Fake Engaged to My Hockey Rival
"Still playing dirty, Huntress?" he taunted, pinning me with those piercing grey-blue eyes.
"Still hiding behind your daddy's money, Reaper?" I shot back, my blood boiling.
Lanaya Roux and Maverick Hayden are college hockey royalty-and bitter rivals. As the captains of competing university teams, their hatred on the ice is matched only by the legendary feud between their billionaire families' empires.
But when their ruthless fathers force them into a fake engagement to secure an $18 billion corporate merger, Lanaya and Maverick are thrown into the ultimate game of survival.
The rules are simple: Live together in the same penthouse. Smile for the cameras. Pretend to be madly in love for six months.
It was supposed to be strictly business. But behind closed doors, the venom they spit at each other quickly morphs into a scorching, undeniable addiction. Maverick is an arrogant, aggressively protective alpha who refuses to let her go, and Lanaya is the fiercely independent captain who refuses to submit.
Beneath their explosive chemistry lies a devastating secret: a shared tragedy from eight years ago that claimed the life of Lanaya's brother and shattered their innocent childhood bond.
With the national hockey championship on the line, scandalous secrets surfacing, and unseen enemies sabotaging their every move, the line between love and hate has never been so dangerous.
What happens when the fake engagement to your worst enemy becomes the only real thing in your life?
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Chapter 2
[POV: Lanaya Roux]
The player's tunnel was a suffocating throat of concrete and shadows.
Maverick's grip on Lanaya's elbow didn't loosen. His long fingers dug through the thick fabric of her jersey, the heat of his palm seeping into her skin like a brand. An unwanted electric jolt shot straight up her arm. She hated it. She hated the immediate, traitorous way her body registered his touch.
"Let go of me," Lanaya warned. Her voice echoed off the damp walls.
"Not until you listen."
"I have nothing to say to you. And I definitely don't want to hear whatever lie you've cooked up about Crew."
She yanked her arm back hard enough to strain her injured shoulder. Maverick used her momentum against her. He stepped smoothly into her space, crowding her backward until her spine hit the rough concrete wall.
He was too big. Too close.
The heavy scent of cedar, dark musk, and pure adrenaline flooded her senses, suffocating the last remaining oxygen in the tunnel. Her breath hitched. A dark, twisted pull tightened low in her stomach, a physical awareness she violently tried to push down.
"It is not a lie." His voice was a brutal rasp. "But that is not why I stopped you."
"Then what? Did you just want to gloat about the tie?"
"Look at your phone, Lanaya."
She glared at him. Her heart was hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm against her ribs, and it had nothing to do with the game. Without breaking eye contact, she dug her phone out of her gear bag.
The screen lit up the dim tunnel.
Six missed calls from Camden Roux. One forwarded email attachment from her father's assistant.
Lanaya opened it. It was a drafted press release.
Redstone Franchise Files for Bankruptcy. Crew Roux Memorial Foundation Slated for Immediate Liquidation.
The concrete wall dug painfully into her shoulder blades. The air left her lungs completely. "No. My father would never let this happen."
"He is broke, Roux." Maverick stepped a fraction closer, trapping her between his arms. The friction of his chest brushing hers sent a sickeningly hot spark straight through her. "He has been bleeding money for years. The only way to save Redstone and the foundation is a joint merger with my father."
"What does that have to do with us?"
"The board won't approve the buyout if the two star players are tearing each other apart on national television. We are a PR nightmare."
"Then I will request a trade."
"You can't."
"Watch me."
"No one will take you, Lanaya. Alexander already made sure of it."
The name came out flat. Not the way a son says a father's name with pride or resentment - something older than either of those. Something that had been worn smooth by years of learning to move inside that authority rather than against it. A weariness so settled it had become structural. For one unguarded second, she almost felt something like recognition. Then it was gone, and so was any softness in his eyes.
"He controls the league," Maverick continued, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low register that vibrated against her skin. "You are locked in. We both are."
Lanaya pushed against his chest, but it was like shoving a wall of pure muscle. "What do they want from us?"
Maverick stared down at her. His eyes were storm-dark, filled with a volatile mix of rage and a starving, suffocating heat that made her pulse pound in her throat.
"An engagement."
Her blood ran ice-cold. "What?"
"They want us engaged. Publicly. By tomorrow morning."
Lanaya let out a harsh, broken laugh. "Fake engaged? To you? I would rather swallow glass."
"Do you think I want this?" He leaned down, his mouth brushing dangerously close to her ear. The sheer heat radiating off his body was unbearable. Electric. "You think I want to pretend to be in love with the girl who looks at me like I am a murderer?"
"You are a murderer."
He flinched. The muscle in his jaw ticked violently, but he didn't pull away. He stayed so close she could feel the heavy, rapid thud of his heart against her own.
"I won't do it," Lanaya whispered fiercely. "I will let the team burn before I put a ring from you on my finger."
"You will do it."
"You can't force me."
"I don't have to." Maverick pulled back just enough to lock his dead, grey-blue eyes with hers. The raw dominance in his stare made her shiver. "Because if you walk away tonight, I will buy Crew's foundation myself. And I will burn it to the ground."
Her hands curled into fists. "You wouldn't."
"Try me, Huntress." The toxic promise slid over her skin like a blade. "Say no, and see what I destroy next."
Lanaya shoved past him. She was done. Done with his voice and his heat and the way he said Crew's name like he still had the right to.
She made it ten steps down the tunnel before she stopped.
She didn't mean to. Her body just halted, the way it always did at this exact stretch of corridor, in front of the framed team photograph bolted to the concrete wall. The old Redstone junior squad, twelve years old in matching jerseys, squinting into the flash. Crew was in the center, grinning with his whole face, one arm thrown around Lanaya's shoulders and the other around Maverick's.
The three of them. Before everything.
She almost let herself remember what it had felt like to stand between them, how solid and permanent the world had seemed in that fraction of a second before the camera flashed. Almost. She turned away before the memory could finish forming, before it could show her the part that came after.
Then she made the mistake of looking back.
Maverick was not watching her anymore. He was watching the photograph. His jaw was tight, his arms loose at his sides, and his expression was something she had never once allowed herself to actually look at. Something that had no cruelty in it. Something that looked like a man standing at the edge of a wound that had never once closed.
He didn't know she was still watching.
For just that moment, neither of them was an enemy. They were just two people standing in a tunnel, staring at a boy who was never coming back.
Then Maverick's eyes shifted and found hers, and the cold slid back into place like a door being shut from the inside.
Lanaya turned away and walked out into the noise of the arena corridors and did not look back again.
But the image she carried with her, the one that followed her all the way to the parking lot and refused to let go, was not his threat.
It was his face when he thought no one was watching.
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8.3
I was the long-lost Donovan heiress, finally brought home after a childhood in foster care. My parents adored me, my husband cherished me, and the woman who tried to ruin my life, Kiera Reese, was locked away in a mental facility. I was safe. I was loved.
On my birthday, I decided to surprise my husband, Ivan, at his office. But he wasn't there.
I found him at a private art gallery across town. He was with Kiera.
She wasn't in a facility. She was radiant, laughing as she stood beside my husband and their five-year-old son. I watched through the glass as Ivan kissed her, a familiar, loving gesture he’d used with me just that morning.
I crept closer and overheard them. My birthday wish to go to the amusement park had been denied because he’d already promised the entire park to their son—whose birthday was the same day as mine.
"She’s so grateful to have a family, she’d believe anything we tell her," Ivan said, his voice laced with a cruelty that stole my breath. "It's almost sad."
My entire reality—my loving parents who funded this secret life, my devoted husband—was a five-year lie. I was just the fool they kept on stage.
My phone buzzed. It was a text from Ivan, sent while he stood with his real family.
"Just got out of the meeting. So exhausting. I miss you."
The casual lie was the final blow. They thought I was a pathetic, grateful orphan they could control.
They were about to find out just how wrong they were.
9.3
My father ordered me to marry into the cursed Vaughn family.
Their heirs were rumored to die young from a mysterious genetic agony. My sister Kayden laughed, saying she wasn't going to waste her youth planning a funeral. So, I became the sacrificial lamb.
When I refused, my father slammed his hand on the table and threatened to throw my dead mother's ashes into the city dump.
"You are a struggling actress with no money and no power. You have no choice," he told me coldly.
To make matters worse, my own agent drugged my drink at a business dinner, trying to sell my body to a sleazy investor just to secure project funding.
I was completely cornered, suffocating under the weight of their cruelty. I couldn't understand how my own flesh and blood could be so vicious, treating me like a worthless pawn to be traded and discarded.
But none of them knew that while escaping the drug-laced dinner, I crashed directly into the terrifying Vaughn heir, Algot.
When his glowing crimson eyes locked onto me during a violent episode of his cursed pain, we discovered an impossible truth: my physical touch was the only cure for his agony.
Looking at the dark bruises he accidentally left on my neck, I chose not to run. Instead, I pulled out the private business card he gave me and dialed his number.
"You need me," I whispered to the dangerous billionaire. "And I am going to use you to destroy them all."
7.1
Barrett handed me a Montblanc pen and a legal document, his voice as cold as the rain lashing against his Tribeca penthouse. He told me to sign an admission of guilt for an SEC violation I never committed.
"Eighteen months in prison, Anaya," he said, adjusting his cufflinks without looking at me. "The trust fund is set up. You'll get twenty million dollars the moment you step out."
I was being sold. The man I had loved for ten years, the man whose secrets I had kept, was trading my freedom to save his merger with Adele Townsend. He had scrubbed the digital logs of Adele’s illegal trades and pinned everything on me. When I refused, he didn't see my heartbreak; he only saw a malfunction in a business transaction.
"Do not speak her name," he hissed when I mentioned Adele’s fraud. "This merger is bigger than you."
He forced the pen into my hand, calling me dramatic while his security guards dragged me to a locked bedroom to "cool down." I spent three days parched and starving, listening to the muffled sound of champagne corks popping down the hall. They were celebrating my destruction. My heart finally gave out in that luxury cage, the darkness swallowing me as I realized I was nothing more than a disposable asset to him.
I died in that room, alone and betrayed by the person I trusted most. How could he do this? How could a decade of loyalty be worth less than a stock price? Why did I let him treat me like a sacrificial lamb for so long?
GASP. I shot up in bed, my lungs burning, but I wasn't in the penthouse. I was in my old, peeling Brooklyn apartment, and the date on my phone was May 12th—three years ago.
My phone buzzed with a text from Barrett: "Where are you? Bring the Townsend files. Now."
A cold, cruel smile touched my lips as I typed the reply that would start his nightmare.
"I quit."
7.5
Bryn hovered as a translucent soul over her own fresh grave, just three days after she was buried.
She had been shoved off a cliff by Keifer, the boyfriend she provided for, while her adopted sister Fabiola watched and laughed.
Now, they stood at her grave crying fake tears, ready to steal her massive inheritance.
Suddenly, Dominic Hutchinson, the arrogant school tyrant who made her life a living hell, arrived.
He didn't come to mock her. He dug up her grave with his bare, bleeding hands, hugging her freezing urn as he sobbed in pure despair.
He ruthlessly exposed Keifer and Fabiola's murder plot, sending them to federal prison.
Three months later, Dominic stood before her rebuilt headstone in a pristine white tuxedo.
"It's finally over. I can finally come pick you up."
He pulled out a silver scalpel and slit his own wrist, leaving a bloody kiss above her carved name as he died.
Bryn fell to her knees, screaming and sobbing uncontrollably.
The boy she thought hated her had loved her with his entire life, while the parasites she trusted had killed her.
Why had she been so utterly blind?
A blinding light swallowed her soul, and Bryn suddenly snapped her eyes open.
She was standing by her high school lockers, completely alive.
She had returned to exactly three years before her death.
9.7
What else could Bella Kiretti possibly want?
She had the perfect billionaire husband, the cars, houses,vacations and even the most beautiful children.
Everything was given to her on a golden plate.
But so everybody thought.
With her husband always on business trios and her children now in College, Bella is left home alone most of the time.
Everything was automatically running for her...wake up, eat, scroll through social media, walk the dog and sleep.
Until there was a knock on the door; her twenty year old Nephew,Jack is in town and he wants a place to stay.
"You have grown, and matured."
He was no longer the boy she carried when he was young, he was taller, bigger and his d**k was just the perfect size.
7.3
Betrayed by the man she loved. Katrina Donovan's death was supposed to be the end. Instead, when Katrina opens her eyes, she isn't in heaven-She's in Rachel Sterling's body. The very woman who stole her lover, harvested her heart. The villain everyone hates.
Now trapped in the life of her enemy, Katrina must pretend to be the spoiled, manipulative heiress while hiding the truth that would destroy them all.
Worse-Owen Blake, the cold and powerful billionaire adopted son of the Sterling family, watches her every move. He despises "Rachel", believes she destroyed the only innocent girl he ever cared about. He doesn't know the girl he mourns... is standing right in front of him.
With hatred burning in her veins, Katrina swears she will not waste this second chance. She will expose the lies. Reclaim what was stolen. Make every person who carved out her heart beg for mercy.
But revenge is dangerous-Especially when the only man who might uncover the truth is the one who wants her dead.