Chapter 6 — One Season

Dean stopped her in the parking garage, keys already in her hand, the meeting still ringing in both their ears.

“You can’t do this,” he said.

She didn’t turn around immediately. Sienna knew, the moment she said no one trades you, this conversation was coming. She’d hoped for a day, at least. He’d given her forty minutes.

“Dean.”

“Don’t.” His voice sounded different from the night they met. “Don’t do the icebreaker thing. Eight hours ago you owned fifty-one percent of nothing. Now you own a hockey team, and the first thing you do is keep me chained to it.”

She turned around. “I didn’t chain you to anything,” Sienna said. “I just blocked a trade.”

“You blocked my trade. The one I asked for.”

“You asked for it in front of eleven men you’d never met before today, thirty seconds after walking in on me.” She kept her voice low. “That’s not a request, Dean. That’s a man running.”

His jaw tightened. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then tell me.”

He stared at her for a long second, like he was deciding whether she’d earned the answer. Then he looked away, the anger visible in his expression cooled into something heavier.

“I’ve watched owners use this team like a toy before,” he said. “Smile for the cameras, talk about family, and then ship a man out the second the numbers say so. I had a friend who—” He stopped. Shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not doing it again. Not for someone who—” He gestured at her, helpless. “Not for someone I can’t even look at without—”

He didn’t finish that sentence either.

“I’m not them,” she said quietly.

“You don’t know that yet. Neither do I.”

“No,” Sienna agreed. “We don’t. So don’t ask me to prove it in a parking garage. Come back tonight. Just us. No board, nothing. I’ll show you the only thing I actually have to offer.”

He frowned. “Which is?”

“A deal,” she said, “instead of an order.”

He was already on the ice when Sienna arrived, alone in a building built for eighteen thousand people, the overhead lights cut down to one bank above center ice so the rest of the arena sat in the dark.

She found her way in through the doors — Marty had given her a master key two days ago and told her, dryly, that a Whitlock should always have a way into their own building — and she stood at the boards for a while and watched him before he noticed her.

He came around the far circle, dropped a puck from his stick, and put it past an empty net top shelf, over and over, the sound of the shot and the sound of the puck hitting the boards the only sound in the whole quiet building.

“You’re going to wake the ushers,” Sienna said.

He didn’t startle. He’d probably heard the door. He glided to a stop at the boards across from her, breathing easy, sweat at his hairline.

“They don’t sleep here,” he said.

“Hm.”

“I have my eyes everywhere in this vicinity.”

She climbed up onto the boards and sat, legs dangling over the ice. He skated closer, slow, and stopped a few feet off, leaning his stick against the glass.

“Tell me about your friend,” Sienna said.

Something shifted behind his eyes. “Who said there was a friend?”

“You did. In the garage. You tried to stop yourself, but you still said it.” She shrugged. “I notice when people avoid some conversations. It’s the job.”

He looked at the ice for a long moment.

“Not tonight,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you. But — not now.”

“Okay.” Sienna didn’t push. She’d learned, with Grant, what it cost to push a man before he was ready, and she wasn’t going to make that mistake again. “Then let me say my piece instead.”

“Go ahead.”

“One season.” She held up a finger before he could argue. “Not because I own you. I don’t think anyone owns anyone, Dean, I don’t care what the paperwork says. But you’ve got a year left on your contract, and I’ve got a year I’m required to spend learning what my grandfather built. So give me that year. Play. Let me learn this team with you in it. And if you still want out when the season ends—” Sienna spread her hands. “I’ll sign the trade myself. No restraints. You’ll have earned the right to ask twice.”

He studied her like she was a play he was trying to read before it developed.

“Why does it matter to you?” he asked. “Where I end up.”

She thought about lying. She didn’t.

“Because the first honest thing anyone said to me in two years,” Sienna said, “was a stranger in a hotel bar who told me not to drink the expensive whiskey. I’d like to find out if that man is also someone I can trust on skates.”

The quiet between them changed.

He skated the last few feet, slow, and stopped right below her, close enough that she could have touched his hair if she wanted to.

“One season,” he said.

“One season.”

He reached up. Sienna reached down. Their hands met — his gloved, hers bare, his grip warm even through the leather. The handshake that was supposed to seal a business arrangement turned into something neither of them planned, a beat too long, his thumb moving once against her knuckles the same way it had moved against her bare ring finger the night they met.

Neither of them let go first.

High above them, in the blue dark of the upper bowl, something small and metallic clicked.

A shutter.

Dean’s head turned fast, scanning the empty rows.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

Sienna was already looking up into the dark, her hand still caught in his, her heart suddenly loud in her own ears.

“Yes,” she said.

Somewhere up there, somebody had just taken their picture.