Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Four: Practice Ice

**Delaney**

The team let family and "significant others" watch morning skate on Thursdays, which was how Delaney found herself sitting alone in the cold, half empty stands of an 8 a.m. practice, holding a coffee she didn't want, watching Roman Kade run drills like the ice had personally wronged him.

She hadn't planned on coming. Priya had suggested it, in that clipped, unbothered voice she used for things that were actually orders. "Shows commitment. Wives and girlfriends section, row two. Wear the blue coat, it reads better on camera than the black one."

So here she was, in the blue coat, watching a grown man skate suicides at dawn, and finding against every intention she owned, that she couldn't look away from him.

There was something different about Roman on the ice than off it. Off it, he moved like every motion cost him something, careful, deliberate, like a man perpetually bracing for impact. On it, he was loose. Fast. He hit the boards on a drill and popped back up laughing, actually laughing, at something one of the rookies said, and Delaney sat there with her coffee going cold and thought, "I have never once written him like this."

That was the problem, she realized. She'd spent a year writing Roan Vale as a wound with a jersey number. Careful. Controlled. Tragic in the way that made readers want to fix him. She had never once imagined him laughing at 8 a.m. over a joke about a rookie's skate laces, and it unsettled her more than she wanted to admit, because the real version was harder to keep at arm's length than the fictional one had ever been.

"You're staring," said a voice next to her, and Delaney nearly spilled her coffee. Priya slid into the seat beside her, sunglasses on despite the indoor lighting, scrolling her phone with one hand. "Which is good. Keep doing that. It reads as smitten."

"I wasn't performing."

Priya glanced up, actually looked at her for a second, and something shifted in her expression, curious, assessing. "I know," she said. "That's what I'm telling you. It's a problem."

"Excuse me?"

"Three months, Voss. That's the deal. I've been doing this a long time, and I know what an act looks like, and I know what this looks like, and they're not the same thing." Priya went back to her phone, apparently done delivering that particular grenade. "Just... be careful. He doesn't do this. Ever. Whatever this is."

Delaney didn't have an answer for that, so she didn't give one. On the ice, Roman took a pass, wired a shot into the top corner, and turned to find her in the stands before the puck had even finished rattling the mesh, like some part of him had been tracking her the whole time without letting on. He didn't smile. He just looked, for one long second, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with cameras or contracts, and Delaney had to look down at her coffee to keep from doing something humiliating with her face.

**Roman**

He knew the exact moment she walked into the stands because his whole body knew it before his eyes confirmed it, some old animal instinct rerouting itself around a woman he'd met three weeks ago, and he told himself, skating the next drill, that this was normal. Athletes clocked crowds. It was a survival skill. It meant nothing.

He scored on Halloran during a two-on-one and looked up at the stands before he'd even decided to, and found her watching him with an expression he didn't have a name for, something unguarded that vanished the second she noticed him noticing.

After practice, showered, hair still damp, he found her waiting by the tunnel exit, coffee cup crushed and empty in her hand like she'd needed something to do with her fingers.

"You skate like a different person," she said, before he'd said anything at all.

"Different how."

"Off the ice you move like everything's a threat assessment. On it, you're..." she paused, searching for the word, "...unguarded. Which is a strange thing to say about a man whose entire job is hitting people."

"Ice is the only place I don't have to think about what I look like doing it." He said it before he'd decided whether it was safe to say, the way things kept happening to him around her lately, honesty arriving before caution could stop it at the door. "Everywhere else I'm managing something. Cameras, or a room, or Priya's blood pressure. Out there it's just the puck and the play and nobody's watching to grade the performance."

"I was watching."

"I know. I could feel it." He hadn't meant that to come out as bare as it did, and judging by the way her breath caught, audibly, in the quiet hallway, she'd heard exactly how bare it was too.

"Priya thinks you're not acting," she said, quiet, like she was testing the weight of the sentence before committing to it fully.

"Priya's usually right about things like that." He stepped closer, close enough to see the coffee stain on her lip that she hadn't noticed, close enough that the tunnel's fluorescent light stopped mattering as much as the two feet of space between them. "You said no feelings. I agreed. I meant it when I said it."

"And now?"

"Now I think I lied to both of us, and I'm trying to figure out how much of a problem that actually is." He reached out, slow, giving her every chance to step back, and brushed his thumb at the corner of her mouth where the coffee had left a mark, and felt her breath stop entirely under his hand. "You've got a little... here."

"Roman."

"I know." He didn't move away. Neither did she. "Say the word and I'll go back to being careful. I'm good at careful. I've had a lot of practice."

She didn't say the word. She stood there in the tunnel with her coffee crushed in one hand and his thumb still resting at the corner of her mouth, and the silence between them stretched out long enough that Roman understood, with the same clean certainty he felt right before a hit landed, that the rule they'd built together in a conference room three weeks ago had already quietly stopped applying to either of them.

"This is a terrible idea," she finally said, but she said it the way you'd say something true and inconvenient rather than something you actually wanted to stop.

"The worst," he agreed, and didn't move his hand.