat from a banked fire.
Because the thing my dragon didn’t account for—the thing it had never had to account for in its long, uncomplicated existence—was what happened when the person you decided belonged to you became visible to the people who wanted to hurt you. What happened when proximity became a weapon. What happened when the thing you valued most in the world became the most efficient tool available to anyone who wanted leverage.
I’d learned that lesson in smoke and silence and a grief that didn’t have an end. I’d built everything that came after on top of that lesson. And I was not—I was absolutely not—going to learn it again with a twenty-three-year-old hockey player who’d already been hurt by one man who should have protected him and didn’t need another.
Dante made a small sound in his sleep—not distress, something softer than that—and shifted closer.
My body responded before I could stop it. My arm moved fractionally, accommodating his weight, and the warmth in my chest flared brighter, and for one unguarded moment I felt what my dragon had been trying to tell me all night: that this was right, that this fit, that every instinct I possessed was oriented toward the sleeping man pressed against my side in a way that had nothing to do with professional duty and everything to do with something older and more fundamental than duty had ever been.
Then I remembered the smell of smoke. The way Clara’s name had sounded in my mouth when I’d understood she was gone.
I looked at the ceiling and did not move my arm and waited for dawn with the discipline of a man who’d had two hundred years to get good at waiting.
The alarm went off at six-thirty. Dante stirred against my side, made a confused sound, and then seemed to register where he was and who he was pressed against.
He went very still.
Chapter seven
Scrum - Post-whistle pushing or confrontation between players.
Dante
I went very still.
My first coherent thought was that I was pressed against Theron Kincaid’s side like I’d been glued there, and my second coherent thought wasn’t really a thought so much as a full-body inventory of every point of contact between us—my chest against his arm, my stomach against his ribs, my hip against hiship—and the mortifying realization that the extremely obvious problem currently making itself known against the side of his thigh had been making itself known against the side of his thigh for an unknown number of hours.
I kept my breathing even. Didn’t move. Tried to work out whether there was any version of extracting myself from this situation that didn’t require him to not already know.
“Morning,” he said, and his voice had that rough edge it got first thing, lower than usual, and I felt it in my chest before I processed the word.
“Morning,” I managed.
I should have moved. That was the obvious play—acknowledge the awkwardness, apologize, get myself vertical, and deal with the physical situation in the bathroom like an adult. Instead, I lay there like an idiot, hyperaware of every inch of him, of the way his arm hadn’t moved away when I’d woken up, of the fact that he smelled like hotel soap and something underneath that I couldn’t name but my body seemed to have extremely strong opinions about.
My ribs ached. My face throbbed. My jaw felt like someone had used it for batting practice.
“How’s your head?” he asked, and I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was pretending not to notice or if he was genuinely focused on concussion protocol at six-thirty in the morning while I was having a full-body crisis pressed against his side.
“Fine,” I said. “Better. I mean—it hurts, but not worse.”
