With a silent prayer, I lift one foot to set it down on the ice when I feel my cell vibrate in my back pocket—thank fuck. Reaching for it, I’m suddenly knocked aside with a gruff, “Hey, watch where you’re standing, asshole!”

Any other day, I may have gone out of my way to put the bastard in his place. In these skates, though, I’m more likely to eat shit before I even get close enough to put my hands on him. If my rank could see me now, they’d never let me live this down.

Shuffling aside, so that I’m not blocking the entryway to the rink, I grab my phone and answer without looking at the screen. “Paxton.”

“Do you believe in fate?”

“Laela.” My voice is too low, too hoarse. Allowing my eyes to slam shut, I lean against the Plexiglas and press a hand to my chest, to the heart that’s lurching wildly behind bone and muscle. “I didn’t expect to hear from—”

“Sometimes I think that people are put in our path for a reason,” she says, the words rushing out of her like she’s desperate to make them be heard, “and it doesn’t matter how much we fight it. If they’re meant to be ours, they always will be.”

Beneath my palm, the hammering of my heart doesn’t settle down. “What are you trying to say? That—”

“I can think of a hundred different reasons to walk away from you, Reid Paxton.”

Fire burns hot and livid in my blood. “Then walk, sweetheart. You want to tear me a new one for lying to you at the gala? I’ll sit here and take every goddamn lash. But what I’m not going to do is—”

“And six hundred and seventy-three to stay.”

“What?”

“Six hundred and seventy-three emails, Reid. I can ask myself . . .” She swallows audibly, and I can almost see her clutching the phone, her dark red hair whipping around her in the December breeze. “I can ask myself why I never walked away but maybe—maybe I should have been asking myself instead why I stayed.”

The cold weather is hell on my lungs, and yet I don’t move a single muscle, too fearful that if I do, she might stop talking. “You hate me,” I hear myself rasp.