Iced Out

Chapter 5: The Proposal

NOVA

My second day at the Chicago Glaciers facility started with a summons.

I was barely halfway through my morning coffee, reviewing my sparse notes from yesterday’s disastrous ten-minute session with Cole Harrington, when the sleek desk phone chimed. It was Diane’s assistant, Toby. His voice trembled slightly, as if he were relaying a message from a hostage situation.

“Dr. Calloway? Diane needs you in the executive suite. Immediately.”

“I have player evaluations starting in twenty minutes, Toby,” I replied, not looking up from my legal pad.

“She said to tell you the evaluations won’t matter if we don’t have a team captain by noon.”

That got my attention. I capped my silver pen, the phantom ache of old secrets twisting in my stomach. If the team captain was in trouble, the ripple effects would reach every department in this building. Including mine.

I took the elevator down to the PR floor. Diane’s office was a shrine to corporate warfare. All sharp angles, glass, and aggressive lighting. Diane herself was standing behind her desk, tapping a manicured fingernail against an iPad screen.

“Close the door, Nova,” she said. She didn’t look up.

I closed it, stepping into the sterile quiet. “Toby mentioned something about the captaincy?”

Diane finally raised her eyes. She looked exhausted, but it was a dangerous, buzzing kind of exhaustion. She slid the iPad across the glossy surface of her desk. “Look.”

I stepped forward and looked down. It was a tabloid article. The photos were grainy, lit by the neon wash of a nightclub or casino. Cole was in a booth, a blonde woman leaning intimately into his space, her hand resting on his thigh. His face was shadowed beneath a baseball cap, but the rigid set of his jaw was unmistakable.

My chest tightened. A sharp, entirely unprofessional flicker of annoyance that I immediately, ruthlessly suppressed.

“Onyx Casino,” Diane said, her voice clipped. “Three A.M. This is the third time this month he’s been caught in places that violate his brand guidelines. Victor Raines is threatening to step in. Frost-Lyte is threatening to pull his sponsorship. The league ethics committee is circling.”

I kept my expression perfectly neutral. “It’s a bad look. But he’s a single, thirty-two-year-old athlete. Is it a terminable offense?”

“It is when Victor Raines is looking for an excuse to gut Cole’s influence in the locker room,” Diane snapped. “Raines wants a puppet captain. Cole isn’t a puppet. But if he looks unstable, reckless, and prone to gambling-adjacent environments...” She trailed off, letting the implication hang.

My stomach tightened. *Gambling-adjacent.* The word lodged in my chest like a splinter. I pushed it down. *Not now. Not here.*

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked carefully. “You want me to evaluate him for gambling addiction?”

“I want you to save him,” Diane said flatly. She crossed her arms, leaning back against her chair. “I can’t bury this with a charity hospital visit or a press release. The media narrative is shifting. They’re painting him as a tragic, spiraling hero who can’t handle the pressure of his legacy. We have to change the story.”

“Okay,” I said, slipping into my clinical voice. “How?”

“By giving the press something they love more than a trainwreck. A romance.” Diane’s eyes gleamed with a predatory light. “A high-profile, indisputable, grounding relationship. I need the world to look at Cole Harrington and see a man who is settled. Focused. Domesticated.”

I nodded slowly, following her logic. It was textbook crisis PR. “You want to set him up. A fake relationship.”

“Exactly. Three months. Just long enough to get through the Frost-Lyte contract renewal and push us safely into the playoffs without Raines breathing down my neck.”

“Do you have a roster of actresses or influencers on standby?” I asked.

“No.” Diane pushed off her desk and began to slowly pace the room. “An actress looks like exactly what it is: a PR stunt. The press will smell the ink on the NDA. We need someone unimpeachable. Someone who doesn’t need his money, who doesn’t care about his fame, and whose very presence demands respect.”

She stopped pacing. She turned and looked directly at me.

“She needs to be wholesome,” Diane said softly. “Stable. Trustworthy. Educated. Someone whose professional reputation is so solid that her mere association with Cole proves he isn’t losing his mind.”

The silence in the room stretched until it felt like it might snap.

I stared at Diane, waiting for her to laugh, to drop the punchline. But her crimson lips were pressed in a flat, serious line.

“You are out of your mind,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

“You’re perfect, Nova,” Diane countered, stepping closer. “You’re beautiful, but you don’t dress like you want attention. You’re a doctor. You’re literally employed to fix his head. If you’re dating him, the narrative writes itself: the broken captain finds stability with the brilliant psychologist. It’s gold.”

“It’s an ethical nightmare!” I practically shouted, my carefully maintained armor cracking right down the center. “I am his doctor, Diane! Entering a romantic relationship with a patient, fake or not, violates every code of conduct in my profession. It compromises my clinical objectivity.”

“It’s a performance. You don’t actually have to treat him while you’re holding his hand in public.”

“Absolutely not,” I said, taking a step backward toward the door. “No. Not happening. Find someone else.”

“There is no one else!” Diane’s voice cracked like a whip. “Victor Raines pushed hard to bring you here, Nova. A flashy new mental health initiative for the team. But if Cole goes down, Victor cleans house. The coaching staff, the training staff, and your shiny new department. You think Raines won’t fire you the second you stop being useful to his PR?”

I froze, my hand hovering over the doorknob.

*If I got fired, I lost everything.* The fresh start. The distance from Portland. The fragile structure I had built to outrun the guilt that had followed me for five years. This job was the first thing in my life that felt like forward motion instead of running. If I lost it before I’d even finished unpacking, the weight of what I’d done, the tip, Marcus, the silence afterward, would swallow me whole.

Diane saw the hesitation. She swooped in like a hawk. “Three months, Nova. Public appearances only. Dinners, charity galas, a few carefully curated paparazzi walks. You keep your job. You keep your department. Cole keeps his ‘C’. Everybody wins.”

“He hates me,” I said, my voice tight. “He was in my office yesterday, and we practically declared war.”

“He hates everyone,” Diane dismissed with a wave of her hand. “But he understands leverage. He’s desperate. And frankly, doctor, you look a little desperate too.”

*She didn’t know the half of it.*

“I need to think,” I managed to say, my chest tight.

“You have until tomorrow morning,” Diane replied, turning back to her computer monitor. “Because tomorrow afternoon, I’m holding a press conference. I suggest you read over your employment contract tonight, Nova. Just so we’re all clear on exactly what’s at stake.”

I opened the door and walked out, my sensible pumps carrying me mechanically toward the elevator.

My mind was a chaotic blur of contract clauses, press conferences, and the lingering, dangerous memory of Cole Harrington towering over my desk. *Wholesome, stable, trustworthy.* It was the biggest lie of all. I was none of those things. I was a woman holding a match, standing in a room full of gasoline.

I hit the button for my floor. Diane was right about one thing.

I needed to read my contract.