In Love With the Hockey Master

CHAPTER 3

Mia POV

I ran.

I told myself I was running because it was my job. Because I was the only medical staff on site. Because if something happened and I hadn't responded, there would be paperwork. I told myself all of that very firmly while my heart was doing something completely different.

I shoved open the door to the medical ward.

Cole was flat on his back on the examination table, one arm draped over his eyes, jaw clenched so hard I could see it from the doorway.

He was lucky I found him when I did. He was lying on the ice like he had all the time in the world, too proud to make a sound, too stubborn to admit he needed anything. In my years of medicine, I had treated exactly two types of patients: those who complained too much and those who would rather die quietly than ask for help. Cole Ryder was aggressively the second kind.

"You really can't do anything without me, can you?" I teased.

Cole didn't move. "Go away, Mia."

"Go away?" I repeated. "I'm the only medical staff on site. You're on my table so you're my problem."

I snapped on the glove. He finally lifted his arm. Those steel blue eyes pinned me with a look that should have come with a warning label. "I didn't ask for you."

"And I didn't ask for my father to hire a fossil with a death wish." I said. A small laugh came out of him. I pulled up a stool. "Let me see the knee."

He didn't move.

"Cole, the knee. Now."

His eyes widened at my tone. No one talked to him like this.

I'd seen the way rookies stammered around him. The way my father's Vincent shiver when Cole entered a room.

But I wasn't a rookie. A legendary hockey player with a bad temper didn't scare me.

He groaned and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Every movement cost him... I could see it in the way he clenched his jaw, gripping the edge of the bed so tight that his knuckles turned white.

I knelt in front of him and rolled up the leg of his practice pants.

My breath caught.

His knee was like a roadmap. Six surgical scars, no seven. Two of them are old enough to have faded, the rest looks newer. The kneecap itself sat slightly wrong, pulled to one side by what must have been years of compensated movement. The muscle on his left thigh was noticeably smaller than his right, the kind of atrophy that happened when a joint was avoided, when the body learned to route around the damage.

But it was one scar that stopped me.

Long, diagonal, running from below the kneecap upward and to the left. I had seen this pattern before, in trauma cases. In patients who had been operated on under emergency conditions or worse, in patients who had been sent back into activity too early, before the tissue could bind.

A good surgeon didn't leave a scar like this, a rushed one did.

"What happened to you?" I whispered.

He shrugged. "None of your business."

I looked at the scar again, something nagged at the back of my mind, something I couldn't place yet.

"Hockey happened," he said, voice flat. "Are you happy now? Can you do the job?”

I looked at his leg, then him. I looked at the way his left leg sat slightly crooked, the muscle atrophied compared to the right. At the exhaustion behind his eyes that had nothing to do with sleep.

You didn't become an assistant coach because you wanted to," I said slowly. "You became one because it's the closest you can get."

I had known it somewhere in the back of my mind since the first time I saw him watching the players on the ice with that expression. The one he wiped off his face the second he noticed anyone looking. You can't play. And it is killing you every single day.

He rolled his eyes. " I became one because your father offered me a job."

"No." I shook my head. "You took it because standing at the edge of the ice is better than standing in a house somewhere pretending it doesn't exist."

His jaw tightened like I had hit something real.

"Shut up!" his hands curled into fists. "You don't know anything about me."

He didn't want to confront the truth or he just hated that I saw through him. I never knew he went through that. Watching others play, must have been killing him.

And yet, he swallowed the pain and never complained.

Cole grabbed my wrist, his hold firm. His thumb pressed against my pulse point, where my heart was betraying me by racing.

"Stop," he snapped. "Whatever pity party you're throwing for me, stop. I hate pity. I hate people looking at me like I'm broken."

He dropped my wrist and sighed, raking his hands through his hair. "I'm fine."

I opened my mouth to fire back. He wasn't fine and he didn't need to pretend with me, he didn't need to wear a mask around me.

But before I could bring the words out, the TV wall blinked on. Someone in the front office must have patched through the feed.

A press conference.

My father stood on a podium, a big smile on his face. My hands paused on Cole's knee. Beside him, Harrison Cole, the team owner.

And between them…

My hands stopped moving entirely.

I knew that face before I heard the name. I would know it in any crowd, in any light, in any country I ran to. Clean-shaven, that perfect black hair and that smile, the one that tilted just slightly to the left, the one that made interviewers lean forward and fans cheered and every person in his world believed he was something good.

The smile he had worn while his hand was wrapped around my throat.

"Marcus Webb," my father said into the microphone, proudly, beaming. "Our newest addition."

Marcus Webb.

The name landed in my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

He knew I was here, he had to know. My father bragged about me to every player who walked through those doors. "My daughter, the doctor." Marcus had heard that exact phrase a hundred times when we were together, always said in the same tone.

This was not a coincidence.

Marcus stepped to the microphone. His voice washed over me like ice water.

No, my father wouldn't do this. He couldn't. He couldn't bring the same man that I complained about to the same vicinity I was. He knew I had been running from Marcus.

He knew that the reason I had done my internship here was because I just couldn't keep running anymore and I was broke.

Yes, he didn't care but this was the worst that he could do to me.

"I'm grateful for the opportunity," Marcus said, eyes glinting with malice. "This is a fresh start, a new family and I can't wait to get on the ice and prove myself."

No. No. No.

My hands were shaking. I pressed them against my thighs to hide it. My breath came too fast. The room felt small. Smaller than the closet last night. Smaller than the car Marcus locked me inside while he screamed about dinner being cold.

"Mia."

Cole's voice, distant at first, like hearing someone call your name from the bottom of a pool.

"Mia, look at me."

I couldn't. The screen was still playing. Marcus was laughing at something my father said. His hand clapped my father's shoulder, friendly. The same hand that had…

"Hey!" Cole's hand cupped my face, turned my head and forced me to meet his eyes. "Whatever you're seeing right now, you're not seeing it alone. I'm right here."

I stared at him, my breath was still coming wrong. But something in those words, the particular way he said them, like a man who knew what it was to be somewhere terrible alone helped me a bit

I held onto that.

I wanted to tell him everything. The bruises. The hospital visits I faked. The restraining order I couldn't afford to enforce because Marcus always found me anyway.

I pointed at the screen instead.

"That man," I said. My voice was very quiet. "I know him."