Fake Dating My Ex’s Rival Hockey Star

The event

# Chapter Five

**Piper**

My phone rang at 6:12 in the evening, two days after I signed my life away.

I was standing in my kitchen in a sweater with a hole in the sleeve, eating cereal out of a coffee mug because every clean bowl I owned was still in the sink.

The screen lit up.

**VANCE, R.**

I swallowed too fast and answered on the second ring. "Is it your shoulder?"

"Do you own a dress?"

I blinked at the wall. "Excuse me?"

"A dress." His voice was flat, like he was already bored of the conversation. "Black. Something that doesn't look like it came out of a clinic."

"Mr. Vance, it is six in the evening. If this is not a medical—"

"Clause four," he said.

Two words. That was all.

Twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week.

I closed my eyes. "Where are we going?"

"A car will be outside your building in forty minutes."

"That is not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

And then he hung up.

I stood there for a full ten seconds with the phone still against my ear, listening to nothing.

Then I put the mug down and went to my closet.

I owned exactly one dress worth wearing in public. Emerald green, silk, still in the plastic bag from the dry cleaner because I hadn't touched it in two years.

I had bought it for Liam's first gala. He had looked at me in it for about half a second and said, *"Yeah. That's fine."*

I stared at it for a long moment.

He had said black.

I put on the green one anyway.

---

The car was a black Escalade with windows so dark I couldn't see inside until the door opened for me.

Ryder was already in the back seat.

I had spent three sessions with this man half naked on a treatment table. I thought I was prepared.

I was not.

He was in a black suit with no tie, the collar of his shirt open at the throat, his dark hair pushed back off his forehead. The jacket had been cut by somebody who knew exactly how wide his shoulders were and had decided to make that everybody's problem.

He looked up. His eyes moved over me once, slow, from my heels to my face.

They stopped on the green.

"I said black."

"You did," I said, and got in.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was gone before I could call it a smile.

The car pulled into traffic. I set my bag on my knees, opened it, and looked at his right side.

He was holding his shoulder wrong. Slightly lifted. Locked.

"You have been favoring it all day," I said.

"I've been favoring it for six months."

"How bad is it right now? Sharp or dull?"

He looked out the window. "Dull."

"You are lying."

"Yes."

I let out a breath. "Where are we going?"

"The Ashworth. The league foundation gala."

My stomach dropped an inch.

"There will be two hundred cameras in that room," he said, still watching the street go by. "Sponsors. Owners. Every reporter in this city holding a glass of free champagne and hoping somebody bleeds. I have to stand for three hours and shake four hundred hands."

He finally turned his head and looked at me.

"And if that shoulder locks in front of them, it is not an injury anymore. It's a story."

I understood then. All of it.

"So you need me close," I said.

"I need you close."

"Then why the dress?"

"Because the second anyone in that room finds out Ryder Vance travels with a private therapist, they will know exactly why." His jaw tightened. "Tonight you don't work for me."

"Then what am I?"

He was quiet.

The city slid past the glass in gold streaks.

"Whatever they decide you are," he said.

---

We went in separately.

He walked through the front doors, into the noise and the cameras and the wall of flashing white light. I went through a side entrance with the caterers, past steel carts and stacked chairs, and came out into a ballroom that looked like somebody had poured money over it and let it dry.

Chandeliers. Marble. An ice sculpture of the league trophy melting quietly onto a bed of white roses.

I took a glass of champagne I had no intention of drinking, just so my hands had a job.

I found him within a minute. He was near the stage, surrounded, six men in suits laughing at something he had not laughed at. He never once used his right arm.

Good.

And then I made the mistake of looking left.

Connor.

My brother stood by the bar in a tuxedo, deep in conversation with two men wearing sponsor pins, his shoulders relaxed for the first time in weeks.

My whole body went cold.

He could not see me here. Not in this dress. Not in this room, three feet from his own captain.

I turned away fast and moved toward the far wall.

That was when I heard the laugh.

High. Bright. Practiced.

I knew that laugh. I had heard it every day for four years, in hallways, in locker rooms, behind my back and once directly into my face.

*Please, no.*

"Piper?"

Liam's voice cut through the room like something thrown.

I turned around because my body did it before my brain could stop it.

He was ten feet away in a navy suit, a drink in one hand, the other resting low on Chloe's back.

She wore red. Of course she did.

Her eyes found me and lit up like Christmas morning.

"Oh my God," she said.

She crossed the floor toward me with her heels clicking, and Liam followed, and two other couples turned to watch because that is what people do when they smell something interesting.

Chloe stopped in front of me and looked me over. Slowly. Head to shoes and back up.

Then her gaze settled on the dress and her smile went soft with delight.

"Is that the green one?" She tilted her head. "From the draft party?"

Heat crawled up the back of my neck.

She turned to Liam and touched his arm. "Babe. You told me she'd have to sell it."

Liam laughed into his glass.

One of the women behind them laughed too, quietly, the way people laugh when they don't know what's funny but want to be included.

"Excuse me," I said, and tried to move past them.

Liam stepped sideways. Not hard. Just enough.

"Come on," he said, all charm now, all warmth for the audience. "Don't be like that. How did you even get in here?"

"I was invited."

"By who?"

I said nothing.

Something ugly and satisfied moved behind his eyes.

He turned to the little half circle of people around us and raised his voice by exactly the amount required.

"Piper and I used to date," he said. "Before she got fired for filing a complaint against her boss."

The air went out of me.

Chloe pressed her hand to her chest. "God, that was so brave," she said sweetly. "Even though nothing came of it."

She paused. Perfect timing. She always had perfect timing.

"Nothing did come of it. Right?"

The woman behind her made a small sound. Not quite a laugh. Worse than a laugh.

"That is not what happened," I said.

My voice came out thin. Small. Nothing like the voice I had used in Ryder's doorway two days ago.

Chloe's eyes glittered.

"See, this is what she does," she said gently, to everyone, like she was explaining something sad. "She gets quiet. And then two weeks later, somebody gets a call from HR."

Liam leaned in.

Close enough that only I could hear him.

"I told you," he murmured. "Without me, you're nothing. You couldn't even stay in the room."

The ballroom tilted.

My ears filled with a low roar. The champagne shook in my hand and I gripped it harder to stop it, which only made it worse. Somewhere behind me a camera flashed and my eyes burned and I thought, with terrible clarity, *if I cry here, it is over. Every single person in this room will remember me as the woman who cried at the gala.*

And across the floor, my brother was thirty feet away with his back to me, laughing at something a sponsor said, one glance away from destroying his entire career for me.

I had to get out.

I turned.

And ran straight into a wall of black wool.

A hand came to the small of my back. Warm. Wide enough to cover half of it.

The glass was taken out of my fingers and set on a passing tray without a sound.

Ryder didn't look at them.

He looked at me.

"You were supposed to find me twenty minutes ago," he said.