Off the Ice

An MM Hockey Romance by Chase Power

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Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Hockey Romance, Injured Athlete, Age Gap, Forced Proximity, Roommates to Lovers, Forbidden Romance, Secret Relationship, Praise Kink, Brat/Tamer, Caretaking, Hurt/Comfort, Touch Starved, Found Family, Comeback Story

He can’t touch him for six weeks. Nobody said he couldn’t tell him what to do.

Rafe Donnelly knows how to take a hit.

He knows how to grin for the camera, own a room, and hand everybody the version of him they paid to see.

Then his knee goes in a contract year, and the only question anyone has left for him is when are you back?

Micah Voss is the first man to ask what he needs tonight.

Ex-player. Nine years older. The calmest person in any building — and on the team payroll, with a clause in his contract that says he can’t lay a finger on a player. But Rafe’s on crutches, his elevator’s out for eight weeks, and Micah has a spare room, no stairs, and a house so quiet Rafe can finally hear himself think.

A temporary arrangement. Clear rules. Six weeks until that contract runs out.

Rafe can work with six weeks. If Micah can’t touch him, he can damn well tell him what to do.

One low, steady good and the league’s golden boy finds out exactly what he’s been missing. One night in Micah’s bed and the most careful man in Pittsburgh finds out what it costs to finally want something for himself.

But Rafe has spent his life being the good news. Micah has spent his being the one nobody has to worry about.

And if they want more than a place to hide, they’re going to have to learn the difference between taking care of someone and taking over.

Off the Ice is a high-heat MM hockey romance with an injured star, an older ex-player who gives very clear instructions, forced proximity, a forbidden countdown, praise kink, hurt/comfort, found family, and a hard-won HEA. No cheating. Standalone.

You’ll Love This Book If You Enjoy:

✔️ An injured hockey star and the older ex-player who takes him in
✔️ Forced proximity: one spare room, one bathroom, one very thin wall
✔️ A forbidden countdown — a no-touching clause, a loophole, and midnight on New Year’s Eve
✔️ Praise kink — one quiet “Good” that takes the league’s golden boy apart
✔️ A calm, careful dom who gives very clear instructions, and a mouthy brat who calls him Coach
✔️ Hurt/comfort with real stakes: a second knee surgery in a contract year
✔️ The caretaker who finally learns to be taken care of
✔️ Found family: a sister with a hatchback, an eight-year-old with a model lander, a captain who keeps secrets
✔️ A public claiming, rules written by two authors, and a hard-won HEA

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⚠️ Content Warning: Off the Ice is a high-heat MM romance for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit sexual content between two adult men, dominance and submission, praise, edging and orgasm control, light bondage, one rough, angry (consensual) scene, a serious sports injury, surgical recovery and an on-page re-injury, pain-medication avoidance, family financial pressure, and strong language. All intimacy is consensual. No cheating. Guaranteed HEA.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Eleven days after surgery, in a tux and a locked brace, the league’s golden boy is working a room on one leg and a load-bearing grin. Four hundred people don’t notice he’s going gray. One man does.

Chapter One: One More Picture

“So when are you back?”

That made eleven. Eleven times in forty minutes, and I’d met every one with the same grin, because the grin was load-bearing and the alternative was telling a man who’d made his fortune in dental implants that I didn’t fucking know.

“Soon as they’ll let me,” I said. “I’m a nightmare patient. They’re begging to get rid of me.”

He laughed. His wife laughed and squeezed my forearm, the way everybody squeezed something, and I leaned harder into the crutches so she wouldn’t feel the shake.

Sentinels Casino Night. The Fairmont ballroom done up like Monte Carlo on a hockey budget: felt tables, plastic chips, a ten-foot ice sculpture of the team crest sweating through a tablecloth. Four hundred people had paid a grand a plate to lose play money to men with missing teeth, all of it for the children’s hospital. I’d worked this party five years running and I was good at it. Put me in a tux in front of donors and I turned into a golden retriever with a jawline.

This year the retriever had a brace locked straight from thigh to ankle under a pant leg the tailor had split and pinned shut. Eleven days since a surgeon rebuilt my right knee. Second time for that knee. First time in a contract year.

Late October, a nothing play along the half-wall. My skate caught a rut, a defenseman finished his check, and I heard it go before I felt it. You don’t forget that sound. I’d been nineteen the first time.

Also, I hadn’t swallowed anything stronger than Advil since breakfast.

At four o’clock that had seemed smart. The good pills made me soft and slow, half a beat late on every punchline, and I wasn’t about to stand in front of the people who signed my checks looking half a beat late on anything. So the bottle stayed on my kitchen counter and I showed up armed with ibuprofen and charm.

By nine the ibuprofen had clocked out. What I had below the thigh wasn’t a knee anymore. It was a hot fist, closing, and it tightened another notch every time my heart beat.

“Donnelly!” A palm cracked down on my shoulder. “There’s my guy. When are we getting you back out there, bud?”

Twelve.

“Aw, you miss me that bad?” I turned the grin up. “Tell my agent. Loudly.”

The trick to a room like that is nobody actually wants an answer. They want the feeling of having asked. So you hand them a line, you get the laugh, and they walk off believing Rafe Donnelly’s doing great and that they’re the kind of person Rafe Donnelly jokes around with. Everybody leaves happy. I’d been running that play since I was fifteen and my dad started bringing guys from the job site to my games.

Crutches in a crowd are their own sport, though. Every handshake meant parking one under my armpit and balancing on the other like a drunk flamingo.

I worked the room on one leg. Dealt blackjack to a table of season-ticket holders and let a nine-year-old in a jersey down to his shins clean me out. He had a cast on his wrist, monkey bars, so I signed it and told him we were twins. I posed with a woman whose hand slid south and settled on my ass, and I let it sit there because moving it would have taken a sentence I didn’t have. I told the Winnipeg bus story. Twenty minutes later I told the Winnipeg bus story again. Somebody pressed a bourbon on me and I carried it around like a prop, because my stomach had started a slow, greasy roll that had nothing to do with booze.

In the men’s room I checked my phone. Forty unread. I thumbed down far enough to confirm what I already knew: forty people, one text.

When you back, Donny?

Timeline??

Your dad says March. That true?

I pocketed it, checked that my face was still on, and went back out.

Garrett Lindqvist caught me by the roulette wheel.

Our general manager had the build of a man who used to play defense and the eyes of a man who now read spreadsheets for pleasure. “Walk with me.”

“Bold ask, Garrett.”

“Stand with me, then.” He steered us into a gap behind a potted palm, which is where bad news and big ideas both happen at these things. “The content team has a pitch. I like it. I want you to like it.”

“I like everything. Famously.”

“The Road Back.” He let the title hang like it deserved a drumroll. “Six episodes. A crew follows your rehab start to finish. The surgery, the grind, the first day you lace up skates. People love a comeback, Rafe, and they already love you. It keeps your face in front of the fans the whole time you’re out.” He paused. He didn’t have to say the next part, so naturally he did. “In front of ownership, too. This year, that’s not nothing.”

This year. My deal was up in June. Nobody hands seven seasons to a winger with two surgeries on one knee unless they’ve watched him earn it back, and Garrett was offering to film me doing exactly that. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was a guy with a cap sheet, throwing me a rope.

And I had people hanging off the other end of it. The mortgage in Erie came out of my account on the first of every month. So did the last of my sister’s student loans. So did a cousin’s business loan that was never getting paid back.

“Cameras in the PT room,” I said.

“Tasteful cameras.”

“Garrett, right now a woman half my size is teaching me to straighten my own leg. It’s not cinematic.”

“It will be once we put music under it.”

“What’s the last episode?” I asked.

“You. On the ice. First round of the playoffs, if you’re feeling ambitious.”

“And if I’m—” The fist in my leg clenched and the rest of the sentence went white.

Garrett smiled as if I’d finished it with a joke. “That’s why they call it a comeback. Think it over. Say yes, but think it over.”

He clapped my arm and was gone, and a woman from PR with a headset and a clipboard slid into the space he’d left.

“Rafe! There you are. Can I steal you? The Hendersons are at the step-and-repeat and they bid on a photo. One picture.”

It was not one picture.

It was the Hendersons, then the Hendersons with their daughter, then the daughter alone, then a board member who happened to be walking by. The photographer’s flash was the kind you feel in your molars. Each pop punched a purple hole in the ballroom that took longer to close than the one before it. Sweat crawled down my spine under the jacket. The chatter around me had gone thin and distant, like I was hearing the party from the bottom of a pool.

“Gorgeous. One more, Rafe? Big smile.”

I gave her the big smile. My lips had gone numb, so I had to take it on faith.

“One more.”

“I think he’s needed in the back.”

The voice came from my left, low and unhurried, and it cut through the pool water like the only thing in the building at the right volume.

Micah Voss.

He stood a yard off with his hands in his pockets. Charcoal suit, no tie, collar open. Broad through the chest and shoulders, brown hair cropped close, a short beard starting to go silver at the chin. The team paid him to run workshops for us on routine, pressure, how to keep your own head from eating you alive in March, and he was the calmest man in any room he entered. Eighteen months of hallway conversations, and he’d never once laughed at the wrong moment. Then there was Columbus, which I didn’t think about. Often.

“We’re almost done,” PR said brightly. “We just need—”

Micah looked at her. That was all. He didn’t say it again, didn’t smile, didn’t square up. He waited, pleasantly, like a man with the whole night free, and she ran out of sentence.

“Sure. Of course. Rafe, find me after?”

“He won’t,” Micah said, and then to me, quieter, “Door behind the bar. Can you make thirty feet?”

“I can make thirty miles.”

“Thirty feet’s fine.”

He walked beside me and never touched me. I clocked that. He put himself on my bad side, between the brace and the crowd, and matched my pace exactly, and anyone watching saw two guys stepping out to talk shop. Nobody grabbed my shoulder. Nobody asked me a single thing. Easiest thirty feet I’d covered in two weeks.

The door let onto a service corridor. Fluorescent tubes, a mop bucket, racks of dirty glassware, the clang and holler of a kitchen somewhere around the bend. After the ballroom it was quiet as a church.

A stack of banquet chairs stood against the wall. Micah pulled the top one down and set it behind me.

“Sit.”

I sat. I didn’t decide to. My ass hit the chair before my brain had finished drafting its objection, and that should have worried me more than it did.

He lifted the crutches out of my hands and leaned them on the wall. Then his palm settled on the back of my neck, warm and heavy, and tipped my head down toward my knees.

“Breathe. You’re done for tonight.”

“I’ve got the live auction at ten. I’m supposed to hold up a—”

“Someone else can hold up a stick.” His thumb pressed in just under my skull. “In through your nose. Slower than that.”

I breathed. In, slower than that. Out. The purple holes started to close. The corridor quit its long, lazy tilt. His hand stayed exactly where it was, and something in my chest that had been cranked tight since the surgeon said the word again backed off by about one turn.

People put their hands on me all day. It was most of the job. Guys ran me into the boards, trainers dug elbows into my hip flexors, strangers threw an arm around me and held up a phone. Every one of those hands was in the middle of getting something.

This one was just holding my neck.

I wanted to push back into it like a dog. I held still and hoped he’d forget to take it away.

“Scale of ten,” he said.

“Three.”

Nothing. I looked up. He had hazel eyes, steady, and they were reading my face like a box score.

“Three,” he said back, perfectly flat. He didn’t argue with it. He put it away somewhere, and I had the uneasy feeling it was going to come back out. “When did you last take something?”

“Advil at six.”

“Something real.”

“…Breakfast.”

“On purpose.”

“They make me stupid.”

“Mm. How’s it going without them?”

I laughed, which was a mistake, because it jostled the leg and came out a hiss.

He let go of my neck, and I felt it leave. He pulled a second chair off the stack, set it in front of me, and got both hands under my braced calf.

“I’m lifting. Don’t help.”

I didn’t help. He raised the leg like something that might spill and set my heel on the seat, and the relief when the blood quit pounding downhill was so sharp I made a noise I’d normally charge for.

His eyes flicked up.

“Sorry,” I said. “That was a private sound.”

“I’ve heard worse in locker rooms.”

“Not from me, you haven’t.”

Micah crouched in front of the chair. He did it carefully, one hand on the wall, sparing his left shoulder the way he always did, and then he was eye level with my bow tie.

“I’m going to loosen this. All right?”

“Buy a guy dinner first.”

“I’m working up to it.”

So dry I nearly missed it. Then his fingers were at my throat, tugging the knot open, slipping the top stud free, and his knuckles dragged along the skin under my jaw.

I should mention that my dick had been dead for eleven days. Clinically. Anesthesia, pain, the general indignity of pissing into a jug. I’d figured it was on injured reserve with the rest of me. It picked that exact second, in a hallway that smelled like bleach and prime rib, with my leg on fire and a man’s knuckles on my pulse, to lift its head and take an interest.

Read the fucking room, I told it.

It did not.

Micah stood, and if he noticed me going red to the ears he had the manners to blame the collar. He vanished around the bend and came back with a bottle of water, a sleeve of crackers off some catering tray, and a line cook’s curious stare trailing behind him.

“Small sips. Eat two of those.”

“Yes, Coach.”

One eyebrow rose a millimeter. “I’m not a coach.”

“You’re a little bit a coach.”

“Crackers, Rafe.”

I ate the crackers. He leaned on the opposite wall and watched me do it, arms folded, and the suit jacket pulled across his biceps in a way I filed under medication I haven’t taken yet.

“You do this a lot?” I asked. “Extract guys from parties?”

“First time.”

“So I’m special.”

“You were the only one in there about to faint into an ice sculpture.”

“I wasn’t going to faint.”

“You went gray. I watched it happen from across the room, over about ten minutes, and I watched four hundred people not notice.”

That landed somewhere soft. I covered it. “You watched me for ten minutes?”

A beat. “I was standing near the bar.”

“That’s not a no.”

“Drink your water.”

He took out his phone and thumbed a text.

“Who’s that?”

“Garrett.”

“What are you telling him?”

“That you’re done for tonight.”

“That’s it? No reason?”

“It’s a complete sentence.” The phone went back in his pocket. “How were you getting home?”

“Car service.”

“Cancel it.”

I cancelled it. He handed me the crutches one at a time and stood close while I got upright, close enough that I caught cedar and clean cotton off his collar. I swayed. His hand came up flat between my shoulder blades and stayed until the floor settled.

“Steady?”

“Three,” I said.

“I didn’t ask for a number.”

“I know. I’m building a brand.”

The corner of his mouth moved. On Micah Voss, that was a standing ovation.

He took me out through the loading dock so I wouldn’t have to cross the ballroom again. I didn’t ask how he knew I couldn’t.

He drove an old Volvo wagon with a hockey bag in the back and a booster seat belted in behind the passenger side. He ran my seat all the way down and back so the brace had room, and didn’t say a word about how long it took me to fold myself in.

“You’ve got a kid?” I nodded at the booster.

“Nephew. Finn. He’s eight, and he’ll tell you he doesn’t need it.”

“Does he?”

“The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania feels strongly.”

I spent the ride up Penn Avenue working on my exit. Simple plan. He’d pull to the curb, I’d say appreciate it, Coach through the window, and he’d be on the Parkway before I reached my front door.

He parked. He killed the engine. He got out.

“You really don’t have to walk me up,” I said.

“I know.”

My building was an old produce warehouse in the Strip, all brick and timber and iron-framed windows, and I’d bought the top floor at twenty-three because it looked like where a guy who’d made it would live. It had one way up that wasn’t stairs: a freight elevator the size of a studio apartment, with a wooden gate you hauled down by a strap.

The gate had a sheet of paper taped to it.

OUT OF SERVICE — MODERNIZATION

ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 8 WEEKS

Micah read it. He read the date in the corner, November tenth. Then he looked at the staircase beside it, steel treads switchbacking up into the dark.

“What floor?”

“It’s really not—”

“Rafe.”

“Five.”

He was quiet a second. “And how have you been getting to five?”

“I’ve got a system.”

“Show me.”

“It’s not really a spectator—”

He waited. Same as he had with the woman from PR. All the time in the world and nowhere he’d rather be, and I ran out of sentence.

So I showed him. I sat down on the third step, laid the crutches across my lap, planted my good foot and both palms, and hoisted my ass up to the fourth. Then the fifth. Bad leg stuck out in front of me like a plank the whole way, tuxedo pants collecting forty years of warehouse grit.

“See?” I was a little out of breath. “Great for the triceps. I’m coming out of this with arms like a gymnast.”

Micah stood at the bottom with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the leading scorer of the Pittsburgh Sentinels scooting backward up a staircase on his butt in a bow tie.

He didn’t laugh. I’d have known what to do with a laugh.

“How long does the whole trip take?”

“Twenty-five minutes. Twenty if I don’t stop to cry.”

“Do you stop to cry?”

“That’s a joke.”

“Is it.”

I had nothing for that.

“How many days?”

“Three.”

“Who knows?”

“You, as of now. Congratulations.”

“Not the trainers. Not your agent.”

“The team would have me in a suite at the Fairmont by lunch. Nurse, room service, nice view of the Point.” I picked at a brace strap. “For two months.”

“And that’s worse than this.”

I meant to say something funny. I had it lined up. What came out was, “I’ve lived in hotels since I was sixteen. Billet houses, road trips, call-ups, all of it. I can’t lie flat in one for eight weeks staring at a ceiling that isn’t mine. I’d rather do the stairs.”

It was the first honest thing I’d said all night, and it sat there on the step between us with no punchline to cover it.

My sister had a futon in a third-floor walk-up with two roommates. My parents had my old bedroom in Erie and enough worry to fill it to the rafters. I didn’t say either of those out loud, but Micah was looking at me like he could do the math himself.

He came up the three steps and held out his hand, palm up.

“Keys.”

“Why?”

“Because I can do five flights in under two minutes, and you’re going to tell me what you need.”

I gave him the keys. Gray duffel, I said, the stuff by the bathroom sink, the charger. He went up, and I sat on cold steel and listened to his footsteps climb five stories without once breaking rhythm, which was its own kind of pornography for a man in my condition.

My phone buzzed twice against my thigh while he was gone. I let it.

He was back in six minutes, barely breathing hard, with my bag on his good shoulder and an orange bottle in his fist.

“Your refrigerator has mustard and one protein shake in it.”

“I’ve been busy. Scooting.”

“Thirty count,” he said. “Twenty-six left. Eleven days.”

“I told you. Stupid.”

“You did tell me.” He cracked the cap, shook one into his palm, and held it out with the water. “I have a spare room and no stairs. One night.”

“Micah. I can’t just—you barely know—”

“One night. You can get back to your triceps tomorrow.”

“Why would you do that?”

He thought about it. I liked that he actually thought about it instead of handing me something nice.

“Because otherwise I drive home,” he said, “and I think about you on this staircase.”

I took the pill. I’d held out fourteen hours against my surgeon, my agent, and my own nervous system, and I took it because he was the one holding it out.

I only remember pieces of the drive.

He didn’t turn on the radio. He didn’t ask how I was feeling, or what the surgeon said, or whether March was realistic. Twenty minutes in a car with another human being and not one question I had to perform an answer to. I hadn’t known that was on the menu.

The pill came on like a warm tide somewhere past the tunnel, and the fist in my knee uncurled one finger at a time, and I watched the streetlights slide over his hands on the wheel and thought some things about those hands that I’m going to blame on the pharmacy.

Big hands. Blunt, clean nails. A defenseman’s hands, even now. I wondered what they did when he wasn’t being careful with them. I wondered if he was ever not careful.

I pictured one of them back on my neck. Then I pictured it lower, wrapped around me, that same unhurried grip, that same voice telling me slower than that, and I had to turn my face to the window and count overpasses until my body remembered it was an invalid.

Hawthorne turned out to be twenty minutes and a different planet. Old trees. Porch lights. His place was a brick bungalow, low and square, with exactly one step up to the front door.

“One step,” I said. “I’ll allow it.”

“Generous.”

He went up ahead of me, unlocked the door, then turned and stood there while I crutched up after him. Close enough to catch me. Not offering to. I was starting to get that about him: he’d carry my bag all night, and he wouldn’t carry me unless I asked.

Inside it was warm and smelled like his collar, cedar and clean laundry, with garlic underneath from something cooked hours ago. Lamps, no overheads. A wall of books. A kitchen so clean it looked staged. Every object in that house sat precisely where it had been set down, with the air of having been there for years.

The spare room was at the end of a short hall. Double bed, corners tucked tight enough to bounce a puck off, a folded towel waiting on the quilt. A room made up for a guest by a man who hadn’t known he was having one.

I got myself down onto the edge of the mattress with all the grace of a dropped piano. Before I could start the project of swinging the leg up, Micah had a pillow off the head of the bed and one hand cupped under my heel.

“Lifting.”

“Not helping,” I said.

“Fast learner.”

It was not praise. It was barely a remark. It went through me like a slap shot anyway, hot and straight down the middle, and I had no idea what to do with that, so I looked at the ceiling. His ceiling. Plaster, one hairline crack, nothing like a hotel.

He set my bag on the chair and stood my crutches where I could reach them. Then he stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame, filling most of it.

“Do you want company, or do you want dinner left outside the door?”

I opened my mouth for the easy answer and found I didn’t have one loaded.

For two weeks people had been telling me what happened next. Surgery at seven. No weight on it for six. Smile for this. Sign here. One more. Nobody had put two options in front of me and made it plain that either one was fine with him.

My throat did something stupid.

“Company,” I said.

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