Page 37 of Cold Comeback
When Thatcher pressed against me, grinding slow and deliberate, I bit back a sound that would have carried through the thin hotel walls.
He gasped, and I covered his mouth with mine, swallowing the sound.
"The walls are thin," I whispered against his lips.
"Don't care." He grabbed a handful of my ass. "Let them hear. Let them know I exist."
I kissed him harder, losing any pretense of control, grinding until we were both wrecked and gasping, two men on a shitty hotel bed proving to each other we were still here.
As we came up for air, we collapsed onto Thatcher's bed, breathing hard in the artificial darkness.
I spoke first. "I should probably sleep in my own bed."
"Probably."
Neither of us moved.
I listened to his breathing slow and felt his heartbeat settle against my ribs. I heard Knox's television and Pluto's snoringtwo rooms over through the thin walls—the usual sounds of a team on the road.
But this—Thatcher curled against my side, my hand in his hair, and the taste of him still on my tongue—it wasn't normal at all. It was a dangerous chapter left out of my leadership manual.
"Thatcher?"
"Mmm?"
"Tomorrow, when we get back to Richmond. We should talk. About what this means."
"What do you think it means?"
The honest answer lodged in my throat:It means I'm falling for you and it terrifies me. It means every rule I've built my career on is crumbling. It means the team that trusts me to lead them might lose that respect if they knew their captain can't keep his hands off a teammate.
"I think," I said carefully, "we're in territory neither of us has mapped before."
Thatcher didn't answer. After a few more minutes, his breathing evened out. Tension leaked out of his body.
The careful performance fell away in sleep—no practiced smile and no deflecting humor. It was a man who'd spent his birthday alone, singing to strangers because it was the only way to prove he existed.
I studied the bruise spreading across his shoulder, dark purple against pale skin. My fault, somehow. I'd given him my tape, protection, and superstition, and it hadn't been enough to keep him safe.
When I tried to slip away to my own bed, his hand caught mine—unconscious, instinctive. His grip was firm even in sleep, like he feared I'd disappear.
I sat back down.
Thatcher's hand in mine was like stepping off the edge of everything I'd ever known about being a captain. About being safe. About being alone.
I didn't go to my own bed. Instead, I stayed awake until the digital clock read 5:47 AM, watching him breathe, and wondering when keeping someone else safe had started mattering more than protecting myself.
Chapter nine
Thatcher
I'd never been the kind of person who went all-out for Halloween. Growing up, our house had a bowl of fun-size Snickers left on the porch and an attached note that read "Take One Please" because Dad was always working and Mom considered candy distribution beneath her pay grade.
The Richmond Reapers team house was different. It deserved a Halloween loud enough to terrify the neighbors.
"You know this is insane, right?" Pluto asked, holding one end of a particularly ambitious fake spider web while I stretched it across the front porch railing.
"Insanity is dedication without boundaries," I replied, stepping back to survey our work. It looked like something died on our porch and had been lovingly preserved by a gothic Martha Stewart.
