Iced Out

Chapter 11: Playing House

COLE

I had to hand it to her. She was good.

I sat across the linen-draped table in Victor Raines’ private dining room, a crystal tumbler of sparkling water sweating in my hand, watching Nova Calloway charm an entire room of people who terrified her.

The charity gala dinner was an intimate affair. Thirty seats. Hand-calligraphed place cards. A five-course tasting menu designed by a chef whose name I couldn’t pronounce and whose food I was barely tasting because I kept getting distracted by the woman in the green dress sitting six inches to my left. *Professional curiosity,* I told myself. *She’s my PR partner. I need to know if the performance is holding.* It was holding. That was what I was watching for.

She was magnificent.

Not because she was beautiful, though she was. The emerald silk caught the candlelight every time she moved, turning her into something almost liquid, something that shifted and glowed. Her dark auburn hair was swept up, exposing the long, pale line of her neck, and more than once my eyes drifted to the soft hollow of her throat where her pulse beat, steady and composed. *Situational awareness,* I filed it under. *Reading the room.*

No. She was magnificent because she was performing the single most convincing lie I had ever witnessed, and she was doing it with the calm precision of a surgeon.

“So, Dr. Calloway,” Victor Raines said from the head of the table, swirling a glass of red wine with the practiced ease of a man who owned everything in his line of sight. “What drew you to sports psychology? Surely a Stanford graduate had more glamorous options.”

I watched Nova turn toward Victor, and the smile she gave him was warm, open, and utterly controlled. Not a single crack. Not a flicker of the revulsion I had seen flash across her face in the SUV when I told her we’d be sitting at his table.

“Athletes operate under extraordinary pressure, Mr. Raines,” she said, her voice smooth and unhurried. “The gap between peak performance and total collapse is often a single unprocessed emotion. I find that space fascinating.”

Victor leaned back in his chair, studying her with those flat, calculating eyes that always made me want to put a fist through the nearest wall. “Fascinating,” he echoed. “And you think you can fix my captain?”

His gaze slid to me. Possessive. Amused.

I opened my mouth, but Nova beat me to it.

“Your captain doesn’t need fixing, Mr. Raines.” She reached over without looking and placed her hand lightly on my forearm. The contact sent a bolt of heat straight through my sleeve and into my bloodstream. “He just needs someone who isn’t afraid of him.”

A ripple of laughter moved around the table. Dmitri, seated three chairs down next to a very flustered-looking PR coordinator, caught my eye and grinned so wide I could see his gold molar.

Under the table, I pressed my knee against Nova’s. A signal. *You’re doing great.* She didn’t pull away. She pressed back. I told myself the gesture was strategic. A teammate acknowledging a good shift. Nothing more. But I didn’t move my knee, and neither did she, and that fact sat in the back of my mind like a splinter for the rest of the dinner.

The dinner moved through its courses with the choreographed elegance of a ballet. Nova navigated every conversation with the same unshakeable poise. She talked defensive strategy with Coach Brentwood, who looked at her with something approaching awe. She discussed concussion protocol funding with two of the team’s medical sponsors, citing studies by name, from memory. She made one of the senior defensemen, a man who hadn’t voluntarily spoken to a front-office employee in six years, ask her a follow-up question about sleep optimization.

But it was the way she handled the wives and partners that caught me off guard.

Between the fourth and fifth courses, the conversation fragmented into smaller clusters. I watched Nova lean toward Katya Volkov, Dmitri’s sister and a regular in the WAG section, and say something quiet that made Katya’s carefully maintained composure crack into a genuine, startled laugh. Within minutes, three more women had shifted their chairs closer. Nova listened to each of them with the same focused intensity she used in session with me. She asked questions. Real questions. Not polite, surface-level small talk, but the kind of questions that made people feel seen.

She was reading the room the way I read a defensive formation. Instinctively. Completely.

I sat back in my chair, the sparkling water forgotten, and realized I’d been watching her for the last ten minutes without checking the room once. *That’s the arrangement working,* I told myself. *She’s convincing. That’s the whole point.*

“You are staring,” Dmitri murmured, materializing at my shoulder with a fresh drink and zero respect for personal space. He followed my line of sight to Nova, who was now showing Katya something on her phone that had the entire cluster of women leaning in. “Like wolf watching lamb. Except she is not lamb. She is other wolf.”

“Sit down, Volkov.”

“She is good at this,” Dmitri continued, ignoring me entirely. He settled into the empty chair beside me, his massive frame making the delicate dining chair groan in protest. “Too good. Either she is best actress in world, or she actually likes you. Both options are terrifying for you.”

“It’s a performance,” I said flatly. “She’s doing her job.”

Dmitri took a long sip of his drink and looked at me with the expression he reserved for when I said something profoundly stupid on the ice. “Da, Captain. Whatever you say.”

The dessert course arrived. A delicate arrangement of dark chocolate and blood orange that Nova barely touched. She was starting to fade. I could see it in the way her shoulders had lost a fraction of their rigidity, the way her smile was taking a beat longer to arrive. She was running out of performance fuel.

I leaned in, close enough that my lips nearly brushed the shell of her ear. To the room, it would look intimate. Romantic. *Exactly what Diane ordered.*

“You’re flagging,” I said, low enough that only she could hear. “We can leave in ten minutes. I’ll make an excuse about early practice.”

Nova turned her head, and suddenly our faces were inches apart. The candlelight caught the green of her eyes and turned them incandescent. This close, I could see the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose that her makeup almost concealed. I could smell her perfume, something clean and sharp, like winter air over warm skin.

“I’m fine,” she whispered. But her eyes told a different story. They were wide, unguarded for just a fraction of a second, and in them I saw exhaustion, and fear, and something I didn’t have a name for.

“You don’t have to be fine,” I said. The words came out before I could stop them. They weren’t part of the script. They weren’t for the cameras or the table or Victor Raines. And the second they left my mouth, I wanted to take them back. *What the hell was that, Harrington?*

Her lips parted. The composure wavered.

And then Dmitri’s booming laugh erupted from three seats away as he knocked over a water glass, and the moment shattered.

Nova pulled back, blinking rapidly, the professional mask snapping back into place so fast it gave me whiplash. She picked up her dessert fork and took a precise, mechanical bite of chocolate.

Good. *That was a mistake.* I turned back to the table, jaw tight. The arrangement had rules for a reason. Public appearances. Performative contact. Nothing unscripted. And I had just gone off-book for a woman I’d known for three days because she looked tired at a dinner party.

*Ninety days,* I reminded myself. *Stay in your lane.*

But when I glanced sideways at her profile in the candlelight, at the way she held herself together like a cracked vase refusing to spill, something nagged at the edge of my attention. Not attraction. Not softness. Something more like the irritation of a puzzle piece that didn’t fit where I’d put it.

*She’s good at the performance. That’s what you’re noticing. That’s all you’re noticing.*

Across the table, Dmitri caught my eye again. He wasn’t grinning anymore. He was watching me with an expression I had never seen on his face before.

It looked a lot like concern.

I ignored it. Dmitri saw romance in everything. It was a Russian affliction.