Page 70 of Top Shelf

“Mm, it was bad ice.”

Zoe coughs into her drink while Tamara pretends to check her phone, and Lulu looks delighted by the entire disaster.

Heidi’s eyes crinkle, then flick back to the photographer and reporter still lurking in the corridor, and before I can ask, she steps in closer and reaches for my tie.

“Your tie is crooked,” she murmurs.

“It is not.”

Her fingers slide under the knot and tighten it, then her palms rest briefly on my chest. The diamond ring catches the light, trying to distract me from her face, but nothing can distract me right now. Media might be watching, and teammates are definitely watching. But I no longer care.

I lift my hand to her hair to catch a loose strand between my fingers.

“May I?”

Her gaze drops to my mouth with a nod. “For the act,” she murmurs.

I kiss my wife.

I mean for it to be a brief public display, something convincing for the reporters, and Anton, my family, or anyone who might question whether our marriage is real.

But Heidi’s fingers curl into my shirt, and her mouth softens under mine.

Fuck convincing anyone. All the reasons collapse into each another, and I kiss her simply because I want to. Because the courthouse kiss has been living under my skin for days, and now she is wearing my name and my ring, pressing her mouth to mine as though neither of those things frighten her nearly as much as they frighten me.

My hand slides from her hair to the back of her neck, angling her lips against mine. I forget the hallway, the media, the game, the people standing several feet away pretending not to watch. Let them. The brief kiss I intended stretches into something far too real to belong to an act or a joke or a dare.

But I am also the first to pull back, because one of us has to.

Heidi’s eyes open slowly, and for once, she has nothing to say. She’s dazed in a way that makes every part of me want to do it again. And again. My thumb brushes gently along the side of her neck, then I let my hand fall.

Behind us, Chase’s voice rings out. “You know, some of us are trying to maintain a workplace here!”

Heidi blinks hard, color rushing into her cheeks. “Shut up, Walton!”

“It is biologically impossible for him to do that,” I reply, but I don’t look at him. I’m looking at my wife, and the way her fingers are still clutching my shirt.

She realizes too, and lets go as if the fabric burned her, and I know I should say something safe or practical now. Put her mind at ease and remind her this is part of the act.

But I cannot muster another lie.

Instead, I reach out my hand for hers, let my eyes drift over my jersey, and say the only thing I can.

“Let’s go home, min fru.”

Chapter eleven

Heidi

The apartment is too quiet when we get home.

The silence follows us in from the elevator, settling into the space as the door clicks shut and Viktor drops his keys onto the counter. He drove us home with a hand on the wheel and the other loose near the gearshift again, and I sat in the passenger seat with his jersey swallowing me and my mouth still warm from the kiss outside the family room, dying to place my hand in his.

The kiss. That stupid, public, ‘for the act’ kiss, which started with his fingers in my hair and ended with me clutching his shirt, one breath away from climbing him in front of half the Colorado Storm organization.

He shrugs out of his suit jacket, hangs it over the back of the chair, and turns to me with such a controlled expression, it makes my skin feel tight under his jersey I still have on.

“I am going to shower,” he says.