Warm Heart

by Amy Lane

“Like a hug,” Tevyn said, and because Mal was six foot tall and Tevyn was barely five eight, it was the most natural thing in the world for Tevyn to lean against his chest, and Mal to wrap his arms around Tevyn’s shoulders.

  Gah! He felt so good. And this was so wrong.

  “Tevyn,” Mal began hopelessly, not sure he could say this.

  “Stop.” Tevyn kept his head against Mal’s chest, and the world imploded to only the two of them. “I know, Mal,” he said, just loud enough for his voice to carry to Mallory and nobody else. “She’s dying, and she can’t go home. Her doctor called right after the ceremony.”

  Mal grunted, his arms tightening through no conscious thought. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “You wanted to be the one to tell me.” Tevyn sighed. “So kind. I thought… you know. We could have a dance before we went home tomorrow. That’s all.”

  Mal’s arms tightened even more. “Okay. One dance. I understand.”

  “No, you don’t.” Tevyn snuggled a little closer. “But maybe someday you will.”

  A Snow-Bunny’s Bunny

  TEVYN wondered what it would take to get Mallory Armstrong to hold him like this forever.

  Five years ago, he’d walked into Mal’s office, feeling pretty damned cocky. He was one of the best snowboarders in the country, if not the world. He’d qualified for the Olympics when he was eighteen and could feel his body get better and better with every downhill run and every trick.

  But nothing had prepared him for the razor-sharpness of Mallory Armstrong.

  Tall, dark, handsome, with smoldering brown eyes and black hair that fell from a barely beginning widow’s peak, Mallory had looked at home in his wood-and-chrome furnished office and blue pin-striped suit.

  But as soon as he’d seen Tevyn’s Grandma Missy, some of that sharpness had faded, and the man left had been solicitous and kind.

  He’d taken every dollar Tevyn had made after that and applied it to things that meant the most to Tevyn and his grandmother, and he’d showed up at Tevyn’s events because Missy couldn’t.

  Tevyn knew Mal did that for other clients, and for the first couple of years, he could brush away that sort of smug feeling of pride that burned in his stomach when he saw Mal—wearing dark blue Gore-Tex and bright orange wool as sort of the snow bunny’s pinstripe—standing quietly with Tevyn’s agent and trainer and physical therapist. Mal hung back, of course. He had no official standing at Tevyn’s events. But Tevyn wanted him there, had told Sean Murphy, his agent, Gretta Klein, his trainer, and Harold Neil, his PT, that Mal was part of the team.

  It was true. If Mal hadn’t been part of the team, Tevyn and Missy would never have figured out how to afford a physical therapist and a trainer, and Mal had been the one to fire Tevyn’s first agent, who had showed up to nothing and had done nothing to help land Tevyn endorsements.

  But sometime after he’d broken his wrist, Tevyn had started taking a good look at Mal’s calendar, and he’d realized Mallory Armstrong went to as many of Tevyn’s events as he possibly could, while he made maybe two events a year for the other clients on his roster.

  Tevyn would never put Mal on the spot about it, but he knew.

  Mal thought he was special.

  And coming out to tell Tevyn about his grandmother was a kindness.

  Unlike a lot of the athletes on the snowboarding circuit, Tevyn had a home. He’d gone back to the cabin he’d grown up in as often as he could in the last five years, spending summers fixing it up between rock climbing and parkour in the mountains to keep fit. He’d known Missy wasn’t what she had been when he was a kid. But he’d been doing a promotional surfing event in Australia at the end of this summer, and his week with Missy hadn’t prepared him for the decline she’d had during his month away.

  He’d started to prepare with Mallory then. More than just a companion who visited every day, they’d hired a nurse and set up an on-call service with a helicopter transport in case of emergency.

  And still, every time Tevyn returned home, he’d had to spend a good two hours explaining to Missy where he’d been and why he looked so grown-up.

  He hadn’t been prepared for the doctor’s phone call. And hadn’t been prepared for the slug of need to his gut when he’d seen Mallory making his way through the disco after having arrived by helicopter shortly beforehand.

  He hadn’t been scheduled to be here.

  He’d come anyway.

  Tevyn held tight to him as the slow song wound down, taking in his cologne, the familiar wool of his coat, the crispness of his fine cotton shirt. Mal had lean lips and a quiet smile in the best of times, but now he was looking down at Tevyn from brown eyes that usually looked flinty with calculation.

  Tonight they were warm with compassion.

  “Song’s over,” Mallory rasped, and Tevyn took a reluctant step back.

  Time to face the music.

  “DO you have a room?” Tevyn asked as they both cleared the discotheque and made their way toward their lodgings. “I’ve got a suite. Gretta and Sean left after the event. Gretta was going to meet me at the qualifying rounds in Aspen in a month, and Hal is leaving tomorrow.”

  “I was going to leave tonight,” Mallory began, but Tevyn shook his head with authority.

  “I’d ask Damie about that. Visibility is going to be crap tonight. Snow’s probably already started to fall. Tomorrow it should lighten up, but right now it’s too dangerous.”

  Mal groaned. “Dammit! Dammit. I told Missy I’d try to get you there as soon as—”

  Tevyn turned in the hall and touched him briefly on the arm, ignoring the charge that rippled up his back as he did. “Mallory, don’t be dense. If Missy was in her right mind, she never would have told you to bring me back on a dime. She grew up in snow, and the winds in the mountains are fierce, I don’t care if they’re the Sierras or the Rockies. Now text Damie so he can stop shitting his pants and tell him to bring his go bag to my room.”

  Tevyn gave his room number and steered Mal down the hall toward the elevators, waving briefly to a couple of people he passed in the hallway.

  “Friends?” Mal asked after he’d put his phone back in his pocket.

  Tevyn shrugged and gave his “not really friends in bed” smile, and Mal’s uncomfortable glance away was his reward.

  He let out a bark of laughter then, trying not to be bitter. He wouldn’t apologize for the people he’d been with during his years on the circuit, but he could admit that the number wasn’t small.

  So Mal’s next words surprised him.

  “I don’t know how you do that,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Wave flirtily? It’s an art form. I’ll hold a class.”

  Mal’s stolid grunt was reassuring. “No. How you can be on such good terms with everybody afterward. I had one boyfriend in five years, and he would literally set fire to a trash can for an excuse to walk on the other side of the road from me, and you sleep with beautiful people left and right, and they just… smile and wave.”

  Tevyn rolled his eyes and shook his head. “’Cause your one boyfriend was important,” he explained, feeling like it was obvious. “So whatever broke you up, it hurt him. These guys—”

  “And girls,” Mal filled in sourly.

  “And girls—they’re, you know, dance partners who got naked.”

  “Is that why you wanted me to dance tonight?”

  Ouch. “Don’t be an ass. Do you have luggage, or did you leave from the office?” Tevyn hit the elevator button and wished for this conversation to be over. In the harsh light of the hallway, Mallory Armstrong was as calculating as he’d ever been, and the way he saw Tevyn was still as unflattering.

  “I left from the office,” Mal said, looking sheepish, and Tevyn’s flare of temper passed. No luggage—he hopped in the company copter and went. That said something.

  “Harold’ll have something you can wear,” he muttered, getting on the elevator and knowing Mal would follow. “And you and Damien can have Gretta’s and Se
an’s beds.” Tevyn scrubbed at his face, wishing—not for the first time—that Mal would just put that big autocratic hand on his shoulder, lower his head, and murmur, “We can share a bed.”

  But what good would that do?

  Mal, the one solid presence in his life, would be reduced to a bedmate, and Tevyn would still be alone when he woke up in the morning.

  “Thank you,” Mallory said. “I didn’t think beyond getting here to tell you.”

  Tevyn gave him a lopsided smile. “That’s not like you. You usually plan three steps ahead.” Tevyn had once seen Mal’s open suitcase as he’d been packing to return home. The man had little carrying cases for everything—his ties, his gloves, his belts, his sweaters. It all fit together like a big wooden puzzle made of clothes and shoes.

  “I was… anxious,” Mal said. The door opened, and Tevyn led the way down the hall. “You’re holding up very well, though.”

  Tevyn’s smile turned hard while pulling out his key card. “Sure I am.”

  He moved to open the door to his suite, only to be stopped by Mal’s hand on his. “Are you?”

  Tevyn took a deep breath. “She raised me from a little kid, Mal. Mom left and became a random postcard, and Missy was there. I…. She taught me you can’t fight a glacier or an avalanche, and shaking your fist at the snow is pure foolishness. But even if you can’t stop it, that doesn’t mean it won’t freeze you, grind you, or tumble you about until you can fight clear.”

  Mal made a sound of sympathy, and Tevyn couldn’t look at him. He opened the door to the suite and gestured in.

  Harold Neil, Tevyn’s physical therapist, was sprawled on the couch in front of the television in a way designed to send the healthiest back into spasms. A giant of a man—taller than Mal or even Damie, the helicopter pilot—Harold had dark clay-colored skin and wore his gray curls in a stout brush cut. He was twice divorced, in his fifties, and happy to, as he said, spend his years before retirement chasing Tevyn from snowfall to snowfall with the occasional foray to surf.

  His whole regimen depended on Tevyn stretching at every opportunity, and an hour a day on the yoga mat was part of Tev’s job.

  “Hal?” Tevyn said softly, trying not to make the wake-up too rude. “Hal? You up?”

  Harold choked on a snore and flailed off the couch, and on any other day, Tevyn would have been cracking up and throwing couch cushions at him while he flailed.

  But it had actually been a hell of a day, and Tevyn could only manage a small smile.

  “Hal?”

  “Tevyn? Mallory? Tevyn, what’s Mallory doing here?”

  Tevyn kept his face still. “Remember that call I got about Missy?”

  “Gah!” Harold scrubbed his face with his hand. “Yeah. You came to make sure he was all right?” His eyebrow arched skeptically.

  If Tevyn hadn’t spent that slow dance in Mal’s arms, he wouldn’t have been looking for the quick sideways glance Tevyn’s way.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “He didn’t bring any clothes.” The adrenaline that had kept the sadness at bay in the club was fading now, and Tevyn found he just wanted to get Mal situated and go to his room. “If you could lend him some sweats, man, I’d appreciate it. Also Damie’s on his way in—”

  A knock at the door pretty much announced Tevyn’s next item on the agenda, and as Mal went to answer it, Tevyn took that opportunity to disappear.

  He stripped out of his club clothes and donned fleece pajama pants, an oversized T-shirt, and the sweater he’d been wearing at the club. It had been a toss-up between Missy’s sweater and a hooded sweatshirt Tevyn had managed to steal from Mal. The fleece pajamas, bright and rainbow-colored, had been made by Missy the first year he’d gone traveling. God, he’d been, what? Seventeen then? On his own, getting laid a lot and blowing minds. You could get up a lot easier after a scary fall at seventeen than you could at twenty-five. Tevyn knew that he had ten, maybe fifteen years to do what he really loved at a competitive level before becoming a teacher and a footnote in snowboarding history.

  The idea of doing it without Missy in his corner hit him like a fist to the middle. Oh man. He just wanted to see her while she still knew him. One last time, whether it was for a week or an afternoon. She’d broken her hip, and the doctor said infection often set in after a fall like that, and her heart had been going for years. She’d never been good at wearing slippers, even in the bitter chill of the Rocky Mountain foothills. She already had a cold. Tevyn was well aware her decline might be much faster than he’d imagined before the season had started.

  With a sigh, he pulled the covers down in his bed, turned off his light, and curled up in a little ball, the better to vent his grief when nobody could hear.

  He didn’t hear Mallory enter the room, but he did feel the tentative hand between his shoulder blades.

  “Wha—”

  “Sh, Tev. Got up for water. Heard you.”

  Tevyn buried his face in the pillow. “’M that loud?”

  “No. Was just… waiting. You were way too fine.”

  Tevyn gave a small laugh that turned into a hiccup that turned into a sob.

  And then a curious thing happened. He took his own advice and just… relaxed. Stopped trying to fight the attraction between them, stopped trying to fight the intimacy. He gave in and let Mallory rub his back as he cried himself to sleep.

  HE woke up to someone pounding on the connecting door.

  “Wha—Mal, I’m getting up?”

  “I’m right here!”

  Tevyn was so surprised, he fell out of bed.

  He was used to strange bodies in the morning, but never, ever, had he woken up with one of them fully clothed on top of the covers.

  “Mal?” he mumbled. “Oh my God. You stayed last night?”

  Mallory yawned and stretched, Harold’s T-shirt and sweats flopping around his lean body. “You asked,” he said grumpily.

  Tevyn blinked. “I don’t remember that.” He’d said that? “I never ask anybody to stay.” He’d begged his mother. He’d been six. That was the last time.

  “Well, you asked me.”

  “Tev! Mal!” Damien called. “Guys, we gotta get a move on if we want to get out. There’s another storm coming in, and if we don’t hit the air in an hour, we’re grounded!”

  Tevyn hauled his hands through his hair. “Oh crap! Yeah! We’re on it, Damie! Is Harold—”

  “Staying here!” Harold called, seemingly from farther away. “I’ll go get your gear and meet you with it at the copter!”

  Tevyn came to his senses and opened the connecting door. They were both wearing pajamas and nothing had happened, and this “screaming through the hotel room” thing wasn’t working. “Damie, can you ask Harold to get us some food? I’m okay flying, but you know me.”

  Damien nodded grimly. Tevyn needed carbs in his stomach before a flight. It was the weirdest thing, because he could do aerial acrobatics on an empty stomach for hours. But get him up in the air and his whole world went black without a decent breakfast.

  “Got it,” he said, then took in Tevyn’s pajamas and gave Mal, still swimming in Hal’s sweats, a look over Tevyn’s shoulder. “Uh….”

  “We were talking,” Tevyn said with dignity.

  “Frankly, I’d be more comfortable if you both were naked, but sure.” Damien rolled his eyes as though he’d expected to find them naked for a couple of years. “Talking. Whatever you kids are doing these days.”

  Damien was about Mal’s age, tall, fit, with curly dark hair, round brown eyes with a tilt at the outer corners, and tawny skin that marked Polynesian ancestry. Like Mal, he was hot enough to hit that, but, unlike Mal, Tevyn had only ever felt competence and warmth radiating from Damien, with no electric currents that made things like a dance or a late-night conversation awkward and painful. Damien was already dressed—jeans, boots, cabled sweater—and looked disgustingly perky.

  Tevyn rolled his eyes. “Right now we’re threatening death for some coffee. How’s that?
That radical enough for you?”

  “Nice sweater,” Damien snarked. “Did you shave a baby’s ass for that sweater?”

  Tevyn crossed his arms protectively over his chest. “Nobody disses my grandma Missy’s knitting, you hear me?”

  Damien laughed and ruffled his hair—because he was appallingly tall. “Get your fuzzy-butted sweater into my helicopter in less than an hour, or we’ll get stuck in this suite for a week, and then I really might have to see you two naked, and that would be appalling!”

  Damien spun on his heel then, leaving Tevyn to close the door.

  “Forty-five minutes,” Tevyn said with a sigh. “You just gotta shower and put on a suit.” He gestured to the hotel room, which was in its usual spectacular state of disarray at the end of a competition. “Any ideas for this?”

  Mal was standing and holding one side of Harold’s sweats up so they didn’t slide off his ass. “Yeah, I do. You shower first. Let me fold clothes. All you have to do is stuff your go bag, and Harold can bring the big suitcase later. Jesus, Tevyn, didn’t Missy teach you how to pick up?”

  “She tried.” The clock was ticking, and Tevyn couldn’t seem to move. They were standing across the room from each other, and all he could think was that he’d had Mallory Armstrong’s heat at his back for the entire night, and he’d been asleep and unable to so much as rub his chest.

  Mallory met his eyes then, and a charged silence filled the room.

  “I, uh….”

  “Thank you,” Tevyn said, the words coming past a lump in his throat.

  “For what?”

  “Staying. Nobody but Missy ever stayed before. Thank you.”

  Tevyn watched in fascination as Mallory’s throat grew blotchy and his cheeks filled with color. “All you ever have to do is ask,” he said.

  They both swallowed in tandem, eyes locked, as all the air drained out of the room. Damien shouted, “Guys!” and the spell was broken just enough for them to get a move on.

  FORTY-FIVE minutes later, they were running out of the hotel room, loaded only with Tevyn’s and Damien’s go bags, and Tevyn had the distinct impression he’d left something important behind. Harold had strict instructions to pack what was left—folded into meticulous piles by the larger suitcase—and to drive them down to the city when he was ready to leave, and Tevyn’s board and snow boots were already loaded into the small luggage space of the copter. The icy wind of Donner Pass battered at them as they climbed into the passenger compartment, and Damien’s voice came over an intercom from the cockpit.