Fake Dating My Ex’s Rival Hockey Star

Public association

Piper

I couldn't speak.

He held my eyes for one more second. Then he lifted his head and looked past me, and I felt the exact moment the group behind me understood who had just walked up.

Somebody's glass stopped halfway to their mouth.

Liam recovered first. He always recovered first.

"Vance." He put his hand out, smiling wide. "Hey. Big fan, seriously, I—"

"Say it again."

Liam's hand stayed in the air. "Sorry?"

"The last thing you said to her." Ryder's voice was quiet. It did not need to be anything else. "You said it quietly. Say it at the volume you said the rest."

Nobody moved.

Liam's smile stayed on his face like a picture somebody forgot to take down.

Chloe stepped in, laughing lightly. "We were just catching up. Piper and I go way back."

"I know," Ryder said. "She told me."

Chloe's face changed.

It was small. A flicker. But I saw it, and it was the first thing all night that made my chest loosen.

One of the men behind them cleared his throat and tried to save the moment. "I didn't realize you two knew each other."

And then Ryder Vance did something that stopped my heart.

He reached down and took my hand.

Not my wrist. Not my elbow. My hand. He laced his fingers through mine, slowly, in front of all of them, and his thumb settled against my knuckles like it had been doing it for years.

"You didn't know a lot of things," he said.

Then he looked down at me, and the whole room fell away.

"We're leaving."

---

He did not let go of my hand until we reached the car.

At the top of the marble stairs I felt him go rigid beside me and I looked back on instinct.

A silver haired man stood on the mezzanine with a drink in his hand, watching us go. Not smiling. Not surprised.

Ryder's grip tightened once around my fingers.

"Don't look at him," he said.

I didn't.

---

In the car, I finally started shaking.

It came all at once, the way it does when your body has been holding a door shut and somebody finally tells it to stop.

Ryder took off his jacket, one shoulder at a time, careful with the right side, and dropped it over my lap without a word.

"I'm sorry," I said. My voice cracked on the second word. "I froze. I stood there and I let them say all of it and I couldn't—"

"You didn't cry."

I turned to look at him.

He was watching the window again, jaw tight, the city sliding across his face in pieces of light.

"I have taken two hundred and twelve stitches," he said. "Nobody has ever hit me the way he hit you tonight. And you stood there and you didn't give them one tear."

My throat closed.

"Why did you step in?" I whispered.

"Because the moment they smell blood on you," he said, "they smell it on me."

It should have hurt. Somehow it didn't. It was the first completely honest thing anyone had said to me in weeks.

My phone buzzed in my bag.

**CONNOR:** *Was that you leaving with Vance?*

I stared at it until the screen went dark and I did not answer.

"Lawrence."

I looked up.

Ryder had turned his head. In the low light his eyes were almost black.

"There's a clause you didn't read," he said.

I frowned. "I read the parts that mattered."

"You read the parts I let you find." He leaned back against the seat. "Page nine. Clause nineteen."

Something cold went down my spine.

I pulled the contract up on my phone with fingers that were still not steady. Page seven. Page eight.

Page nine.

**CLAUSE 19. PUBLIC ASSOCIATION.**

I stopped breathing.

Beside me, without looking away from the window, Ryder Vance said quietly,

"Now you've read the part that matters."