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 7
[POV: Lanaya Roux]
The heavy oak door of the VIP lounge vibrated behind Lanaya's back.
Maverick was too close. The suffocating heat radiating from his massive frame trapped her against the wood. His dark, toxic promise still hung in the air - Because if you stop hating me, Huntress... we are both going to lose.
"I am not going to stop hating you," Lanaya breathed, her chest rising and falling rapidly against the tight silk of her dress. "That is the one thing you never have to worry about."
Maverick's jaw flexed. The raw, broken guilt she had seen on the press stage was completely gone, replaced by the ruthless, predatory captain she knew.
"Good." He stepped back, instantly severing the electric tension between them. The sudden loss of his body heat made her shiver, though she would die before admitting it. "Keep that energy for the cameras. We have a dinner in two hours."
"Another one?" Lanaya pushed off the door, her legs trembling slightly. "I just lied to fifty reporters. I'm done for the day."
"You are done when I say you are."
"I am not your hostage, Maverick!"
"You are my fiancée." He turned, his broad back to her as he adjusted his suit jacket. "And tonight is the Redstone charity gala. The entire board will be there. Including my father."
The name Alexander Hayden sent a spike of ice through her veins. "So what? I have to parade around in another tight dress and pretend you don't make my skin crawl?"
Maverick stopped. He turned slowly, his grey-blue eyes locking onto hers with a chilling intensity.
"Yes," he said softly. "You will smile. You will hold my hand. And you will not flinch when I touch you."
"I flinched because you cornered me!"
"You flinched because you are terrified of me."
"I am disgusted by you. There is a difference."
He crossed the room in two massive strides, invading her space again. He didn't touch her, but his sheer size was completely overwhelming.
"Are you?" His voice dropped to that lethal, vibrating rasp that scraped directly down her spine. "Because when I kissed you last night, you didn't feel disgusted, Lanaya. You felt desperate."
Her breath hitched. A dark, twisted pull tightened low in her stomach. "I pushed you away."
"Eventually." He leaned down, his mouth brushing dangerously close to her ear. The heavy scent of cedar and pure adrenaline flooded her senses. "But for two seconds, you were entirely mine."
"You're insane." She shoved his chest, desperate to put distance between them. It was like shoving a brick wall.
"Maybe I am." He caught her wrist, his long fingers wrapping around her pulse point. "But I am the only thing standing between your father and bankruptcy. Remember that tonight when my father starts asking questions."
He released her wrist and opened the lounge door. The chaotic noise of the arena hallway flooded back in.
"The car leaves in an hour," Maverick ordered without looking back. "Don't be late."
The Redstone charity gala was a glittering, suffocating trap.
The ballroom was packed with Boston's elite, all of them eager to stare at the newly engaged couple. The crystal chandeliers overhead felt like spotlights.
Lanaya stood near the ice sculpture, her hand tightly trapped in Maverick's. He was playing the devoted fiancé flawlessly. His thumb stroked the back of her hand, a slow, agonizingly tender rhythm that made her heart pound a frantic beat against her ribs.
She hated him. She hated her body's traitorous reaction to his touch even more.
"Smile, Huntress," Maverick murmured, his lips brushing her temple as a photographer snapped their picture. "My father is watching."
Lanaya stiffened. She looked past the flashbulbs and saw Alexander Hayden standing near the bar. He wasn't smiling. His cold, calculating gaze was fixed entirely on them.
"He knows," Lanaya whispered, her throat tight. "He knows this is fake."
"He suspects," Maverick corrected, his grip on her hand tightening painfully. "Which is why you need to sell it."
"I am trying!"
"Try harder."
Before she could argue, a sleek, sharp-featured woman in a red dress broke through the crowd, heading straight for them.
Lanaya's stomach plummeted. It was Chloe Vance. The lead anchor for Boston Sports Network, and Maverick's very public, very recent ex-girlfriend.
"Maverick." Chloe's voice was a purr that grated on Lanaya's nerves. She ignored Lanaya completely, resting a manicured hand on Maverick's arm. "Congratulations on the... sudden engagement."
Maverick didn't pull away from Chloe's touch. "Thank you, Chloe."
"I have to admit, I was shocked." Chloe finally turned her predatory gaze to Lanaya. "Especially considering how much you two despise each other. Or is the whole 'blood feud' thing just for the fans?"
Lanaya felt Maverick tense beside her. This was a trap.
"It's not a feud," Lanaya said, forcing her voice to remain steady. "It's passion. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference on the ice."
"How romantic." Chloe's smile was venomous. "But I know Maverick. He doesn't settle down. Not unless he's getting something out of it. So tell me, Lanaya..." Chloe leaned in, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "How much is Alexander paying you to wear that ring?"
The silence between them snapped tight.
Lanaya's blood ran ice-cold. She opened her mouth to defend herself.
Maverick dropped her hand.
He didn't defend her. He didn't step between them. He simply went still - his weight shifting almost imperceptibly toward Chloe, his attention narrowing in that specific, contained way that meant he was managing something he didn't want witnessed.
The stillness was the thing that broke her.
She knew this shape. She had carried a version of it in her chest for eight years - the image she had never let herself complete, of Maverick standing at the edge of the lake while Crew went under. Not running. Not shouting. Just that terrible stillness, the same contained quiet she could never find an explanation for, the detail that lived at the center of everything she believed about him and had never once let herself examine directly. She wasn't examining it now. But her body had already made the connection her mind refused to.
His inaction in this room was not the same as that day. She knew that. She told herself that.
It didn't matter. Something that had been holding for eight years gave way anyway.
"That is none of your business, Chloe," Maverick said, his voice terrifyingly calm. But he didn't step away from her.
"Excuse me," Lanaya choked out.
She didn't wait for a response. She turned and fled through the crowded ballroom, not because of Chloe's accusation, not even because Maverick had dropped her hand. She fled because the armor had cracked in a place she hadn't known was load-bearing, and if she stayed another second the thing she had been holding since the lake was going to come apart in full view of Boston's entire social elite.
She made it to the corridor before her back hit the wall and the breath finally left her in one long, ragged collapse.
Eight years. She had carried this for eight years. And she was so tired of holding it.
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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.