Trapped On The Ice With My Obsessed Captain

CHAPTER 1

Wren Calloway

I'm the only girl on the hockey team, and our arrogant captain hates it, yet he's the one trapping me against the boards, his hard body pressing close to "fix my stance."

"You're dropping your left shoulder," Kael Thorne said against the back of my neck.

His glove closed around my hip. Not gentle. Not asking.

"I wasn't."

"You were." He shifted my weight with one hand, adjusting me like I was equipment. Like I was his. "Again."

"Get off me."

"When you stop skating like a liability."

I drove my elbow back. He caught it. Of course he caught it. Six-two, two-twenty, reflexes like something born in the dark. His chest was flush against my back and I could feel his breathing, slow and controlled, while mine was doing something I refused to name.

"The team voted me in," I said through my teeth.

"The team was wrong."

"Then take it up with Coach."

"I take things up with the ice, Calloway." His mouth was close enough that I felt the shape of my name against my ear. "And right now, the ice is telling me you don't belong on it."

I spun. Bad idea. It put us face to face with three inches of frozen air between us. His helmet was off. Dark hair damp at the temples. Eyes the colour of a lake in November, grey and flat and hiding everything underneath.

"Say that again," I said. "Without your hand on my hip."

He looked down. His glove was still there. He hadn't moved it.

Something shifted behind those grey eyes. Not embarrassment. Something hungrier.

He dropped his hand.

"Tomorrow. Five a.m. Extra ice." He skated backward, still watching me. "You show up or I go to the board and tell them their diversity recruit can't hold a defensive zone."

"I'll be there."

"I know." He turned his back. "That's the only thing about you I don't hate."

The rink was empty. The lights buzzed overhead like a migraine. I stood on the ice with my pulse doing something stupid and my hip still burning where his hand had been, and I thought: This is a problem.

Not him hating me. I could handle hate.

The problem was the three seconds where he forgot to.