CHAPTER 1

Mia POV

I didn't expect to find anyone in my father's office at eleven o'clock at night. The arena was empty. That was the whole point.

My father had complained about being sick and I was supposed to have dropped his medication hours ago on his table but I'd spent twelve hours in the hospital. Too busy to attend to anyone.

All I wanted to do was drop them, grab my keys that I'd left in his drawer and drive home without talking to anyone.

But the light was on and the man in my father's chair wasn't my father.

He had his feet up on the mahogany desk. A suit jacket draped over the back of the chair, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and my dad's laptop on his lap.

Cole Ryder. Everyone in this city knew that name. Three Stanley Cup rings, two MVP seasons. The kind of player that made crowds stand before he even touched the puck.

And then, eighteen months ago, he was just gone, no farewell game, no press conference. One day he was on the ice and the next, he was my father's assistant coach, walking with a limp nobody dared ask about.

He was the kind of handsome that made you angry at yourself for noticing. I'd spent two years building walls so high that no one could get near me, and this man made them feel thin every single time he walked into a room.

What could he be doing in the office? I took in a breath and shoved the door open.

He raised his head, his steel blue eyes landed on mine and stayed there. Not on my body, not on my lips, but on my eyes like he was deciding something.

The words I had planned to say hung in my throat immediately.

"Office is closed," I forced the words out, crossing my arms. "What are you doing here?"

His brows raised. "What are YOU doing here?"

I rolled my eyes. "I'm the coach's daughter, I have every right to be here."

"That's not the flex you think it is," he mumbled, jaw tightening.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You've been coming in through the side entrance for three weeks," he said, not breaking eye contact with me. "You leave your keys in the third drawer every time, you always forget them. You're not here for your father, you're here because you don't want to go home."

The accuracy of that hit like cold water, I crossed my arms tighter. "You don't know anything about me."

He chuckled. "I know you haven't said a word to your father in two weeks. I know you worked a double shift today because Ramirez called in sick. And I know the medication on that desk has been sitting there since Tuesday."

My mouth went dry. "Have you been watching me?"

Something moved across his face, not quite a smile. "It's a small arena.” He shrugged.

"You need to leave. Now." I stepped closer. My heart pounding in my chest. If Coach Vance, my father, found him in the office then he would find out that I hadn't dropped the medication he had asked me to.

The order was to lock the door after I had dropped it and that was what I was planning to do until I met him.

I wasn't ready for another long tale of how I was.

He didn't move. Instead, his lips curved into a lazy smile. "Or what? You'll tell daddy?"

I felt my jaw tighten. "Or I'll call security."

A lie.

"You mean Gary? The sixty-eight year old who was snoring through the third period last Tuesday?" He swung his legs off the desk and stood.

The room changed. That was the only way to describe it. He didn't move fast or make noise, he just stood up and suddenly there was less air. He was tall in the way that made you aware of your own smallness. Not threatening, just his... present like he took up space on purpose.

He walked around the desk and kept walking towards me until my back hit the wall.

The air left my lungs, I forgot how to breathe and then remembered I wasn't supposed to want to. My back was flat against the wall, nowhere to go. My brain was telling me to shove him, but my body was not listening to my brain.

He planted one hand on either side of my head, his palms flat against the wall, he didn't touch me not once. But I could feel the heat coming off him like standing too close to a fire. He smelled like whiskey and clean soap and something underneath both of those things that I didn't have a name for, something that made my pulse do something embarrassing.

"You're not supposed to be here," my voice cracked. Damn it. "If Coach Vance sees..."

"And you're not supposed to be a spoiled rich kid..." He cut off, tilting his head. "Playing doctor while hiding behind your daddy's name but here we are."

‘Spoiled rich kids,’ I scoffed, trying to push him away but he was stronger. Just felt like I was hitting rocks.

He had no idea, he had no fucking idea about the bruises I used to cover with concealer.

No idea about the restraining order I kept folded in my wallet. No idea that "daddy" hadn't paid my rent in three years and never once asked if I was eating.

"You don't know shit about me," I whispered. "So don't come here and tell me that..."

"Shh," he said, his finger pressed lightly against my lips and I was so surprised by the gentleness of it that I stopped talking. I searched his face for one second, just one, something that looked like real worry moved through his expression. Like whatever was about to happen, he didn't want it to happen to me.

Then I heard it, footsteps echoing in the hallway.

"Why is the light still on?" A voice barked.

Oh no. That was my father.

Cole moved fast. His warm calloused hands found my wrist, surprisingly gentle as he pulled me toward an old media booth

Oh God.

My hands flayed in front of my face, trying to get the cobwebs away from my hair.

The door closed just as my father's shadow passed under the main office door.

Good, I turned to face him in the dark.

‘Wrong move,’ I thought.

There was no space, his chest was against mine, warm through the thin fabric of his shirt. I could feel his ribs expand when he breathed. His chin was above my head. His breath moved through my hair and I stood very, very still, like if I didn't move, none of this would be real.

My hands were flat against his chest, I could feel muscle and bone underneath my palms, and beneath all of that, a heartbeat.

Fast, too fast for someone who was standing perfectly still and pretending to be completely unbothered. His heart was pounding just as hard as mine was, he was just better at hiding it on his face.

I could feel every inhale he took, every exhale. His hand stayed on my lower back, holding me still.

"Don't move," he breathed.

I couldn't if I tried.

Then my father's voice echoed through the wall, “Agreed to the trade. Harrison is pushing hard, but Marcus comes with baggage."

Another voice. The assistant GM. "Baggage we can manage. He scores. That's all anyone cares about."

My blood went cold, Marcus?

Cole's thumb brushed my lower lip. I should have pulled away, any reasonable person would have pulled away.

"You have no idea what you're doing to me," he murmured, his voice barely above a breath.

I looked at his mouth. Then I made the mistake of looking at his eyes. Dark, steady and patient, like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be. But my chest ached with something I didn't have a name for.

I almost told him.

Then my father laughed outside loud, the way he only laughed when a deal was closing. "Perfect, finalize it. Marcus is exactly what this team needs."

Marcus.

It was a common name. It could be anyone. It had to be anyone else.

Cole felt my body change before I could stop it. Every muscle pulled tight, my hands curled into fists against his chest.

"Hey." His voice shifted, the softness from a second ago was still there but something else moved underneath it. His hand cupped my jaw. "Look at me."

I couldn't, my ears were ringing.

CHAPTER 2

Cole POV

I almost kissed her. I almost kissed Mia Vance, my head coach's daughter, completely off-limits, carrying something heavy in her eyes that she worked hard to hide and the worst part was, I had been thinking about doing it for three weeks. Tonight just almost made it real.

If she hadn't pulled back first, I would have crossed every line I spent eighteen months building.

Her father's voice faded down the hallway. The closet went silent and she was still pressed against me, her breath uneven, her body trembling for reasons I didn't understand yet.

I had my hand on her jaw. My thumb on her lip. Her fingers curled into my shirt like she wanted to kiss me too.

Then she turned her face away.

My jaw tightened.

"Don't," she whispered.

I let go immediately as I stepped back, putting a distance between us.

My heart was slamming against my ribs like I had just played five periods of overtime on a broken knee with nothing left in the tank.

Stupid. So incredibly, embarrassingly stupid.

She was off limits for a hundred reasons and the loudest one was the one standing ten feet away behind a closed door.

I had promised myself when I took this job that I would keep my head down, do the work, collect the paycheque and survive the season. Then I would figure out what came next for a man who used to be somebody and was now a footnote with a limp.

David Vance, her father.

That was reason enough to step back. That was reason enough to walk out of this booth, go home, pour a drink, and make peace with the fact that some things were permanently off the table.

I looked down at my knee. The one that ached every morning, the one that popped in the cold, the one that had ended everything.

I didn't blame the game, I never blamed the game. I blamed the man on the other side of that wall. But she didn't know that and she didn't need to, not tonight.

And now this. Her in the dark, those green eyes and that sharp tongue, the way her whole body had locked up when she heard that name through the wall. She was carrying something heavy, and I wanted against every sensible thought in my head to help her carry it.

I hated that.

I hated that she made me want things I had no right to want. I hated that she made me forget, for about thirty seconds in a cramped dark booth, exactly who her father was and what he had taken from me.

Some things couldn't be forgiven, some lines couldn't be uncrossed, but I still wanted to kiss her anyway.

She slipped out of the closet first, and didn't turn back to look at me. "Lock the door," she said, trying to hide the way her voice shook. But I heard it. She walked out of the office like nothing happened. I stayed behind, counted to sixty. Pressed the back of my head against the wall and stared at the ceiling.

Avoid her, I told myself. Keep your head down, do the job and survive the season.

I had been telling myself the same thing for three weeks.

It was working great.

*****

The next morning, I was on the ice before sunrise, running drills with the junior affiliate, a bunch of kids who thought they were gods because they got drafted in the third round.

My job was to keep them from destroying each other before the season started. Three Stanley Cup rings on my shelf at home, and this was what I was doing with my mornings.

I was the assistant coach.

I said that to myself every day like it might hurt less if I got used to it. It didn't.

"Again," I barked. "Faster on the breakout. You're skating like my grandmother."

They laughed, but I didn't. My knee ached, it always ached. The cold made it worse but I refused to wear a brace. A brace meant admitting I was broken and I would rather be limp than admit anything.

I scanned the stands before I even knew I was doing it, an old habit or a new one.

Mia wasn't there.

Good, I told myself. And then hated that I'd had to tell myself that at all.

I was engrossed in my thoughts when I heard screaming. Fucks sake. Carter and Reeves. They were both nineteen and still acted stupid. Carter slashed Reeves across the shins, and Reeves dropped his glove and threw a punch.

I blew the whistle. "Enough."

They didn't stop. Carter grabbed Reeves by the jersey. Reeves swung wild, missed, hit me instead... His elbow connecting with my ribs.

I stumbled back. My skate caught a rut in the ice.

I went down hard. .my left leg twisted underneath me. The same knee.

The same sound, a wet pop that I heard before I felt it. Pain exploded up my thigh, my hip, white and hot and familiar in the worst way.

I stifled the scream. Pressed my palm over my knee and felt it already beginning to swell beneath my hand. Oh no.

In a flash I was twenty-eight again. Same ice, same sound, same fire in my leg and the same sick feeling of knowing that something was over that could never be undone.

My breath came out in uneven pulls.

"Coach?" Carter called, his face going pale. "Oh shit. Coach, I'm sorry..."

"Get off the ice," I forced out. "Both of you. Now."

4yThey scrambled. The rest of the team followed. Within thirty seconds, the rink was empty, leaving me alone, flat on the back staring at the scoreboard that hadn't changed in years.

My knee was on fire. My chest was tight with anger. I should have left them to their stupidity.

And now, I couldn't even stand. I was still too proud to ask for help.

Eighteen months, eighteen months of physical therapy, of injections, of lying to myself that I could still be part of this world without paying for it and now this. Two kids who wouldn't listen.

I couldn't remain lying on the floor forever. I needed to stand up. I tried but my legs bucked, hitting the ground.

I exhaled.

I remained on the ice, the cold seeping through my clothes and I thought about her. Mia. The way her body pressed against me.

This was the wrong moment to be thinking about her but the moment her face flashed in my memory, somehow my heart relaxed.

I heard someone running on the concourse.

"Cole?"

Her voice. Of course it was her.

CHAPTER 3

Mia POV

I ran.

I told myself I was running because it was my job. Because I was the only medical staff on site. Because if something happened and I hadn't responded, there would be paperwork. I told myself all of that very firmly while my heart was doing something completely different.

I shoved open the door to the medical ward.

Cole was flat on his back on the examination table, one arm draped over his eyes, jaw clenched so hard I could see it from the doorway.

He was lucky I found him when I did. He was lying on the ice like he had all the time in the world, too proud to make a sound, too stubborn to admit he needed anything. In my years of medicine, I had treated exactly two types of patients: those who complained too much and those who would rather die quietly than ask for help. Cole Ryder was aggressively the second kind.

"You really can't do anything without me, can you?" I teased.

Cole didn't move. "Go away, Mia."

"Go away?" I repeated. "I'm the only medical staff on site. You're on my table so you're my problem."

I snapped on the glove. He finally lifted his arm. Those steel blue eyes pinned me with a look that should have come with a warning label. "I didn't ask for you."

"And I didn't ask for my father to hire a fossil with a death wish." I said. A small laugh came out of him. I pulled up a stool. "Let me see the knee."

He didn't move.

"Cole, the knee. Now."

His eyes widened at my tone. No one talked to him like this.

I'd seen the way rookies stammered around him. The way my father's Vincent shiver when Cole entered a room.

But I wasn't a rookie. A legendary hockey player with a bad temper didn't scare me.

He groaned and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Every movement cost him... I could see it in the way he clenched his jaw, gripping the edge of the bed so tight that his knuckles turned white.

I knelt in front of him and rolled up the leg of his practice pants.

My breath caught.

His knee was like a roadmap. Six surgical scars, no seven. Two of them are old enough to have faded, the rest looks newer. The kneecap itself sat slightly wrong, pulled to one side by what must have been years of compensated movement. The muscle on his left thigh was noticeably smaller than his right, the kind of atrophy that happened when a joint was avoided, when the body learned to route around the damage.

But it was one scar that stopped me.

Long, diagonal, running from below the kneecap upward and to the left. I had seen this pattern before, in trauma cases. In patients who had been operated on under emergency conditions or worse, in patients who had been sent back into activity too early, before the tissue could bind.

A good surgeon didn't leave a scar like this, a rushed one did.

"What happened to you?" I whispered.

He shrugged. "None of your business."

I looked at the scar again, something nagged at the back of my mind, something I couldn't place yet.

"Hockey happened," he said, voice flat. "Are you happy now? Can you do the job?”

I looked at his leg, then him. I looked at the way his left leg sat slightly crooked, the muscle atrophied compared to the right. At the exhaustion behind his eyes that had nothing to do with sleep.

You didn't become an assistant coach because you wanted to," I said slowly. "You became one because it's the closest you can get."

I had known it somewhere in the back of my mind since the first time I saw him watching the players on the ice with that expression. The one he wiped off his face the second he noticed anyone looking. You can't play. And it is killing you every single day.

He rolled his eyes. " I became one because your father offered me a job."

"No." I shook my head. "You took it because standing at the edge of the ice is better than standing in a house somewhere pretending it doesn't exist."

His jaw tightened like I had hit something real.

"Shut up!" his hands curled into fists. "You don't know anything about me."

He didn't want to confront the truth or he just hated that I saw through him. I never knew he went through that. Watching others play, must have been killing him.

And yet, he swallowed the pain and never complained.

Cole grabbed my wrist, his hold firm. His thumb pressed against my pulse point, where my heart was betraying me by racing.

"Stop," he snapped. "Whatever pity party you're throwing for me, stop. I hate pity. I hate people looking at me like I'm broken."

He dropped my wrist and sighed, raking his hands through his hair. "I'm fine."

I opened my mouth to fire back. He wasn't fine and he didn't need to pretend with me, he didn't need to wear a mask around me.

But before I could bring the words out, the TV wall blinked on. Someone in the front office must have patched through the feed.

A press conference.

My father stood on a podium, a big smile on his face. My hands paused on Cole's knee. Beside him, Harrison Cole, the team owner.

And between them…

My hands stopped moving entirely.

I knew that face before I heard the name. I would know it in any crowd, in any light, in any country I ran to. Clean-shaven, that perfect black hair and that smile, the one that tilted just slightly to the left, the one that made interviewers lean forward and fans cheered and every person in his world believed he was something good.

The smile he had worn while his hand was wrapped around my throat.

"Marcus Webb," my father said into the microphone, proudly, beaming. "Our newest addition."

Marcus Webb.

The name landed in my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

He knew I was here, he had to know. My father bragged about me to every player who walked through those doors. "My daughter, the doctor." Marcus had heard that exact phrase a hundred times when we were together, always said in the same tone.

This was not a coincidence.

Marcus stepped to the microphone. His voice washed over me like ice water.

No, my father wouldn't do this. He couldn't. He couldn't bring the same man that I complained about to the same vicinity I was. He knew I had been running from Marcus.

He knew that the reason I had done my internship here was because I just couldn't keep running anymore and I was broke.

Yes, he didn't care but this was the worst that he could do to me.

"I'm grateful for the opportunity," Marcus said, eyes glinting with malice. "This is a fresh start, a new family and I can't wait to get on the ice and prove myself."

No. No. No.

My hands were shaking. I pressed them against my thighs to hide it. My breath came too fast. The room felt small. Smaller than the closet last night. Smaller than the car Marcus locked me inside while he screamed about dinner being cold.

"Mia."

Cole's voice, distant at first, like hearing someone call your name from the bottom of a pool.

"Mia, look at me."

I couldn't. The screen was still playing. Marcus was laughing at something my father said. His hand clapped my father's shoulder, friendly. The same hand that had…

"Hey!" Cole's hand cupped my face, turned my head and forced me to meet his eyes. "Whatever you're seeing right now, you're not seeing it alone. I'm right here."

I stared at him, my breath was still coming wrong. But something in those words, the particular way he said them, like a man who knew what it was to be somewhere terrible alone helped me a bit

I held onto that.

I wanted to tell him everything. The bruises. The hospital visits I faked. The restraining order I couldn't afford to enforce because Marcus always found me anyway.

I pointed at the screen instead.

"That man," I said. My voice was very quiet. "I know him."