Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Two: The Rule

Delaney's pov

She should have said no in the hallway. She'd had four minutes to say no, walking back to her office, and instead she'd spent them googling "how much does a publicist make in a normal industry" and coming up with numbers that made her want to lie down on the carpet.

By the time Priya, Roman's agent, a woman with the energy of a hawk that had gone to law school, called to set up "the terms meeting," Delaney had already built her rule. One rule. Non-negotiable.

"No feelings," she said, before Priya had even finished pouring coffee in the conference room. "This is a business arrangement. Photo ops, one dinner a week somewhere with good lighting, maybe a game where the cameras catch us in the family section. Nothing real."

Priya glanced at Roman, who was sitting across the table with his arms crossed, looking like he'd rather be doing wind sprints. "Fine by me."

"Fine," Roman said.

"I mean it," Delaney said, and she heard her own voice sharpen in a way that surprised even her. "You, of all people, should understand why."

Something shifted in his face. Careful. "Because of Beckett."

There it was. She hated that he knew the name, hated more that he said it like he'd been waiting to.

Beckett Reyes. Center for the Portland Static. Her boyfriend for two years, back when she was twenty four and still believed a man could love you and also disappear for six game road trips without it costing anything. Beckett, who'd been having the best season of his career, twenty two goals by February, until a game in March when Roman Kade caught him against the boards at full speed, shoulder first, and put him through eleven weeks of concussion protocol and a torn labrum that ended his year and very nearly his contract.

Delaney had been in the stands. Section 114, row C, wearing his number. She'd watched Beckett go down and not get up for ninety seconds that felt like ninety years, and she'd watched Roman Kade skate to the penalty box without so much as glancing back at the body he'd left on the ice.

Three weeks later, Beckett had broken up with her over text, blaming the injury, the meds, the mood swings, blaming everything except the fact that he'd been distant for a year before Roman ever touched him. But Delaney's grief hadn't been that logical. Grief never was. She'd needed somewhere to put the wreckage of that season, and Roman Kade.. cold-eyed, silent, unapologetic... had been standing right there holding the wrecking ball.

Ravenquill93 hadn't started as a crush. It had started as an exorcism. She'd written the first chapter of 'Enforcer's Bargain' at 1 a.m., eight weeks after the breakup, trying to understand the man who'd ended her relationship with one hit and never once looked sorry about it. Somewhere around chapter nine, understanding had turned into something else, and she'd hated herself for it every single time she opened a new document.

"That hit was clean," Roman said now, quiet, not defensive so much as tired of defending it. "Refs reviewed it. League reviewed it. It was a hockey play."

"I know." She did know. She'd read the report eleven times. "That's not the point. The point is I spent two years of my life next to a man your sport chewed up, and then I spent a year writing love stories about the man who did the chewing, and I am not..... " her voice cracked in a way she despised, ".... I am not doing that again in real life. Fiction is safe. Fiction I can close the laptop on. This isn't fiction."

Priya, wisely, said nothing, and pretended to read her own notes.

Roman looked at Delaney for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice had dropped the flat, transactional edge from the hallway. "No feelings," he agreed. "You have my word. I'm not looking to get inside your head, Voss. I just need three months of good press before Priya's phone stops ringing with real offers." A beat. "And for the record... I looked back. After the box. Cameras just never catch that part."

She didn't know what to do with that, so she didn't do anything with it. She stood, gathered her folder, and told them she'd have a joint statement drafted by Friday.

She told herself, walking out, that the rule would hold. She had a lot of practice believing things that weren't quite true.

Roman's pov

He hadn't lied about looking back.

He remembered it clean, the way he remembered every hit that mattered... Reyes going down heavy and wrong, that specific stomach drop silence that fell over a rink when nineteen thousand people all inhale at once, and Roman skating that long, exposed lap to the box with his own pulse hammering in his ears, forcing his face into nothing because that's what you did, that's what the position required, because an enforcer who looked rattled was an enforcer who got tested twice as hard the next shift. He'd looked back once the trainers were out there. Just once. Long enough to see the guy's skate twitch, which in his world counted as good news.

He hadn't known, then, that somewhere in Section 114 a woman in a Reyes jersey was watching him do it and deciding, in real time, that he was the villain of her whole story.

He hadn't known he'd end up wanting, very badly, to be a different character than that.

Priya cornered him in the parking garage after. "You good?"

"Fine."

"You went quiet in there."

"I'm always quiet." He unlocked the truck. "It's my personality."

"It's a symptom," Priya said, "but sure, let's call it a personality." She studied him over the roof of her Audi. "You could've told me the ex-boyfriend thing when you picked her as the PR angle. Would've been useful information."

"I didn't pick her because of an angle," Roman said, before he could stop himself, and then wished he hadn't, because Priya's eyebrows did a thing that meant she'd file that away and bring it up again at the worst possible time.

The truth.... the ugly, inconvenient truth he wasn't planning to say out loud to his own agent in a parking garage... was that he'd known about Beckett Reyes before he'd ever found the fic. It was public record, one of a hundred things you learned skimming a beat reporter's old interviews. He'd known, and he'd still built the entire blackmail plan anyway, because some reckless, competitive part of him had wanted to know if he could be more to her than the worst night of her life. Wanted to prove... to her, to himself, he wasn't sure which... that he wasn't just the hit reel she'd watched from Section 114.

That wasn't strategy. Priya would call it a liability. His coach would call it a distraction. Roman drove home turning it over anyway, the way you turn over a sore tooth, unable to stop checking whether it still hurt.

No feelings, she'd said, and he'd agreed, and meant it, mostly, the way you mean a promise you're already fairly sure the season is going to break.

He thought about the hallway. About chapter thirty one. About a woman brave enough to write four hundred thousand words trying to understand a man everyone else had already decided to hate, and reckless enough to sit across a conference table from that man and tell him the rules to his face instead of running.

'Respectable', he'd told Priya. ' someone stable.'

He hadn't told her the rest of it: that stable wasn't actually what he wanted. He wanted someone who'd looked straight at the worst thing he'd ever done on live television and hadn't looked away... had looked so long and so hard she'd written six novels about it instead.

He was in trouble. He'd known it since the hallway, honestly. He was just getting around to admitting it.