Page 141 of Cold as Ice

“What? Are you serious? You’re actually serious.” Mal looked shocked. “I thought she just didn’t like athletes.” He paused. “Okay, justyouas an athlete, maybe. But I guess this makes more sense.”

“If only we were in an awesome drama movie. If we were, I’d totally be attacked next by the illegal bookies, trying to get me out of the way using any method they could. And then you’d have to protect me.” Elliott beamed up at Mal.

Mal just rolled his eyes. “I’m a hockey player, not a bodyguard.”

“But you could be both! Defend me with your hockey stick and your bulging muscles,” Elliott teased. “Sounds like a good time. Almost as good of a time as the spanking.”

Mal flushed and then chuckled. “God, you and your one-track mind. Lunch first,thenwe can go back to my place. Alright?”

“Not like I’m twisting your arm, big manly protector,” Elliott said, batting his eyelashes.

“Never,” Mal said, grinning at him.

“Are you worried at all?” Mal asked as he and Elliott walked down the street towards Darcelle’s. It was mid-morning on a Sunday and Elliott had already complained twice that they could have spent a long, lazy morning in bed.

Frankly, Mal felt the same. But they’d promised to attend this unofficial team event that Ramsey had put together, and they’d also agreed that it was high time they told the rest of the team what was really going on.

“Everyone still thinks that your version of good taste is avoiding me,” Elliott had reminded Mal, still impossibly sounding delighted by the whole thing. “They need to know whatreallygood taste is.”

Mal had rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t disagree.

They’d told Coach. He knew Elliott had told Ramsey and Ivan.

“No, not worried at all.” Elliott wasn’t, of course. Elliott had flawless confidence even if Mal was sometimes convinced it was more of the “fake it til you make it” variety.

Elliott turned to him, squeezing his hand reassuringly, and continued, “It’s going to be okay, you know?”

“You don’t know that.” And there was the one thing that worried Mal: the unknown. Everything he could control, everythingElliottcould control—that would be fine. But their futures weren’t necessarily their own.

“Yeah, I do,” Elliott said. “I love you. You love me. Nothing else matters.”

Mal raised an eyebrow.

“Okay,” Elliott conceded with a wry smile, “almostnothing. I really wanna play hockey. And I want to play with you.”

Mal squeezed his hand back. “I want to play with you, too.”

“Do you though?” Elliott asked, grinning impudently.

Mal rolled his eyes.

Elliott kept going, because this was Elliott. Mal reminded himself that this was the man he loved. The man he wanted to love for the rest of his life.

“I don’t know, I’m half-expecting you to retire at twenty-three, right when I get to the team.”

“I’m not—Iwon’t.”

“Just because your dad wants you to. Because he’d decided that’s the only ‘worthwhile’ hockey-related occupation he can come up with,” Elliott finished.

Mal winced. “I’m considering not doing the internship, okay?”

He was more than considering it. He’d reached out to the team, to his contact at the front office, and expressed some misgivings. He’d said he’d fallen back in love with playing, this season. Slipped in a sentence about how great his line mates were. Didn’t mention Elliott by name, because he was afraid if he did, he would start and not stop—and the front office didn’t need a rhapsodizing treatise on how fucking unbelievable Elliott was.

Onandoff the ice.

“Good,” Elliott said. “I just want you to be happy.”

He didn’t need to say,I just want you to find and make your own happiness, but he didn’t have to.

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