Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King
Beatrix Holloway has always been the dependable one. For four long years, she stood beside her boyfriend, Julian, sacrificing everything to help him build his dream. When his company finally lands a massive sponsorship deal, she spends her last savings on an engagement ring, hoping to surprise him.
Instead, she catches him in bed with the investor's daughter.
Publicly humiliated and mocked for her plus-size figure, Beatrix runs away believing she's lost everything. But a chance encounter with eight-year-old Ivy Ashcombe changes her life forever.
"I want you to be my daddy's girlfriend."
Beatrix laughs it off—until Ivy announces to an entire crowd that she's found her new mommy.
Now the internet believes Beatrix is secretly involved with Nikolai Ashcombe, the billionaire owner of the country's biggest hockey team and the cold, intimidating man known as the Ice King. To protect his daughter and put an end to the rumors, Nikolai offers Beatrix a contract she never saw coming.
Beatrix thinks it's only a business deal.
She never expects Ivy to become a determined matchmaker, her cruel sister to set her sights on her fake billionaire boyfriend, or the terrifying Ice King to look at her plus-size body like she's the only woman he's ever wanted.
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Chapter: Chapter 35 — The Weight of ItPOV: BEATRIXI used to get paid to read numbers like these.By the third day, I could recite them without looking. Two sponsors gone from the charity benefit. A third name quietly missing from the sponsor page on the team website, which I noticed only because I had stared at that page so long I knew its shape. Meridian, holding its position, for now. A story shared more than a million times, and a second story, written by a different outlet, that began with the words as previously reported.I stayed inside the penthouse. There was no rule about it. Nobody had told me I had to. But two photographers had taken up a permanent position across the street, and every time I walked past a window I felt the small cold pull of a lens finding me.Marcus stood in the hallway more than he used to. Priya called the apartment twice a day with updates, and I listened from the next room while Nikolai said, in his most even voice, that it was being handled.It was not being handled. I had spent years i
Last Updated: 2026-11-09
Chapter: Chapter 34 — The Board ReactsPOV: PRIYABy the time I reached my desk that morning, the story had been shared four hundred thousand times, and my phone had not stopped ringing since before dawn.I had worked for Nikolai Ashcombe for six years. I had handled a fired coach, a flooded arena, and one memorable weekend when a player posted something about a referee that required three lawyers and a great deal of coffee.I thought I knew what a bad day looked like.I had no idea.At seven, Meridian's lead counsel called me directly. Her name was Adaeze Okafor, and she had never once called me in all the months of the stadium negotiations.She did not waste a word."Meridian would like an emergency meeting with the board and with Nikolai, in person, at two this afternoon. It is not a request.""May I ask what the agenda is?""I think you already know what the agenda is," she said, and ended the call.At half past eight, the first email arrived.Calloway Trust, a regional bank that had sponsored our charity benefit for f
Last Updated: 2026-11-03
Chapter: Chapter 33 — The Spy StoryPOV: BEATRIXMy phone was already buzzing when I woke up, and this time I knew better than to hope it meant something good.It was a few minutes past six. The bed beside me was empty, the sheets still faintly warm, and somewhere down the hall I could hear the low, clipped rhythm of Nikolai's voice behind his office door.It was the tone he used only when something at work had gone wrong. I lay there for a moment telling myself it was a sponsor. A schedule. Anything.Thirty-seven messages. Maya, three times in a row. A number I did not recognize. Priya's name, twice, both marked urgent.And a link, sent by four different people, with no words attached at all.I opened it.The headline stretched across the top of the page in heavy black letters. SYMPATHY FIRST, FACTS SECOND: THE BILLIONAIRE'S BRIDE WHO BUILT FALSE STORIES FOR A LIVING.Beneath it was a photograph of me in the flour-dusted apron, laughing, cropped from the cook-off clip, with a thin red circle drawn around my face like a
Last Updated: 2026-11-02
Chapter: Chapter 32 — Ordinary DaysPOV: BEATRIXFor several days, nothing happened.I want to say that plainly, because I have thought about those days many times since, and the most remarkable thing about them was how unremarkable they were.No headlines. No strange calls. No drawers left open. The sun came up, the coffee got made, and life went on with a gentle, unhurried kind of ordinariness I had never once lived inside before.The mornings became my favorite part.Nikolai was always awake before me, but he had stopped disappearing into his office. Instead, I would find him in the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up, doing something to a pan of eggs that he insisted was cooking and that Ivy insisted was a crime.He had not burned anything in nine days. Ivy kept count on the refrigerator door in purple marker, and he pretended not to care about the number.She had also carried her clipboard out of the practice kitchen and into daily life, appointing herself official judge of every meal in the house.On Saturday she s
Last Updated: 2026-10-06
Chapter: Chapter 31 — Old EmailsPOV: THORNEPruitt arrived at my office on the eighth morning, exactly as promised, carrying a plain brown folder as though it held nothing more valuable than a receipt from the dry cleaner.I had used him for nineteen years. He was a soft spoken man in a gray coat, with the kind of face people forget while they are still looking at it, which in his line of work was the entire point. He did not sit until I told him to. He never did."You found something," I said."I found what you asked for." He set the folder on my desk and stepped back. "Emails from her last job. A marketing firm called Kessler Brandt, on the east side. She left there almost four years ago.""Where did they come from?""An account she stopped using a long time ago. Closed, on paper. Old things last longer than people expect." He paused, and for a moment I thought he might say more. "I would rather not explain further."I did not press him. In nineteen years I had learned that the men who found things for me were mos
Last Updated: 2026-09-30
Chapter: Chapter 30 — The Thorne AlliancePOV: ARTHURI chose the restaurant carefully. A private room at a club neither of us belonged to publicly, no windows facing the street, a staff paid well enough to forget faces by morning. Conversations of this nature required the right setting. A man will agree to things over a quiet dinner that he would refuse outright in a boardroom with a secretary taking notes.Richard Thorne arrived eleven minutes late, which I understood to be deliberate. He had spent thirty years in business making certain everyone understood his time cost more than theirs. I did not begrudge him the gesture. I had used it myself often enough."Arthur," he said, settling into the chair across from me without apology. "This is unusual. You do not typically call.""I do not typically have anything worth calling about."We ordered. We spoke about nothing for the first twenty minutes, the way men of our age and position always do, golf and grandchildren and the general decline of everything that used to work prop
Last Updated: 2026-09-29
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