Centuria Books · Man Advantage 3
Man Advantage 3 — Read the First Chapter
Nell Kittredge expects trouble when she smashes a luxury SUV window to save a trapped kitten.
Chapter 1
Nell Kittredge
The scratching came from inside the black SUV.
Nell Kittredge stopped between the animal-clinic van and the arena loading doors. September sun struck the donor lot hard enough to lift tar from the patched seams. The insulated coolers in her hands pulled at both shoulders, and forty rabies-vaccine packs waited inside them for the Providence Corsairs’ charity skate.
The event paired youth hockey with a mobile vaccination clinic, an arrangement designed by a donor who had never carried a cooler through an arena security line. Nell had spent six mornings matching clinic requirements to the Corsairs’ ice schedule. Children would skate with players in one group while their families brought pets through the loading hall in another. Vaccines had to remain cold. Dogs had to remain separated from sharpened steel, loud horns, and mascots shaped like pirates.
The players were due at one. The clinic opened at one fifteen. Nell had eight minutes to deliver the coolers, check the emergency station, and prevent the volunteer committee from placing a photo backdrop across the animal exit.
The schedule lost all authority at twelve fifty-two.
A claw scraped the glass again.
Nell set the coolers in the narrow strip of shade under the van. Her clinic badge swung forward from her scrub top.
“Hello?”
A thin cry answered.
Not a child. Smaller.
She crossed between two parked cars and followed the sound to a long black SUV with tinted windows. The engine was off. Sun burned across the roof. A Pemberton University donor pass lay on the dashboard beside a pink leather phone case.
The cry came again from the passenger footwell.
Nell pressed both hands around her face and blocked the glare. A scrap of calico fur moved beneath the front seat. One white paw pushed between a pair of gold sandals, then slid out of sight.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
The kitten made no answer this time.
Nell pulled her phone from her scrub pocket and called campus police. She put the dispatcher on speaker while she tried each door.
Locked.
“Pemberton emergency services,” a woman said. “What is your location?”
“West donor lot at Corsair Arena. Row C, near the clinic van. There is a kitten trapped in a black SUV.”
“Is the vehicle running?”
“No.”
“Can you see the animal?”
“Barely. It is under the front passenger seat. The windows are closed.”
Nell gave the plate number and held the phone close to the glass. The cabin offered one faint scrape.
“How long has the vehicle been there?” the dispatcher asked.
“I don’t know. The donor gate opened at noon.” Nell checked the time. “It is twelve fifty-two.”
“An officer is coming from the east gate. Do not enter the vehicle unless the officer directs you.”
Nell looked toward the gate. Traffic stood four lanes deep around the arena. A bus carrying youth players blocked the east turn while security searched its cargo bays.
“That could take ten minutes.”
“The officer is coming now.”
The clinic van carried an infrared thermometer in the first-aid case. Nell ran back, opened the rear door, and pulled the orange case from its wall bracket. Her hands stayed steady while she found the thermometer and the spring-loaded glass punch under the gauze packs.
Her mother had called veterinary nursing a phase. Her father had called it a poor return on tuition. Neither had watched Nell close the clinic at two in the morning, balance controlled medication to the milligram, or tell a frightened owner exactly when hope had ended.
Twenty-one years had taught her that calm could be work instead of temperament.
She aimed the thermometer through the windshield. The dashboard read one hundred and eighteen degrees.
“The cabin is at one eighteen,” Nell said.
The dispatcher paused. “Can you confirm the reading?”
Nell took it twice more. “One nineteen at the passenger seat. One seventeen at the floor.”
“Is the animal moving?”
The kitten’s white paw lay still beside the sandals.
“No.”
“Break the window farthest from the animal. Stay on the line.”
Nell tucked the phone into her chest pocket with the speaker facing out. She chose the rear driver’s-side window, two rows from the kitten, and struck the lower corner with the glass punch.
The tool snapped against the pane.
The window crazed but held.
Nell pulled her scrub sleeve over her hand and reached for the punch again.
“Wait,” a man said.
A black wool coat dropped over her head and shoulders.
Darkness covered the hot lot. Nell caught cedar, clean cotton, and the colder scent of arena air. A huge body pressed along her back and left side. One arm closed around her ribs without squeezing. The man’s other hand covered hers around the glass punch.
“Now,” he said near her ear.
Nell struck.
The pane collapsed into the coat.
Glass rattled over asphalt. The man turned Nell with him and kept the wool between her face and the broken window until the last pieces fell.
“Clear,” another man said.
The coat lifted.
Eamon Haverford stood over Nell with one hand still at her waist.
She had carried his name on charity forms all week. Everyone in Providence knew the rest. Corsairs co-captain. Stay-at-home defenseman. Six feet seven. Old family money tied to half the riverfront and new money from a player-tracking company the league used in every arena. He was openly gay, famously private, and mean enough in front of the net to make sports hosts laugh when they replayed his hits.
The forms had failed to explain his scale.
His shoulders blotted out the sun. Close-cut black hair showed silver flecks of broken glass. A scar split his right brow and ended above eyes the gray-green of winter harbor water. His white shirt fit close across a chest built to stop two hundred pounds of forward at full speed.
His hand spanned half of Nell’s waist.
She noticed because her body had become foolish at a poor time.
“You covered the wrong person,” she said.
“No.”
He released her after one last check of her face.
Keir Donnelly reached the broken window first.
He was only two inches shorter than Eamon, which left him enormous by any useful measure. Dark brown curls fell over his forehead as he stripped off his suit jacket. The gold cap on his left canine flashed when he looked into the SUV.
The Corsairs sold posters of that smile. On the ice, Keir used the same mouth to tell goaltenders where he planned to put the puck.
“I see her,” he said.
“Do not reach through that frame bare-armed.” Nell pulled on nitrile gloves from the first-aid case. “There is glass on the sill.”
Keir rolled his sleeves above muscular forearms. “Better?”
“No.”
His smile widened.
Eamon caught the top of the window frame with both hands. “Move.”
Keir stepped aside.
Eamon set one polished shoe against the running board and pulled. Metal groaned. The broken frame bent outward by two inches.
Nell forgot the vaccine coolers. She forgot the dispatcher speaking from her pocket. The tendons in Eamon’s forearms drew tight under lightly tanned skin, and his shirt pulled across his back. He gave the door one more hard wrench.
The frame opened enough for Keir’s shoulders.
Keir wrapped his jacket around his left arm and reached through. Glass cut the white shirt above his elbow before the jacket covered it. He ignored the blood.
“The kitten is under the seat,” Nell said. “Do not drag her by a leg. Get your hand around the chest if you can.”
“Bossy,” Keir murmured.
“Fast.”
His humor vanished. Keir lowered himself until one knee struck the asphalt. He pushed his wrapped arm through the window and turned his face against the hot door.
“I have fur.”
The kitten cried once.
Nell crouched beside him. “Can you feel her head?”
“No. Back. Ribs.”
“Slide toward the shoulders. Two fingers in front of the legs.”
Keir’s muscles shifted under his shirt. Blood ran from his upper arm to the white cuff and dropped onto the black paint.
Eamon braced the frame wider.
“Got her,” Keir said.
He withdrew one inch at a time. A tiny calico face appeared against the dark jacket. The kitten’s mouth hung open. Her eyes were shut.
Keir cleared the frame and gathered the animal against his chest.
Nell took the kitten at once. Heat soaked through her gloves. The little body felt loose and much too light.
“Shade.”
Eamon lifted both vaccine coolers and carried them under the van’s rear doors. Keir followed. Nell knelt on the hot asphalt, put the kitten on a folded towel, and checked her mouth and gums.
Pink. Dry. Breathing fast.
Alive.
“Water?” Eamon asked.
“Wet a towel. Cool, not ice cold.”
He opened the first-aid case and used a sealed bottle. Keir crouched across from Nell, his cut dripping onto the asphalt.
“Your arm needs pressure,” she said.
“The cat first.”
“Press your jacket against it.”
He obeyed.
Nell laid the damp cloth over the kitten’s belly and paws. She touched one drop of water to the small mouth. The kitten swallowed.
Keir made a rough sound and lowered his head.
The gesture changed him more than the blood or ruined shirt. He stayed one of the largest men Nell had ever met, but his whole body had bent toward one half-conscious animal. His expensive pants gathered dust at the knee. His good hand hovered over the towel until Nell nodded.
He stroked the kitten’s head with one knuckle.
The tiny ears twitched.
“There you are,” he said.
Eamon returned with the wet towel. He did not crowd Nell’s hands. He watched the kitten and followed each order at once.
That should have made him less frightening.
It did not.
His stillness held too much choice. On the ice, men struck Eamon because the rules allowed it. In this lot, no rule made him gentle. He had chosen it for a weak animal and a woman he did not know.
Nell’s pulse beat hard beneath her badge.
“Nell?” the dispatcher called from her pocket.
She pulled out the phone. “The kitten is out. She is breathing and swallowing. We are transporting her to the university clinic.”
“The officer is entering the lot. Stay at the vehicle.”
“She needs active cooling and an exam.”
“Do you work for the clinic?”
“Yes. Nell Kittredge, veterinary nursing, third year. My badge number is PBC-four-one-eight. The clinic is two blocks north.”
“The officer will meet you there after securing the vehicle.”
“Thank you.”
Nell ended the call and met Eamon’s gaze.
He had listened to her give each fact. His attention moved over her clinic badge, scrub top, bare forearms, and knees against the asphalt. No hurry softened the route.
Heat gathered low in her body, sharp and unwelcome.
Eamon was gay. The whole city knew it. Nell had read an interview in which he corrected a reporter who called a former boyfriend a friend. He had done it with twelve plain words and a look that made the reporter apologize twice.
The fact should have closed the path of his gaze.
It did not.
Keir noticed. His brown eyes moved from Eamon to Nell and back. The easy humor left his face.
Before anyone spoke, heels struck the asphalt.
“What did you do to my car?”
Brittney Culver came around the row with two students and a man carrying a camera rig behind her. She was twenty-two, fat, and dressed for the charity stream in a white suit belted with gold. Long strawberry-blonde hair lay in bright waves over both shoulders. The heat had reddened her cheeks, but her makeup remained fixed beneath the phone held at arm’s length.
Nell recognized the pink case from the dashboard.
“There was a kitten locked inside,” Nell said. “The cabin reached one hundred and nineteen degrees.”
Brittney aimed the phone at the broken window. “You smashed my car.”
“Campus police told me to break the glass.”
“Why would there be a cat in my car?”
Nell looked down at the damp towel. “That is a useful question.”
Keir coughed into his good hand. It did not hide the laugh.
Brittney’s attention snapped to him. Her face changed at once. Anger became bright concern shaped for the camera.
“Keir, you’re bleeding.” She stepped closer. “We have medical staff inside.”
“I have medical staff here.”
He meant Nell.
The words slid under her scrub top and settled against her skin.
Brittney looked Nell over. Her gaze stopped at the old repair line along one boot and the white clinic name printed above Nell’s breast.
“She’s a student assistant.”
“Nursing student,” Nell said. “Third year.”
“So not a vet.”
“No. I am the person keeping this kitten alive until one arrives.”
Brittney lowered her phone. “Give it to me.”
“The kitten?”
“It was in my car.”
“That does not make it yours.”
Brittney reached toward the towel.
Eamon crossed the space without visible haste.
One moment he stood by the van. The next, his body filled the gap between Brittney and Nell. He did not touch Brittney. He gave her nowhere to place a foot that moved her closer.
“Back up,” he said.
Brittney looked up at him. “Eamon, this has nothing to do with you.”
“You reached for an injured animal.”
“I wanted to help.”
“She told you what helps.”
Nell stared at the broad plane of his back. Broken glass had nicked his left shoulder through the shirt, leaving three small red marks. His hands hung loose by his sides. The pose carried no threat a camera could name.
Her body named one anyway.
Brittney took a step back and lifted her phone again. “This whole thing is insane. I parked for twenty minutes. She must have put the cat in there.”
The lot went quiet around them.
Nell had expected anger about the window. She had expected a bill, a statement, perhaps an afternoon spent showing the emergency call to an insurance adjuster. The lie arrived too quickly for surprise.
“My van camera covers this row,” Nell said. She hoped it did. “Campus police have the call. The kitten’s temperature and treatment go in a medical chart. Tell that story as many times as you like.”
Brittney’s mouth flattened.
Keir stood. He pressed the ruined jacket to his arm with one hand and lifted his phone with the other.
“Team counsel already has the original video,” he said. “They’ll preserve every copy.”
“You filmed me?” Brittney asked.
“I filmed the rescue.”
“This is my benefit.”
“No,” Eamon said. “It is a Corsairs event hosted at Pemberton. Your committee set up the donor tables.”
Brittney’s camera man lowered his rig.
The distinction cost her control. Nell could tell from the sudden color along her neck.
Campus police entered the row on a small electric cart. The officer stopped beside the SUV, took in the broken glass, bloody shirt, wet towel, and four raised phones, then looked at Nell’s clinic badge.
“Kittredge?”
“Yes.” Nell gathered the kitten and towel together. “The dispatcher has my statement. She needs the clinic now.”
The officer nodded. “Go. I’ll meet you there.”
Nell called Hugh before lifting the carrier. She gave him the kitten’s rectal temperature, breathing rate, gum color, and the time Keir broke the window. Hugh cleared the side treatment room and told her to keep active cooling gentle during transport.
“No ice,” Nell said.
Keir looked at the arena machine behind the loading doors. “I was not going to bring a Zamboni.”
“You considered it.”
“For half a second.”
Eamon opened the clinic van, found the spare cooling pack, and wrapped it in a dry towel before Nell asked. He placed it beside the fresh carrier rather than against the kitten. Keir held the door while Nell checked Chirp’s breathing again.
Three strangers had become a rescue team because each accepted a different job.
The officer directed arena staff to preserve donor-lot camera footage. Hockey families still waited beyond the loading doors. The kitten’s crisis changed the schedule without erasing every animal behind it.
Nell put the kitten into a clean carrier and left the door open for air. She reached for the vaccine coolers.
Eamon already held both.
“Those go to the arena,” she said.
“Later.”
“The vaccines stay cold.”
He glanced at the temperature seals. “They are cold.”
Keir picked up the carrier.
“Your arm,” Nell said.
“Still attached.”
“That is a poor standard.”
“You can improve it at the clinic.”
He smiled at her, but his gaze remained intent. Not the bright grin sold on posters. This one held private knowledge. He had watched Eamon look at her and had reached some conclusion Nell could not yet see.
She walked toward the clinic with two professional hockey players beside her. Eamon’s stride had to shorten for hers. Keir carried the kitten against his chest while blood marked the cuff of a shirt worth more than Nell’s monthly rent.
Behind them, Brittney demanded an arrest, a lawyer, and a replacement vehicle in that order.
Neither man looked back.
At the edge of the lot, Nell glanced up at Eamon.
His face had settled into the cold expression he wore across from a charging forward. The glower held no gratitude. It moved over her as if she had broken a private rule and left him deciding whether to punish her or keep the damage.
Nell should have stepped away.
She shifted closer instead, making room for a student cart to pass.
Eamon’s eyes dropped to the six inches between their arms.
The glower deepened.
Keir saw that too.
“Well,” he said softly. “This season is going to be expensive.”
Chapter 2
Keir Donnelly
The university clinic admitted the kitten faster than it admitted Keir.
Nell carried the calico through a side door marked EMERGENCY INTAKE while a desk clerk stopped Keir in the hall and pointed at his bloody sleeve. The gray tile smelled of bleach, wet fur, and bitter coffee burned near dawn. Eamon stood behind Keir with both vaccine coolers, his ruined coat folded over one forearm, and enough cold patience to frighten the clerk into taking one step back.
“He goes in the treatment room,” Nell called without looking around. “I need another set of hands, and his cut is still open.”
Keir smiled at the clerk. “My medical staff has spoken.”
“She is a student,” the clerk said.
“Third year,” Keir corrected.
The clerk looked from him to Eamon and chose a more useful battle. “The coolers cannot block the hall.”
Eamon carried them to the marked delivery bay, set them exactly inside the yellow line, and returned before Keir reached the treatment room. That was how Eamon moved when a problem gave him measurements. He made himself quiet, found the boundaries, and controlled every inch inside them.
Keir had loved him for four years and wanted him for six. Nothing about that truth had ever felt uncertain.
Then Eamon had looked at Nell in the donor lot.
Keir entered the treatment room with the kitten still warm against his chest. Stainless steel covered three walls. A scale, oxygen cage, warming unit, and locked drug cabinet left a narrow aisle around the raised table. Nell had tied her brown hair away from her face with a strip of blue bandage. The short ends brushed her jaw when she turned.
“Put her here.”
Keir laid the kitten on the towel Nell had spread across the scale. The number climbed to one pound, thirteen ounces.
“Eight hundred and twenty-two grams,” Nell said. “Too light for eight weeks, if that is what she is.”
“You can tell by looking?”
“Teeth, ears, eye color, movement. The vet will check.”
The kitten gave a small, dry chirp.
Nell bent close. “That sound is terrible, but I am glad to hear it.”
She fitted a pediatric oxygen line beside the calico’s nose, checked the rectal temperature, and started a chart with the time of rescue. Her movements had changed since the parking lot. She still worked quickly, but the wild edge had gone. Each tool landed in its tray. Each number received a time and a second check.
Keir had played beside men who became calm only after the puck dropped. Nell belonged to the same strange breed. Crisis gave her a clean surface, while ordinary attention caught at the seams.
Eamon watched her from the doorway.
His face remained still. Keir knew the small signs beneath it: the fixed thumb against his coat seam, the lowered chin, his weight held forward on both feet. Eamon was not waiting to help. He was keeping himself from crossing the room.
Nell pointed at a chair. “Sit down, Keir.”
He sat.
Eamon’s eyes moved to him, and the corner of Keir’s mouth rose. There were few people in the world who could order either of them into a chair. A woman who barely reached Keir’s chest had done it twice in fifteen minutes.
Nell cut the sleeve above his wound. “This shirt is finished.”
“You sound pleased.”
“It kept shedding threads into the cut.” She rinsed blood from his upper arm with sterile saline. “I dislike it on professional grounds.”
“The shirt cost eight hundred dollars.”
“Then it had every chance to do better.”
Keir laughed, and Nell’s mouth softened before she caught it.
The cut measured three inches along the outer arm. It was shallow at both ends and deeper near the middle, where the window frame had torn through skin instead of slicing cleanly. Nell placed a sterile pad over it and pressed his hand on top.
“Hold that. I need the vet to decide whether you need stitches.”
“I’ve had worse cuts taped between periods.”
“This is a clinic, not a bench.”
“We have better snacks on the bench.”
“You have worse infection control.”
Keir looked at Eamon. “I like her.”
“I am in the room,” Nell said.
“I know.”
Color warmed her cheeks. It reached the small scar beside her left thumb when she curled that hand around the kitten’s chart.
Keir had liked women since he was old enough to know what liking meant. He enjoyed soft bodies, sweet scents, sharp voices, and the moment a woman decided she wanted his size rather than merely admired it. That history had never conflicted with Eamon because Eamon was not part of a category. He was the one man Keir had wanted, the one answer that remained true when every label around it became inconvenient.
Nell was easier to explain and harder to dismiss.
Keir wanted her. He had known it when she ordered him to reach around the kitten’s chest, and his body had answered when Eamon covered her with the coat. Desire itself was familiar. What it did to Eamon was not.
The kitten chirped again.
“Chirp,” Keir said.
Nell glanced up. “What?”
“She needs a chart name.”
“She needs an owner to name her.”
“Until then, Chirp.”
Nell considered the calico. “That is a bad name.”
“She made it herself.”
The kitten opened one blue-gray eye and let out another ruined sound.
Nell wrote CHIRP — temporary at the top of the chart.
Keir felt absurdly victorious.
A veterinarian entered with a stethoscope around her neck and silver threaded through a dark braid. Her badge read DR. YVETTE LELAND, CLINICAL SUPERVISOR. Nell delivered the rescue timeline, cabin readings, cooling steps, temperature, weight, and response to water without checking her notes. Dr. Leland listened to the kitten and examined her mouth while Nell entered each finding.
“Early heat injury and dehydration,” Dr. Leland said. “No seizure activity. No burn injury. We will draw blood, place a small line, and watch her kidneys. Good work getting her out.”
The praise altered Nell more than Keir’s teasing had. Her shoulders lowered, and one hand flattened briefly against the table.
“Campus police authorized the window,” she said.
“I heard.” Dr. Leland looked at Keir’s arm. “You are next.”
“I have a game in three days.”
“Then you should avoid an infected wound.”
Eamon spoke from the doorway. “Stitch it.”
Keir looked at him. “Your concern touches me.”
“Nothing touches you until that arm is closed.”
Nell’s gaze moved between them. The clinic room became smaller by a few degrees.
Keir pressed the pad harder against his wound and smiled at Eamon with all the private meaning the sentence deserved. Eamon’s eyes narrowed, but the stern line of his mouth changed at one corner.
They had learned to conduct whole arguments through pauses because secrecy punished touch. Teammates knew they shared a townhouse. A few knew they shared a bed. The club knew nothing official, and no reporter had ever proved more than friendship between an openly gay defenseman and a forward who had dated women in public.
Nell looked down first.
Keir wondered whether she had understood.
Dr. Leland injected anesthetic around the cut, irrigated it again, and placed six neat stitches. Keir kept his attention on Nell because she had begun the kitten’s blood draw across the room. The calico fit inside both of her palms. Nell murmured numbers and clinic terms while Dr. Leland worked, yet Chirp settled at the low sound of her voice.
Keir’s phone vibrated in his pocket.
CORSAIRS COUNSEL appeared on the screen.
He answered. “Tell me you saved the original rescue video.”
“I saved what you sent,” Ramona Lerner said. “What happened?”
Keir gave her the short version. He included the emergency call, temperature, broken window, blood, Brittney’s property claim, and the accusation that Nell had planted the kitten.
Ramona went silent for two seconds. “Do you know how the kitten entered the vehicle?”
“No.”
“Then say only what the evidence shows. Send the full file from your phone, not a compressed message copy. Do not post anything. Do not let team media post anything.”
“Preserve the donor-lot cameras too.”
“Already requested.”
Keir looked at Nell. “And any mention of Nell Kittredge, the Pemberton animal clinic, or the kitten.”
Nell’s head rose at her name.
Ramona heard the change in his voice. She had negotiated two of his contracts and all three restaurant leases. “Personal interest?”
“Evidence interest.”
“You are a poor liar, Keir.”
“That is why we pay you.”
“You pay me to make your truths survivable. Send the files.”
He ended the call.
Nell lifted one eyebrow. “You gave team counsel my name.”
“Brittney gave the lot five versions of it before we reached the door.”
“That does not make it yours to spread.”
“No. It makes it a term we preserve. Ramona will lock the original footage and the camera requests. Nothing public.”
Nell studied him for a long second, then nodded once. “Send me the evidence-hold contact.”
Keir unlocked his phone, entered Ramona’s number, and held the screen out.
Nell took the phone rather than dictating her own. She typed her number, saved the contact, and opened a new message to herself so Keir could not claim she had hidden it from him. The act was dry, careful, and faintly insulting.
His interest sharpened.
Eamon’s did too.
The treatment-room door opened, and a campus officer entered with Brittney behind him. Officer Marta Royce had a square build, a navy uniform darkened by heat at the collar, and a tablet tucked under one arm. Brittney had lost the camera crew but kept her phone.
“Ms. Culver wants to make a property-damage report,” Officer Royce said. “Ms. Kittredge, I have the dispatch recording and your ID. I need the glass tool and the clinic-van camera file.”