She wobbled left and then right and threw her arms outward to grab hold of the wall, but she missed it. Instead she clamped on to a strong forearm right as she tipped backward. The motion pulled him forward and he let out a loud “oof” as he hit the half wall in front of the bench. Fast as a heartbeat, he grabbed her flailing free hand and pulled her to the wall so she could grasp it and get her balance back.

“Oh my God.” Heart beating so fast her pulse sounded like a tsunami in her ears, she looked up at him as he grimaced. “Did I break you?”

One side of his mouth shot up in a smirk. “You should definitely check me out.”

“Why? What hurts, I—” Realization hit. He was fucking with her. “I don’t get it. You’re grunting one minute and joking the next.”

He shrugged and came back out on the ice with her. “Like you said, I’m an onion.”

“Okay, Shrek.”

It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to take his hand—for balance support, of course—as they slow skated around the rink.

“You don’t think I’m a man of great depth?”

He did a spin move so he was again going backward and they were face-to-face, holding hands, alone together in the practice facility. Her mom would call it romantic. She knew better. This was trouble in man form.

“What happened back there with the photographer?”

He pulled his arms in, tugging her closer but still leaving space so their skates didn’t tangle. “He was a jackass.”

She wasn’t in disagreement there. “Yeah, but I’m talking about when you went into robot mode. You just shut down completely.”

“So what? You as a member of the media are trying to get me to spill my trade secrets for surviving the media?”

“Is that how you think of me?” Ow. That landed with a big thump right against her solar plexus. “That I’m like the paparazzi guy?”

“Of course not.” Ian did a half turn so they were hip to hip, holding hands as they skated.

She glanced over at him, having instant lusty ideas about the feel of his beard scruff against her skin before yanking herself back to reality. “Then ’fess up.”

“For as long as I can remember, there has been media.” His jaw hardened and he looked up into the stands as if he expected a reporter or photographer to be up there now documenting his every move. “First it was all about my dad; then they started to actually look at me. They weren’t really doing that, though.” He smiled. It wasn’t a nice one, more of a defense mechanism than a sign of happiness. “They were looking to see how I measured up against the old man. The judgment was always the same: a poor man’s David Petrov.”