TOO CLOSE

[ Scarlett POV ]I found out about Lena Marsh by accident. Which somehow made it worse.Thursday afternoon, early home from a light recovery session. I was making coffee in the kitchen, mine was running slow, so I'd used his machine, which I'd been doing for two weeks without asking and which he'd never mentioned, when his laptop pinged on the counter. He'd left it open before going upstairs to change.I wasn't snooping. I want to be very clear about that. I was standing six feet away, minding my own business, waiting for coffee. The notification just appeared on screen and the words were right there in the preview and my brain read them automatically before I could look away.NORTHGATE WOMEN'S ATHLETIC BOARD, CASE FILE: MARSH, L.That was it. Just a subject line from an old email thread. The preview cut off there. I couldn't see anything else.I stared at it for two full seconds. Then I poured my coffee, went upstairs, and sat on my bed.Marsh. Lena Marsh.I'd come across that name o

MIDNIGHT ICE

[ Cade POV ]I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed for an hour and a half, staring at the ceiling, and eventually accepted that this was not a problem sleep was going to solve tonight.The thing stuck in my head was small. It was a technical thing. Her left edge, there was something wrong with how she loaded it at the top of a crossover, a compensation pattern that worked because of her speed but wouldn't hold up forever. I'd clocked it in practice today and said nothing because we'd been running a team drill and pulling her aside would have made it into something, and I was still navigating how to correct her without it becoming a statement.Today she'd gone down. Third rep, wrong moment, caught the edge and hit the ice hard. She was back up in two seconds, waved off the assistant coach, kept going. Nobody mentioned it. She didn't want them to.But I'd seen it and I couldn't stop running it.At eleven-thirty I got up, grabbed my skates, and drove to the rink.She was already there.Of cours

AFTER MIDNIGHT

[ Scarlett POV ]I stayed on the ice for a while after he left.Not drilling. Just skating. Slow, easy laps, the kind where your body moves on its own and your brain does what it wants. The rink was completely empty and completely quiet and the ice was already starting to pick up the marks from our footwork, small cuts in the surface that caught the light at certain angles.She was someone who got hurt. Because I didn't do enough to stop it.He'd said it like he'd been carrying it for a long time. Like the weight of it had shaped the way he stood.I skated another lap. Thought about the way he'd turned away before telling me, that half-second of composing himself, the choice to turn back slowly and look at me straight instead of avoiding it. That was not a man who found honesty easy. That was a man making himself do something hard.I drove home. His car was already in the driveway. The house was dark downstairs.I went in quietly. Dropped my bag. Stood at the bottom of the stairs for

All Chapters of Her Ice, His Rules: Chapter 11 - Chapter 13

TOO CLOSE

MIDNIGHT ICE

AFTER MIDNIGHT