Page 72 of Ice Princesses
The way she handles power without squeezing it. Theway she listens when people speak. The way she just dismantled a narrative that could have easily benefited her and her parents and didn’t hesitate for a single second.
Competence has always done something strange to my brain. Watching her wield it is not helping.
At the end of the hallway, she stops in front of her office door and pushes it open.
“After you,” she says.
Her voice is light, but there’s a tension underneath it now that wasn’t there before.
I step inside. The office looks exactly like it looked like last week—minimalistic, clean, and organized to a degree that borders on intimidating. It’s a little bit different to her house, where she doesn’t perform.
Behind me, the door clicks shut.
For the first time since we left the boards, the building is quiet.
Isabella turns towards me slowly.
“Well,” she says.
I let the word sit between us for a second longer than necessary, my back to the door, like I’m debating whether I want to pretend this is still about skating.
I exhale slowly through my nose, trying to ground myself in something that isn’t the way my pulse keeps rattling inside my chest. “Careful, Princess,” I mutter, taking a step in her direction. “You keep saying things like that and I’m going to start thinking you like me.”
Her eyes sharpen. “I do like you.”
Just like that. No buildup. And it knocks the air out of meso much, it’s completely disproportionate to the words themselves.
“That’s…” I shake my head once, like I can physically reset everything that is happening inside me. “That’s very inconvenient timing."
“Is it?” she asks.
She hasn’t moved a hair. Not closer or farther away, not even her posture. Isabella is standing there, watching me the same way she watches skaters at work—like she’s tracking every shift and every reaction, and waiting to see what I do with it.
“Yes,” I say. “Because I’m trying very hard to be normal about how you just obliterated a recruiter fromHarvardand didn’t even flinch.”
“Are you failing?” she asks, almost lightly. Her mouth twitches.
I let out a quiet laugh. “Spectacularly.”
Isabella’s gaze drops briefly to my mouth, then back up.
I take a step in her direction and suddenly, we’re too close. I didn’t notice when it happened, but the space between us has narrowed into something charged and calculated. I can see the shift in her breathing, the way her shoulders loosen like she’s making a decision.
“So what are you going to do about it, Coach?” she teases, her icy blue eyes trained on my mouth. They linger there for a long moment.
I don’t give her a chance to say anything else.
I close whatever the remaining distance between us in one step, my hand coming up to her jaw, and then I’mkissing her—hard, immediate, like I’ve been holding it back for too long.
She reacts just as fast, meeting me halfway there, our bodies colliding with desperation.
Her mouth opens against mine on a sharp inhale, her hand gripping my shirt and pulling me closer like she needs more of it, not less. There’s nothing—absolutely nothing—careful about this. No apprehension or testing or hesitation. It’s all heat and pressure and the kind of urgency that makes it impossible to think past the next second.
Her back hits the wall with a soft thud, and she lets out a breath that turns into something deliciously dirty—a desperate moan against my mouth before she’s kissing me again, deeper this time. She’s taking as much as I’m giving, and it’s making me ache for more than I know how to take.
My hand tightens at her waist, anchoring her there, but she doesn’t stay still. She leans into me, meets every movement, every shift of my body. Her leg wraps around me like when we first kissed in the locker room many weeks ago now.
And that?—
