Ignite Me, Ice Captain

To the outside world, Logan Pierce had been in a coma for close to four months. Yeah, he really wasn’t down to that state of oblivion. He was painfully aware of everything around him—the sharp tang of antiseptic clogging the air, the relentless beep of the monitor by his ear, the way the room tensed when someone new walked in. But opening his eyes meant facing the grim reality: he might never feel the glide of the blades against the ice, never sprint down the rink with a stick in hand. Hell, walking properly again wasn’t even a guaranteed deal. Very much aware of his surroundings, he knew when his locker room camaraderie spilled into his hospital room after his surgery, voices loud and full of forced optimism, tossing out inside jokes above his head, rehashed plays, and swearing up and down he’d be back on his skates in no time. Someone even raved about his last goal, the one that sealed the team’s win. They called it legendary. But they skirted around the fact that he’d risked putting the puck in the net knowing full well the human battering ram known as Johnson Abbey was barreling straight for him, stick c****d like a war hammer to prevent him from scoring that goal that determined the fate of the game. Any sane player would’ve ducked or dumped the ball to avoid Abbey’s hit. But Logan wasn’t wired to lose without a fight. After all, the ball was right there, just a flick away from the net. He had toe-pivoted, given his stick the final effort, and sent the puck sailing home just as Abbey’s stick came down like a guillotine. The bulldog was one second too late, or maybe Logan had simply been too determined to see the puck in before the ice came up to meet him and everything faded. Not only had Abbey bashed his head, he’d followed up with some cheap shots up till the point his legs gave up on him, tearing the patellar tendon and his ACL in his right knee, ending him in surgery, in a coma afterwards and possibly looking at the end of his career. He knew that somewhere along the way, his mom had pulled the plug on Bethlehem of Christ Medical Center, where he'd stayed for the greater part he'd been out, and had him transferred to Avery Medical Care. She’d insisted he needed a more specialized recovery, a little less chaos, and a lot more hope. And apparently, Dr. Avery Calloway was the best of the best—some kind of miracle worker for broken athletes. His mum even had the remarkable faith this doctor could make him normal again. You know, like a fairy godmother—wave her dainty glass wand and make everything magical: new knee and a clean bill of health. He’d already heard his surgeons’ verdict. He knew the odds were stacked against him. He just wished his mom would stop setting herself up for disappointment. There was one big problem with being stuck with Dr. Avery Calloway that seemed to have slipped off his mum’s radar when she made the decision on her. She was a rival, officially signed on to handle injured Glazier Titans. Camping with her was basically camping out with his team’s arch-nemesis. Just imagine—he could be surrounded by enemies, lying there helpless, just waiting for one of them to finish what Abby had started. But one undeniable upside his transfer brought was the absence of his teammates hovering around him the two days he’d been holed up at Avery’s. Either they haven’t received the memo, or none of them were brave—or stupid—enough to breach enemy territory without sticks, helmets, and a solid insurance policy. Then again, he wouldn’t put it past Dr. Calloway to have slammed the door in their faces if one or two had tried. From what he’d gathered from her voice, she was the no-nonsense type—the kind who’d rather pull out her own hair than tolerate a rowdy hockey team loitering around her patient like it was intermission at the rink. Well, the quiet and a chance to feed on his thoughts. That works for him. The sound of the door opening dropped into his consciousness. Instantly, his ears trained on the footsteps moving toward him, trying to pick out the individual. Dr. Calloway had only one nurse working with her on him, and he could distinguish between them by their footsteps—and their scent. Rose, the nurse, always carried a faint trace of lavender. Avery, Nothing. No perfume, no antiseptic, not even the sharp bite of mouthwash. A ghost in that sense, one his sharpened sense of smell could not pick out. Her footsteps, though, were very distinctive. Light. Quick. Like she moved on tiptoe, as if she really was the dainty little fairy he half-imagined her to be. When the TV was on, like it was now, it was barely possible to hear her. And that was why he wished he could stretch out, grab the remote controller and turn it off when the little doctor stepped in — an instinct borne from a restless, inexplicable curiosity to pay attention to every little thing she was about. But some well-meaning souls had decided that having the game that ran through his veins, blaring in the background day in and day out, might tempt him to make that bold step out of the darkness eventually. And what damn thing could he do about it… Except wake up. Not yet. The Warrior Ice Arena was deafening, the roar of the crowd nearly drowning out the scrape of blades carving into the ice, and the light footsteps tiptoeing about the bed, barely audible in the thick of it. The match had been against the Ice Vikings. The Beasts had wiped the floor with them that morning, the scoreboard flashing a smug 3-2 in their favour. They weren’t the Titans, sure — but dressing down those losers on the rink still felt damn brilliant. He’d been hoisted onto the shoulders of his grinning teammates, carried off to the locker room like a king, after landing the winning puck clean into their net before the match got into another overtime. Those glorious final moments of the game were replaying both on the screen and in fitful flashes behind his eyes as he struggled to focus on the doctor. The footsteps went dead, then picked up again, this time right by the bed. She had to be tiny—he pegged her at five-foot-two, tops. Until she spoke. Then, suddenly, she didn’t seem small at all. That threw him. More than once, curiosity almost got the best of him. Every time he heard that sultry voice, something in him itched to crack his eyes open—just a little. Just enough to see if she matched the image in his head. Like he wanted to do right now. She started giving him the day’s rundown, things that’d been happening around him. It was getting really tough, limping between listening to her and keeping his eyes on the puck he was about to slam past the Vikings’ captain. “Logan.” Shit. The puck just hit the back of the net solidly, but he was missing out on the deafening roar of jubilation that poured around him on the stadium that day. The sharp command in her voice had effectively ripped the reel of the match out of his head and dumped him straight back into reality — or another dream where he could practically feel her leaning over, about to kiss him. The cheers from the telly faded into the background, drowned out by the pounding of hot blood rushing south. She said his name again, the low, subtly raspy voice wrapping around him like a slow-burning fire, flickering with some hidden promise and some untold secret. Damn, if voices could take a physical form, hers would be smoke curling around the senses. At this point, he was most convinced that Avery Calloway’s real superpower wasn’t her medical expertise but that rich, smooth, captivating way of speaking. The kind that dripped with confidence, seductive without even trying—like the auditory equivalent of dark chocolate melting on the tongue or whiskey sliding down slow and smooth. No wonder she had his mom, and half the world, convinced she was the best damn physiotherapist alive. “The world won’t wait forever for you, Logan. You’ve got to get a move on,” she muttered. “I know you can hear me, so can we stop pretending?” How the hell did she know? As far as he was concerned, he’d been as still as a corpse. Her presumption in calling his bluff made him grunt. Thank God, it had been so long since he used his throat the sound didn’t come out. She checked a few things on the monitor and whisked to the foot of the bed, testing his stimulus response to being tapped on the right knee. Two days ago, he would have felt nothing. Now, it hurt like hell. He was very positive the best doctor in the world was cutting out the painkillers he’d enjoyed in Bethlehem of Christ, which he considered a necessity for keeping him in the blissful place he currently was. He was pretty sure his face twisted into a scowl in reaction to the pain and the sheer cruelty of her action, because he actually felt his facial muscles move—or maybe considering how long he’d been lying motionless, that wasn’t made too obvious either. What made him sure Avery detected the slight movement anyway was her hand sliding over the aching spot, rubbing it almost soothing like she was trying to comfort him. The doctor’s phone rang, and she stepped aside to take the call. From the lightness in her tone, it sounded personal—probably a friend. “Sounds like fun, and after the kind of day I’ve had, I’d love nothing more than to join the party,” she said with a sigh. “But you know what day of the month it is. The summons have been issued for the family’s getting together, and you know how grumpy my mom gets when I skip. I’d rather skip the long lecture on the importance of family unity.” A pause. “No, I can’t use work as an excuse. She already thinks little of my job because I don’t build planes like Jennings, nor am I working to send men to space like Jeffrey, not even contributing to some freaky, world-renowned team doing God knows what like James does.” She chuckled. Whatever her mom thought of her career clearly didn’t bother her in the slightest. It was laughable that someone who sounded like she could sweet-talk her way out of a parking ticket came from a family of intellects. Then again, he supposed he shouldn’t be too surprised. Nobody ever imagined the likes of him, who entertains sports enthusiasts hitting pucks came from his type of family either. The most dreadful in that league was his own dad, a retired Harvard president, whom, if you talked along the caliber of Stephen Hawkins, he would rank there somewhere. If you were talking about his mother—for her part, she’d broken ground in law. Now she sat on the bench as a Supreme Court justice. His eldest brother? A Harvard professor with research so groundbreaking, most were already in print. The second? He might have strayed off course a bit, but at least, he’d risen to become one of the most sought-after neurosurgeons in the country. Then you come to him. Ah yes... the hockey player who skated on ice and carried the ghost of a computer engineering degree from Harvard. His dad never let him forget what a waste his first class honor was in his hands. So what if the career he’d chosen for himself was raking in the big bucks? No matter how wildly successful he turned out to be in life, not making a mark in academia meant one thing in his father’s book—failure. The only reason he was even allowed to run around with the family name was because he was his mom’s pet and his dad dared not infuriate her again. Avery walked out after her call, leaving him alone with his thoughts—and a strange sense of comradeship with her he didn’t expect. A while later, she was back. Had it not been at an hour he was sure Rose had closed for the day, he might have assumed she was the one walking up to his bed. The footsteps were a little different this time. Sure, still light and quick, but there was clicky in the mix, like she was cartwheeling in sky-high heels that could double as weapons. And the scent. He caught it the moment she stepped through the doorway—Chanel’s Grand Extrait. Luxury in a bottle. He knew the brand because one of his high-maintenance exes had practically bathed in the stuff. She just stood there. No movement, no sound—nothing to help him figure out what the hell she was up to. If her plan was to bait him into opening his eyes, it was working. He could barely hold his lids down. His brain, now sensitized by the perfume, went rogue, pulling up images of her. Big, round brown eyes. Full, pouty lips—coated in red. The kind of red that belonged on silk sheets. Or on him. “Logan.” Her voice cut through his imagination like a knife. Did she see his eyes flutter and knew he was on the edge? He was desperately clinging to his dark world, but the oblivion was gradually rejecting him. When he didn’t respond, she let out a heavy breath—frustration, or resignation, or maybe a mixture of both. Then, the click of heels began again, fading away. Probably heading for that family reunion. And if his guess was right, if she really was the family black sheep in hers too, she was about to show up there in something that would make her mum’s jaw hit the floor. Something naughty. Something to pair with those heels. God, he was dying to see it. Maybe... Maybe he was ready to wake up after all. His eyes snapped open, meeting the stark white ceiling. For a moment, he just breathed, adjusting to the sudden flood of awareness. Then, slowly—carefully—he turned his head toward the sound of the click-clack, just in time to glimpse a very feminine figure with a sway that was downright sinful slip through the door. She was not tiny. Slender, sure, but also noticeably tall with a pair of long legs that deserved appreciation. And his guess about the naughty dress was spot on. Wearing the skimpiest black skirt that did as much job as a strappy set would have accomplished in her play to be provocative. Layering it with a shirt that might be making up for the trashed modesty, but any effort to that effect was ruined by the curtain of honey-blond curls bouncing wildly down her back. He’d be lying if he didn’t describe the figure she saw as to kill for. A clean-cut hourglass with enough curve at the back to make a man question what they heck she was doing with a doctorate when she could be every man’s dream. If her face matched the rest of her, and he was betting it did, he imagined she rose a heck of high school fights among the boys just for a shot at the backseat of their jeeps with her when she was younger. What the f**k was he doing, imagining his doctor strutting toward him in nothing but her heels? While the rest of his body below his neck refused to coordinate, the one part he had no control over stood proudly at attention.