Centuria Books · Man Advantage
Man Advantage — Read the First Chapter
They are the kings of the ice. The NHL’s most violent, exclusive couple. And they just decided I’m the only thing holding them together.
Chapter 1 — Under the Grate
The cry came from beneath six inches of rushing water.
Mina stopped under the arena’s concrete overhang and listened past the rain, the diesel growl of a delivery truck, and the music leaking from the donor gala inside. Nothing. Her lab supervisor had already gone back through the service door. The other student volunteers were sharing a rideshare downtown, and Mina had told them she preferred the bus because forty-two dollars was an absurd amount to pay for avoiding weather.
Then the cry came again.
Thin. Ragged. Alive.
She tucked the poster tube holding three months of imaging results beneath the driest corner of the overhang. Her borrowed black dress had survived two hours of sweating donors, a spilled glass of champagne, and the department chair calling her young lady while introducing her work as if she had merely carried the microscope into the room. It could survive mud.
The storm drain crouched beyond the loading bay, and water sheeted across the pavement and poured through its iron mouth; Mina hitched up her skirt and ran.
Cold water filled her shoes on the third step; she reached the grate, dropped to both knees, and bent until her cheek nearly touched the pavement. The runoff smelled of wet asphalt, old oil, and the sour remains of whatever the concession stands had washed away after the afternoon game.
Two pale eyes flashed below.
“I see you.” Mina pulled the flashlight from her bag and aimed it between the bars. A black kitten clung to a crosspiece beneath the grate. It was small enough to fit in both her hands. One forepaw slipped each time a pulse of water struck its side.
The grate did not lift when Mina pulled, and of course it did not—it had been designed to resist snowplows and drunk fans with bad ideas, not accommodate five-foot biology students in borrowed dresses.
She set the flashlight between her teeth and checked the frame. Hinged at the far side. Locking hook near her left knee. The hook had jammed beneath a layer of grit.
The kitten cried again.
“I know. I’m working the problem.”
Her gala name badge made a poor tool. It bent on the first try, but the metal clip was narrow enough to scrape mud from the hook; Mina dug until one thumbnail tore and the latch showed beneath the black paste.
White light flooded her back, and a warning beep sounded once.
She glanced over her shoulder; a black utility vehicle was reversing around the loading-bay corner, its camera likely blind in the downpour. The driver could not see her below the window line, and the open drain waited between Mina and the only clear escape.
She slapped the pavement and shouted, “Stop.”
The vehicle kept coming.
The kitten’s paw slid.
Mina turned back to the latch.
Tires hissed over water. The reversing alarm became a steady shriek, loud enough to shake her teeth. She hooked the ruined badge beneath the catch, braced one soaked shoe against the frame, and pulled.
The engine roared.
Something struck the vehicle behind her with a deep metallic bang.
The alarm stopped; a man’s hand closed around Mina’s waist.
It covered nearly the full distance between her ribs and hip; one hard pull lifted her off her knees and took her backward so fast the storm drain blurred. Her spine hit a chest like a padded wall; heat surrounded her. One thick forearm banded beneath her breasts, holding her several inches above the pavement while another man stepped between them and the vehicle.
“Brake,” he said.
He did not shout, and he did not have to.
The driver stood on the brake hard enough to rock the vehicle. Its rear bumper stopped where Mina’s shoulder had been.
For one quiet second, rain ticked against metal.
Then Mina drove her heel into the shin of the man holding her.
He grunted and set her down at once.
“Good,” he said near her ear. “You do know how to object.”
She spun.
Rook looked larger without the boards and broadcast glass making him seem safely distant; his tuxedo jacket hung open over a white shirt, his bow tie already loose, and wet black curls touched the scar through his left brow. A purple mark spread across his cheekbone from the game two nights ago, and his crooked nose made his smile look even less trustworthy.
Mina had watched him put a man through plexiglass last winter, and the hit had been clean; the smile afterward had not looked sane.
“You picked me up,” she said.
“There was a truck.”
“There was also my spine.”
His dark eyes flicked over her as if checking every part. “Still attached.”
“That does not make it yours.”
The smile changed. Not softer. More awake.
Behind him, Mercer planted one palm against the vehicle’s rear door, and the metal held a shallow dent beneath his hand; he wore charcoal wool, a black tie, and the expression he brought to a penalty kill: cold attention with no wasted movement. Rain darkened his swept black hair and ran over the crooked bridge of his nose; his shoulders filled the space between the red taillights.
Six feet six, the team program claimed, and two hundred forty pounds; Mina had used both figures while calibrating the scale on a biomechanics display inside.
The numbers had not prepared her for the fact of him.
Mercer looked at the driver through the open window. “Did the rear camera fail?”
“She was below the line, Cap. I didn’t—”
“Park. Report it. Put cones around this bay until security checks every vehicle.”
The driver nodded and pulled forward at walking speed, and Mercer’s gaze shifted to Mina.
It began at her wet hair, paused at the donor badge clenched in her hand, and dropped to the blood gathering beneath her broken thumbnail; he did not leer. He assessed. That should have made the inspection less intimate.
It did not.
“You had three seconds to move,” he said.
“The kitten had less.”
“You calculated that?”
“I observed it.”
“From underneath a reversing truck.”
“Beside one.”
Rook laughed. It was a low, startled sound, nothing like the roar he gave a crowd.
Mina turned her back on both of them and knelt by the drain; the latch had sprung.
She gripped the grate and pulled, and it rose an inch, then dragged at her arms. Mercer crouched beside her; even folded down, he remained too much man in too little space. His sleeve brushed her bare shoulder, wool rough against rain-chilled skin.
“Tell me where to lift,” he said.
Not move. Not let me.
The small distinction slipped beneath her guard.
“Near the latch. Straight up until the hinge catches. Don’t tip it toward the channel.”
Mercer set both hands where she pointed, and scars crossed his knuckles and disappeared beneath his cuffs. The grate rose as if it had been made of wire; he held more than a hundred pounds of iron at shoulder height without a tremor.
Mina lay flat and reached into the dark.
Water soaked the front of her dress, and the channel narrowed beyond her shoulder; she could see the kitten now, claws hooked into rust, its hindquarters half submerged.
“Easy,” she whispered. “I have you.”
The kitten struck at her fingers.
“Fair.”
She turned her hand palm down and let it smell her knuckles, and another surge of water shoved its back legs loose; Mina caught its scruff and chest together, drew it clear of the metal, and tucked it against her neck.
The animal shook so hard its skull tapped her collarbone.
Rook’s hand appeared at the edge of the drain, and he did not grab her this time; he opened his palm.
“May I?”
Mina looked at him.
His smile was gone; he waited in the rain with a bruised face and both hands where she could see them.
“Under my arms,” she said. “Don’t squeeze the kitten.”
He slid his hands beneath her and lifted.
This time she knew the force was coming. That made the ease of it worse. Her stomach drew tight as Rook raised her from the pavement and set her on her feet against him; his shirt was warm, and his body seemed to give off heat faster than the storm could steal it.
Mercer lowered the grate. Iron struck concrete with a wet clang.
The kitten burrowed beneath Mina’s chin, and she cupped her palm over its spine and counted the frantic beats. Too fast to measure cleanly. Gums pale beneath the mud. Breathing shallow. Cold stress, possible aspiration, possible injury.
“It needs an emergency vet,” she said.
“There is one twelve minutes away,” Mercer answered.
She looked up. “You know that quickly?”
He held out his phone, and a map filled the screen, the route already marked; of course he had solved the next problem while she was still naming it.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
“No.”
Both men went still.
Mina had the sudden, absurd sense that nobody said that word to either of them often enough.
“No?” Rook asked.
“You are dressed for a room full of donors; I am wet, bleeding, and carrying something that may empty its bowels from shock. You have an event; I have a bus pass and a veterinary hospital with twenty-four-hour intake.”
Mercer’s jaw shifted. “The next bus is in nineteen minutes.”
“How do you know that?”
“The stop is on the route map.”
“You looked up my bus?”
“I looked up the fastest way to keep a half-frozen animal alive; your bus was not it.”
His voice remained level, but the words landed with the weight of command, and Mina felt the answering pull low in her body and resented it immediately. Attraction was not evidence of authority; it was a nervous-system event, no more sacred than a sneeze.
She shifted the kitten higher. “Then call a car. I will ride in it alone.”
Rook tipped his head. “You’d get into a stranger’s car but not ours?”
“The stranger would have a route logged by an app and no reason to think saving me bought access to me.”
Rook’s eyebrows rose; Mercer did not look offended, and if anything, the cold focus sharpened.
“Reasonable,” he said.
He booked the car.
The choice should not have pleased her; the warm pressure that spread beneath her ribs was as unwelcome as the ache Rook’s hands had left around her waist.
Mercer took a folded white handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it, and Mina expected him to wipe the mud from her face himself; some foolish corner of her wanted him to.
He waited.
She took it and pressed the cloth around her torn nail.
“Thank you.”
“For the cloth or the truck?”
“The truck. The cloth is going to be ruined.”
“It can recover.”
Rook bent until his face was nearer hers. He smelled of rain, clean sweat, and the faint medicinal bite of whatever trainers rubbed into bruises. “Can you?”
“From a muddy dress?”
“From looking at Mercer like you want him to give you another order so you can refuse it.”
Heat climbed from Mina’s chest to her face, and Mercer’s gaze cut to Rook, warning in the angle of his chin.
“I look at systems,” Mina said. “He behaves like one.”
“A winning one,” Rook said.
“You lost on Tuesday.”
Rook stared at her; Mina wished, briefly, that storm water could open beneath her and carry her into the drain.
Then he laughed again; he braced one hand on his thigh as if the sound had struck him in the stomach. Mercer looked away, but not before Mina caught the small pull at one corner of his mouth.
The service door opened.
A man in a dark suit stepped beneath the overhang, dry under a security guard’s umbrella; his attention passed over Mina and stopped on Rook’s open jacket, Mercer’s wet hair, and the kitten trembling against Mina’s skin.
“The gala chair is asking for you,” he said. “Both of you. There are cameras inside.”
“There are cameras out here,” Mercer said.
The red light over the loading bay turned toward them with a soft electric whir.
The man in the suit glanced up too late. “Security is documenting the vehicle incident.”
“Then they can send Mina a copy,” Rook said.
The man looked at her badge, and his eyes rested on the university logo, then her full name; Mina turned the badge backward, and her car appeared at the far end of the bay.
She stepped away from Rook before he could decide to move her again, and the cold found every place his body had warmed.
“Your phone,” she told Mercer.
He unlocked it and handed it over.
Mina entered her number, called herself, and ended the call when her bag began to buzz. Then she held the phone toward Rook.
“Yours too.”
Rook obeyed with a grin that suggested he found the word erotic.
“This is not an invitation,” Mina said. “You will both receive the veterinary report because you were witnesses to the injury and because your organization may be liable for the vehicle. You may ask once whether the kitten survived. You may not send a car, appear at my apartment, contact my department, or decide that nearly being flattened makes me your problem.”
Mercer’s eyes settled on her mouth. “And if we want to see you rather than the cat?”
The question moved through her more slowly than Rook’s hands had, and it reached every private place; Mina opened the car’s rear door.
“Then you can ask that once too.”
She climbed in with the kitten and shut the door before either man could answer.
The driver pulled away from the loading bay. Through the rain-streaked glass, Rook stood with his hands in his pockets and his bruised face turned after her; Mercer had not moved at all. The senior executive spoke near his shoulder, but Mercer watched the car until the arena swallowed them from view.
Mina pressed two fingers to the kitten’s narrow chest, and the frantic heartbeat persisted against her skin; her own was not much better.
She had spent the evening explaining cell stress to wealthy people who wanted simple answers: damage or recovery, failure or survival, good investment or bad. Living systems were never that obedient. They adapted. They compensated. They carried the memory of pressure long after the force disappeared.
Rook’s arm remained around her waist in the form of heat, and Mercer’s restraint remained in the shape of the handkerchief around her thumb; her phone lit with two new contacts.
Neither man wrote.
The kitten shifted beneath Mina’s coat and pushed one needle claw through the wet fabric. She loosened the fold, checked the animal’s breathing beneath the passing streetlights, and found the tiny ribs moving faster than her own. Mercer’s handkerchief had already turned pink around her thumb, while Rook’s number waited beside a contact photograph he had apparently chosen during a fight.
Mina had expected money to make them impatient, fame to make them careless, and strength to make every refusal feel temporary. Instead, Rook had released her when she asked, while Mercer had solved the medical problem and let her reject the solution he preferred. The distinction did not make either man safe, but it gave her a specific danger to examine instead of a fantasy to fear.
For the first time that night, Mina found obedience more unsettling than pursuit.
Chapter 2 — The Variable
Mercer lasted seven minutes before he looked at Rook’s mouth.
Rain streaked the passenger window of the team car and fractured the city into red and white smears; Rook sat with his knees spread because the rear seat had not been built for either of them. His tuxedo jacket lay in a damp heap between his shoes, and one hand rested on his thigh; the other turned his phone over and over, screen down, screen up, screen down.
He had not said a word since Mina’s car left the loading bay; silence in Rook was never peace, and it was a held breath before impact.
Mercer watched the reflection of his own face in the glass instead, and he had built a career on directing attention. Two defensemen drifting too far toward the boards; a goaltender favoring his left knee. The instant Rook’s temper stopped serving the play and began serving pain; all of it could be seen early if a man refused the comfort of surprise.
Tonight, Mercer had failed to see a black dress on black pavement until the vehicle’s brake lights painted Mina red; his palm still remembered the rear door bending.
“She did not thank you for picking her up,” he said.
Rook’s thumb stopped against the edge of his phone. “You noticed.”
“Everyone noticed.”
“You liked it.”
“That she objected to you handling her without warning? Yes. It suggested she might live through the week.”
Rook turned his head. The bruise on his left cheek had darkened in the car’s low light. “You liked her ordering me around.”
Mercer loosened his tie by exactly one inch. “She gave useful instructions.”
“And you lifted the grate where she told you.”
“Because she understood the hinge.”
“You could have torn it out of the ground.”
“That would have dropped it into the channel.”
“Yes, Cap. That was her point.”
Rook looked back at his phone, and a faint smile touched his mouth.
Mercer hated that smile, and he hated knowing Mina had put it there. He hated the more private truth: he had spent the drive arranging reasons to speak about her because saying her name without a reason felt too much like admission.