Trapped On The Ice With My Obsessed Captain

I'm the only girl on a men's hockey team, and the captain wants me gone.Kael Thorne told Coach to cut me. He told the board I couldn't hold a defensive zone. He scheduled five a.m. practices designed to break me, and every single time he corrected my stance, his hands ended up somewhere they didn't need to be and stayed longer than any coaching manual would recommend.Then the housing budget got slashed, and we became roommates.One bathroom. Paper-thin walls. And a man who told me to lock my bedroom door at night, then couldn't explain why without his voice dropping to something that had nothing to do with sleepwalking.I told myself I could handle him. The cold stares across the locker room. The way he made two cups of coffee every morning and swore he miscounted. The twenty tally marks tattooed on his ribs that he wouldn't explain. The fact that he never once looked away first.Then I found the notebook.Hidden behind the kitchen pipes. Practice notes in the front. Line combinations in the middle. And on page four, in handwriting so controlled it looked printed, a list titled Things I've noticed about Calloway. My coffee order. My nervous habits. The way I hum in the shower without knowing the walls are thin enough for him to hear every note. And one sentence at the bottom that rearranged every single thing I thought I knew about Kael Thorne:She is going to destroy everything I have built. And I am going to let her.He doesn't hate me. He never hated me.He has been falling apart over me since the day I stepped onto his ice, and the hostility was just the sound of a man who controls everything discovering the one thing he can't.But Kael isn't the only one watching me. Someone on this team wants me off the roster permanently. The threats started with words on my locker. They escalated to my teammate in the hospital, beaten with a bat because he was wearing my jersey in the dark and they thought he was me.Now the captain who spent weeks telling the world I don't belong is sleeping on the couch between my bedroom door and the front entrance with a hockey stick across his lap. He held my hand across campus in broad daylight, past the blood still drying on the parking lot concrete, and he didn't look around to see who was watching.He wanted them to.Kael Thorne doesn't protect the things he hates. He protects the things he would burn his entire career to keep. And somewhere between the five a.m. ice sessions and the three a.m. conversations and the night I left my door open and counted sixteen of his heartbeats before he walked through it, I stopped being a problem he wanted to solve.I became the one thing he refuses to lose.