Page 47 of Game Misconduct
I turn it. Push through.
And there she is—Sloane Carrington, seated behind her desk, calm as a storm’s eye, looking like she owns the whole damn world.
The door clicks shut behind me.
Just the two of us.
Again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sloane
The door closes shutbehind him, and the air changes shape. It gets heavier, denser, like the room remembers him before I do.
Maddox crosses the threshold without hurry, shoulders squared, jaw locked, that contained kind of force he wears like armor.
My pulse jumps in a way it has no business jumping, and I smooth my fingers over the edge of my desk to keep from giving myself away.
He eyes the space around him—floor-to-ceiling glass, sharp lines, walnut, and order. While he doesn’t normally hang out in these types of rooms, he manages to command it and make it feel smaller anyway.
“Take a seat, please,” I say, voice steady and flat enough to skate on.
He doesn’t, not at first. He stands there like a challenge, like the silence between us has a clock in it.
He’s testing me.
I let the beat stretch, matching his stare, spine tall, breath measured, not so much as a blink I don’t own.
The trick with men like him—men like myfather, men like every investor who’s ever thought “young” meant “easy”—is to let them think they’re winning the second before they decide to give ground.
Then you set the line.
Maddox finally moves. He drops into the chair with a sprawl that reads as deliberate disrespect. Long legs open, shoulders heavy into the back, one big hand curls on the armrest like a warning.
I feel the rip of heat in my chest anyway. It irritates me that I feel it, and the irritation irritates me more.
He smells like cold air and clean soap and the ghost of rubber from the rink. It pulls at a thread I should have cut downstairs—my palms on his shoulder, the heat of him through the thin compression fabric, and the way he went very still under my hands when I wrapped the ice tight.
He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t have to. I felt the bite of his breath. I felt my own.
I lace my fingers together and lock my elbows, the posture my old etiquette coach would call “composed readiness.”
“Dean and the board want a different story out of you,” I say, clean and clinical. “On the ice, you’re doing what we brought you here to do. Off the ice, yesterday was… not what we need.”
His jaw tics. A small movement. A warning. He lifts his gaze to mine without lifting his head, like a man sighting along the barrel. “I’m a goalie. Not a circus act.”
His voice is sharp enough to cut glass.
“You’re a goalie and a face,” I answer, not unkindly. “And the city is watching our second season as hard if not harder than our first year.”
I drum my fingers on my desk. “Media day is designed to feed them. You looked like you wanted to break every microphone in the room.”
“I wanted to leave the room. That part wasn’t a secret.”
Tension snaps through me so fast it almost makes me laugh.Not because he’s wrong, but because he’s honest. I respect honest.
But respecting his honesty only complicates things.
