Rule Number One

SERINA

I had exactly one rule when it came to Ivan Vitale, and it was simple.

Do not look at his face while you are this close to it.

I was failing spectacularly. Third double shift this week. My eyes felt sanded at the edges, and he still managed to make my pulse do something inconvenient.

"Hold still," I warned, pressing two fingers into the bruised muscle along his ribs. "Unless you want me to tape this crooked and have you play Sunday looking like a question mark."

"I don't play Sunday looking like anything less than a god," Ivan countered.

"There's that famous humility." I gave him the eyebrow raise that had stopped grown men mid-sentence. It didn't even slow him down.

"You're the one who brought up my appearance."

"I brought up your posture."

"Same thing, coming from you."

"Nothing's the same thing coming from me. That's the whole point of a medical license."

He held still anyway, which was the only answer that mattered.

I pressed harder than strictly necessary on the next pass of tape, just to watch him not react. He didn't even blink. Most patients flinched at half that pressure. Ivan just sat there, jaw set, like pain was something that happened to other people and he'd simply opted out of the arrangement.

"You're better at this than the last three trainers combined," he added, tipping his head back against the wall behind the table. "They all treated me like I was made of glass."

"They probably just wanted to keep their jobs. Coddling the owner's son tends to be good career strategy."

"Is that what you think you're doing? Coddling me?"

"I think I'm the only person on this staff who tells you no. Ask around."

"Must be exhausting."

"You have no idea. I like my job too much to flatter you into thinking you're not a walking liability."

That earned me a low laugh.

It was two in the morning in the team's private medical wing. All the overhead lights were dimmed except the one over the exam table. Ivan sat shirtless on the edge of it, forearms braced on his knees, blood dried at the corner of his mouth from a cut he refused to explain.

So I'd stopped asking an hour ago.

I'd learned in eight months of working for the Kingsmen that some players got hurt on the field and some got hurt in ways nobody wrote down in the official report. Ivan Vitale, franchise quarterback, owner's only son, and the single most infuriating patient on my schedule, was very much the second kind.

His eyes went flat the second a camera pointed his way. They never quite did that with me.

I hated that I'd noticed. I hated it more that I couldn't seem to stop. Something low in my chest tightened every time I clocked it, some traitorous flicker of warmth I refused to name.

And, most of all, the fact that none of it stopped him from being offensively, inconveniently attractive.

"You could tell me what actually happened to your ribs," I pressed, smoothing the tape into a clean line. "I've heard worse than a bar fight."

"Who said it was a bar fight?"

"Your knuckles did." I glanced at his hands, split and swollen across two joints. "They talk more than you do."

His mouth almost curved.

Almost.

I'd catalogued exactly four almost-smiles in eight months and hated that I kept count. Like some part of me had been keeping score without asking my permission.

"Careful, Fyon," he warned. "Keep being that observant and I'll have to give you a raise."

"You don't sign my paychecks."

"Not yet."

"Terrifying threat."

"I mean it as one."

I rolled my eyes and reached for the scissors, mostly so I'd have something to do with my hands that wasn't looking directly at him. My hands weren't quite steady tonight, and for once, Ivan wasn't the reason. I still had a bill sitting unopened on my kitchen counter, and I already knew I couldn't afford it.

His eyes flicked to mine, and for one unguarded second I felt it. That strange electric pull that had nothing to do with professionalism and everything to do with how quiet the building got when it was just the two of us.

Which was ridiculous.

I didn't even like him.

Mostly. My body apparently hadn't gotten that memo, and lately my body was the only vote that mattered.

I looked away first, like I always did. "There," I announced, smoothing the last strip flat. "Try not to get hit there again for a week. I know that's a stretch for a man who treats self-preservation as optional."

"It wasn't optional."

Something in his tone made me look up.

His face had gone still. Jaw tight. Eyes somewhere past my shoulder, like he was solving a problem I wasn't allowed to see.

"Ivan."

"Drop it, Fyon."

I almost didn't. Some stubborn, curious part of me wanted to keep pulling on that thread until it unraveled into an actual answer, but the exhaustion in his face stopped me. Something about the way he said it, low and worn thin, made my chest ache in a place I didn't want to examine. Whatever had put that cut at the corner of his mouth wasn't something he was going to hand me tonight, and pushing felt, for once, like it would cost him more than it was worth to me.

My phone lit up on the counter behind me right then. A text from my roommate, Jenny. My stomach dropped before I even read it.

Jenny: you're on every gossip page right now. are you okay??

I grabbed the phone. Ivan was already reaching for his, and for a second we stood there in the glow of two screens showing the same photograph.

Taken through the narrow window in the exam room door.

My hands flat on his bare chest. His face tipped toward mine, close enough that anyone looking at it would read exactly one thing into it. The caption underneath had already been shared eleven thousand times. Mystery woman comforts heartbroken Ivan Vitale amid rumors of trouble with his longtime girlfriend.

"That's not what this is," I blurted, too fast, too high.

My thumb kept scrolling without my permission, watching the number climb in real time. Six thousand comments. Then seven.

Mistress. Gold-digger.

My hands had gone properly cold, fingers clumsy on the screen.

Strangers I would never meet were already deciding exactly who I was based on one photograph and a caption somebody else had written. It felt like being erased and rewritten in the same breath, and I hated how much that thought scared me.

"I know what it is." His voice had gone flat. Controlled in a way that scared me more than shouting would have.

He pulled his shirt back over his head, wincing at the ribs I'd just taped.

"It's a photograph taken through the door of a locked medical floor," he muttered, already scrolling.

That stopped me cold. "You need a badge to get up here."

"Exactly."

The cold crawled slowly down the back of my neck. "So someone paid to get past security just to take a picture of us taping your ribs."

"That's the part I can't make sense of either."

"Then call security. Get the footage. Find out who it was."

"I already texted the head of security twice." He didn't look up from his phone, thumbs moving fast. "Whoever it was knew exactly which camera to avoid and exactly which door had a broken badge reader. That's not luck. That's a plan."

The word plan sat in my chest like a stone. Someone had wanted this photograph badly enough to bribe a guard or clone a badge, and I didn't like a single guess my brain offered up for why.

"This isn't just a scandal, is it?"

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The look on his face said it clearly enough, that this had already stopped being about a gossip headline the second we'd seen the angle that photo was shot from.

Before either of us could say anything else, his phone rang in his hand.

DAD.

Ivan's whole body changed. Some easy, arrogant looseness I hadn't even noticed until it disappeared. He stepped a few feet away and answered it, and for a second I thought he might put it on speaker.

He didn't.

"Dad." His voice had gone careful. "I know how it looks."

I couldn't hear the other side. Just a low, clipped rhythm through the receiver, too sharp to make out words, sharp enough that I could tell it wasn't a question.

My pulse ticked up in my throat like it already knew something I didn't. I caught myself chewing the inside of my cheek and made myself stop.

"It's not what you think," Ivan said. A pause. His jaw worked. "I was in the room. She was treating me."

Silence again, longer this time. I watched something tighten across his shoulders, watched his free hand curl into a fist and release it slow, like he was counting.

"I understand," he finally said. Quieter now.

Whatever his father said next made him go very still. His eyes found mine across the room and stayed there, and I had the strange, unsettling sense that whatever was being said on the other end of that call had something to do with me specifically, not just the photograph, not just the scandal.

"Yes." One word. It landed like a door shutting somewhere far away.

He hung up without saying goodbye.

The room felt smaller with the silence that followed. I could hear the hum of the overhead light, the faint tick of the clock above the supply cabinet, my own pulse loud in my ears.

For a long moment he just stood there, phone still in his hand, staring at the dark screen like it might tell him something it hadn't already.

"Ivan." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "What did he say?"

He turned to face me, and whatever had been in his expression a minute ago, teasing, guarded, almost warm, was gone completely. What replaced it looked like a decision already made.

"Marry me."

I opened my mouth to laugh, because that was clearly a joke, because it had to be, and the sound never made it out.

Something in my chest dropped straight through the floor. The room didn't feel too warm anymore. It felt like the walls had moved an inch closer.

He wasn't smiling.