Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Eleven: The Charity Dinner

Delaney

Roman won the bet. Ashworth asked Sadie Chen to the team's annual charity dinner, and it took him, by Marchetti's official count, exactly three attempts to get the sentence out cleanly.

"You owe me twenty dollars," Roman said, smug, watching Ashworth visibly relax once Sadie said yes.

"I'll add it to your tab," Delaney said. "Right after the coffee you still owe me from the practice rink, and the dry cleaning bill from the champagne Petrov spilled on my blazer."

"That tab's getting long."

"You can afford it. You make considerably more than I do."

"I could just marry you," Roman said, casual, testing the words like a man dropping a puck to see how it bounced, "and then the tab becomes a shared household expense."

Delaney nearly dropped her coffee. "Did you just propose to me in a locker room hallway over a twenty dollar bet?"

"No," Roman said, immediately, looking somewhat alarmed at himself. "That was not a proposal. That was a poorly timed joke that got away from me. I have a plan for the actual proposal and it does not involve Marchetti's cologne being anywhere nearby, which it currently is."

"Noted," Delaney said, laughing, deciding not to examine too closely how much the accidental almost proposal had made her heart do something complicated and hopeful. "I'll pretend this didn't happen. You get a redo."

"Generous of you."

"I contain multitudes."

The charity dinner itself was a bigger production than Delaney had planned for, black tie, sponsors, half the roster in suits that fit considerably better than their game gear, and Sadie Chen looking genuinely radiant on Ashworth's arm, the two of them orbiting each other with the specific, delighted nervousness of a couple three weeks into something neither had expected to work this well this fast.

"They're disgustingly cute," Delaney told Roman, watching them from across the ballroom. "It's like watching a rerun of us, except with slightly less blackmail."

"Slightly less," Roman agreed. "I maintain the blackmail was a reasonable strategy given the information available to me at the time."

"You maintain a lot of things a functioning legal system would disagree with."

"Luckily I'm dating my own publicist. Built in crisis management."

She swatted his arm, laughing, and let him pull her onto the dance floor when the band started something slow, his hand warm and sure at the small of her back, none of the careful stiffness from the photo line six weeks ago, all of it easy now, familiar, hers.

"I've been thinking about something," Roman said, quiet, close to her ear. "The original deal. Three months. We're barely past two."

"Are you renegotiating again?"

"I renegotiated the terms weeks ago. I'm renegotiating the timeline now." He pulled back enough to look at her properly, something steady and certain in his face that made her chest go tight. "I don't want this to have an end date anymore, Delaney. I never did, if I'm honest, but I kept telling myself three months was the deal because it felt safer than admitting how fast I already knew."

"Knew what?"

"That I wasn't faking anything. Not even the first week." He brushed a strand of hair back from her face, gentle, careful. "I want to stop counting down. I want whatever this is to just be the thing we're doing now, permanently, without an expiration date Priya has to track on a calendar."

"That's the closest thing to a real proposal you've gotten dangerously close to twice tonight."

"I told you. I have a plan for the actual one." He smiled, easy, sure. "This isn't it. This is just me telling you the clock's off. No more three months. No more countdown. Just us, for as long as we both want it, which for the record, on my end, currently reads as indefinitely."

"Indefinitely," Delaney repeated, testing the word, finding she liked the shape of it in her mouth. "I can work with indefinitely."

Roman

Later, near the bar, Priya found him with her usual efficient directness, sliding a printout across the table before he'd even ordered a drink.

"League's finalized the redemption arc numbers," she said. "Sponsors are back. All three deals that went cold in the spring reinstated, plus one new offer from a skincare brand that specifically wants the tunnel kiss clip in the campaign, which, no judgment, but also, absolutely, say yes to that one, the money's obscene."

"Whatever you think is right."

"That's not an answer, Kade. That's you being distracted." Priya followed his gaze across the room to where Delaney stood laughing with Sadie Chen, unguarded, easy, lit up in a way she hadn't been in any of the early photo op smiles Priya had once coached her through. "You're not thinking about sponsors right now."

"No," he admitted. "I'm thinking about a ring I've had sitting in a drawer for two weeks that I haven't figured out how to give her without it feeling like another performance for cameras."

Priya's eyebrows went up, genuinely surprised for the first time since he'd met her. "Two weeks."

"I wanted it to be right. Not staged. Not something the league or the sponsors get credit for engineering." He turned the printout over in his hands, not really reading it. "Everything about this relationship started as a transaction. I don't want the next part to feel like one too."

"For what it's worth," Priya said, softer than he'd ever heard her, "the tunnel kiss wasn't staged either, and that's the moment that saved your career. Sometimes the realest things end up being the best strategy by accident. Doesn't mean you have to keep calling it strategy just because it worked."

He thought about that the rest of the night, watching Delaney laugh across the ballroom, watching Ashworth walk Sadie Chen through the room like a man discovering, in real time, exactly how much better everything felt once you stopped performing carefulness and just let yourself want something openly.

He thought about a kitchen with one photo on the wall, a grandmother's careful approval, a name only she still used. He thought about indefinitely, and what it might take to make the word permanent, properly, with a ring instead of just a sentence on a dance floor.

Not staged, he told himself, driving home that night with Delaney asleep against the passenger window, her hand still loosely laced with his over the console.

Just true. Finally, all the way through.