Fake dating the Captain's step brother
One unforgettable summer. One goodbye that never came.
As children, Kayla and Cole found something that felt too big for their age to understand. Then summer ended. Kayla went home, disappeared without a goodbye, and broke the heart of the only boy who believed she'd come back.
Years later, after losing her mother, Kayla returns to the city of that unforgettable summer and transfers to an elite private school where old money families rule, hockey is everything, and Cole has become the untouchable team captain everyone admires. He's the boy she never stopped loving.
He acts as if she's a complete stranger.
But Cole remembers everything.
He recognized her the second he saw her. He just can't forgive the girl who walked away without a word.
When Cole's stepbrother asks Kayla to be his fake girlfriend for an important family event, just one weekend, no strings attached, she agrees, hoping pretending to move forward will help her finally let go of the past.
Cole has no intention of standing by while his stepbrother parades the only girl he's ever loved on his arm.
Now Kayla is caught between two brothers, one fake relationship, and feelings that never truly disappeared. She'll have to decide whether first love deserves a second chance, or if some goodbyes can never be undone.
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Chapter: Chapter 10Rhys pov We were still arguing when we got through the front door, the same argument we'd been having since the parking lot, low and clipped, both of us too aware of the house around us to raise our voices the way we actually wanted to."You don't get to grab me like that in front of people," I said, dropping my bag by the stairs harder than I needed to. "Whatever's going on with you, that's not how you handle it."Cole's jaw was tight, a muscle working at the hinge of it. He didn't look at me. "I said we were leaving.""You didn't say anything. You just decided.""Same thing.""It's not the same thing, and you know it isn't." I threw my hands up, half out of frustration, half because I still didn't understand what I'd walked into back there. "You've been off all day. Off with Vanessa. Off in the hallway. And now you're….."Both our phones buzzed at the same time, sharp and identical, cutting the sentence off clean.I pulled mine out first. School group chat. My stomach dropped befor
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
Chapter: Chapter 9 Kayla povPriya reached me before the door had even fully closed behind Cole and Rhys, breathless, her hand closing around my wrist."Did you see his face?" she said. "Cole's face. He looked like someone had knocked the wind out of him."I had seen it. I'd been standing close enough to catch the exact moment his jaw locked, the way his shoulders had gone rigid before he crossed the hallway and pulled Rhys away without a word. My chest was still doing something strange and hopeful about it, something I didn't fully trust."Maybe he remembers me," I said, quietly, testing the words before I let myself believe them. "Maybe that's what this was."Priya's face didn't share my hope. She tilted her head, studying me the way she did when she was about to say something I didn't want to hear."Or," she said, gentler than usual, "his brother just got a date to the biggest event of the year, and Cole hates losing. Any version of losing. Even ones he doesn't actually want."I opened my mouth to a
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
Chapter: Chapter 8Cole povI sat at my desk long after the room had emptied out, the image still looping behind my eyes no matter how many times I told it to stop. Kayla, pulling that helmet over her head. Kayla, climbing onto the back of Rhys's bike like it was the easiest thing in the world. Her arms around his waist.I dragged a hand down my face and stared at the blank page in front of me, willing myself to focus on anything else. It didn't work."You're doing the brooding thing again."I didn't have to look up to know who it was. Vanessa's voice carried its own particular weight, always half-amused, always expecting an audience. She dropped onto the edge of my desk without asking, one leg swinging idly."I'm working.""You're staring at a blank page like it insulted your mother." She held her phone out toward me, screen already lit. "Anyway. You should see this before you hear it from someone else."I glanced at it against my better judgment. The event pairing list, my father's handwriting practic
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
Chapter: Chapter 7Rhys povThe second we walked through the doors, three sales associates converged on us like they'd been waiting behind the racks for exactly this moment."Mr. Sterling." The one in front, tall, polished, already reaching for Kayla's jacket like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Welcome back. What can we get started for you today?""She needs something for a formal event," I said, nodding toward Kayla. "Saturday night. Something that actually gets noticed."Kayla stood a step behind me, arms crossed loosely over her chest, eyes moving over the racks with the kind of stillness that told me she was doing math in her head, calculating exits, calculating cost, calculating whether this was a mistake she could still walk back from.I knew that look. I'd seen it on plenty of people who weren't used to walking into rooms like this one."Relax," I said, low enough that it was just for her. "Nobody's going to bite.""I'm relaxed.""You're doing the arms thing.""I don't have an arms
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
Chapter: Chapter 6Kayla povThe hallway was already loud by the time we reached my locker, Priya talking fast enough that I only caught half of it, something about her and her boyfriend's six month anniversary, a reservation she'd been trying to get for weeks, whether she should wear the red dress or the green one."Red," I said, spinning my combination without really looking at it. "Obviously red.""That's what I said, but he likes me in green, and I feel like that means something, right? Like maybe I should wear the color he likes instead of the color I—"She stopped talking mid-sentence. I felt her hand close around my wrist before I understood why."Kayla." Her voice had dropped to a whisper, sharp with warning. "Twelve o'clock."I didn't have to ask. I already knew, some instinct in my chest answering before my eyes even found him, that low hum under my ribs that only ever showed up for one person in this entire school.Cole.He was walking down the hallway toward us, textbook tucked under one arm
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
Chapter: Chapter 5Cole povMy shirt was stuck to my back by the time I got through the front door, the kind of tiredness that lived in my shoulders more than my legs. The coach had run us twice as long as usual, said something about the season opener making us look like we'd never seen ice before. Nobody argued. Nobody ever did.I dropped my bag by the stairs and headed for the kitchen, already thinking about food, water, a shower, in that order, when I passed the living room and saw Rhys sprawled across the couch, phone in his hand, that stupid half smile on his face he only wore when he thought nobody was watching.I almost kept walking. Almost.Then the screen lit up again, another message, and something in me stopped moving before I'd decided to stop.I told myself I didn't care who he was talking to. I told myself that the whole way across the room, and I was still telling myself that when I leaned over the back of the couch and read the name at the top of his screen anyway.Kayla.Her last messag
Last Updated: 2026-09-08
THE ALPHA'S REVENGE BRIDE
Darkness doesn't only exist in the shadows. Sometimes, it's built into the people meant to protect you.
Mara Clifton has spent her entire life as a pawn in her family's ruthless ambitions. Her future was never hers to choose, and neither was the husband they forced upon her.
As punishment for a betrayal she never committed, Mara is ordered to marry Alpha King Alkane Viktor, the very man her family once publicly rejected and humiliated before he rose to power. To her father, the marriage is the perfect opportunity to plant a spy inside the king's palace. To Alkane, it's the perfect chance to destroy the family that once called him unworthy.
Their marriage begins as a battlefield.
He strips her family of everything they hold dear. She is expected to betray the man she now shares a bed with. Every smile hides a scheme. Every touch conceals another act of revenge.
But the deeper Mara is pulled into the Alpha King's world, the more dangerous the truth becomes. The monster she was sent to ruin may not be the real enemy, while the family she has always obeyed is willing to sacrifice her without a second thought.
Caught between a husband consumed by revenge and a father hungry for power, Mara must decide where her loyalty truly belongs... before revenge destroys them both.
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Chapter: Chapter 6I woke before the servants came, the way I always had at Blackstone, and for one disoriented moment I reached for the familiar shape of my own room before I remembered where I was.The ceiling above me was wrong. Too high, too far away, painted with a mural of wolves running beneath a full moon that I hadn't noticed the night before, too exhausted by then to notice anything except the size of the bed and the fact that no one had followed me into the room to watch what I did with my grief.I lay there a long while before I made myself move, staring at those painted wolves, tracing the line of the largest one with my eyes until I'd memorized the exact curve of its spine. It felt easier than thinking about the conversation I'd had in the throne room, though my mind kept circling back to it anyway, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth.‘You've made your reasons very public.’‘No, I didn't.’I hadn't expected honesty. I'd expected denial, or worse, the practiced sympathy men like my fa
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
Chapter: Chapter 5I had imagined this moment more times than I cared to admit.In most versions, I imagined a woman built in her father's image, sharp-eyed and calculating, already searching the throne room for weaknesses before she'd finished her first bow. I had prepared for that woman. I had rehearsed, in the quiet hours before dawn, exactly how little of myself I intended to give her.The woman walking toward me down the long hall was not searching for anything.She walked the way someone walks into cold water, steady because stopping would be worse than continuing, her spine straight in a way that looked deliberate rather than natural. The royal cloak sat unfamiliar on her shoulders, the silver too new against skin that had clearly spent more time in sunlight than any noblewoman I'd met at court. Her hands were folded in front of her, and even from this distance I could see how tightly.She did not look at the throne the way most did, with calculation, gauging distance and posture and exactly how
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
Chapter: Chapter 4(The Bride the Crown Claimed)Horns woke me before dawn. I parted the curtains and froze. Royal soldiers filled the courtyard below, hundreds of them, and as I watched, the silver banner of House Clifton came down from the eastern tower while crimson and black rose to take its place.No battle. No blood spilled to earn it. My father's kingdom was disappearing in complete silence.The King hadn't conquered us with an army. He'd conquered us with a signature.By midmorning the fortress no longer felt like ours. Royal officials moved through the halls with ledgers open, counting grain stores and horses and weapons that had belonged to House Clifton for four generations, while our own guards stood aside at the gates, stripped of their command, watching strangers take their posts without a word of protest left to give.Then the seamstresses arrived. They didn't ask permission before they began.I stood still while they measured me, while our family's colors were folded away and replaced wi
Last Updated: 2026-09-08
Chapter: Chapter 3I didn't mean to say it. The words left me before I'd decided to speak them, quiet, but they landed in the chaos like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples silenced everyone.Every face turned toward me.My father answered before the messenger could."You don't."Two words. No warmth in them, no explanation, nothing but the flat certainty of a man stating a fact of weather. I had heard my father deny me things before, small things, a dress I'd wanted, a suitor I'd once dared to mention. I had never heard him deny me my own life in quite so few syllables.Something in my chest went cold and small.The messenger, Damon, I would later learn, watched the exchange without expression, and when no one spoke further, he inclined his head, set the second scroll containing the formal terms upon the table, and took his leave with the unhurried calm of a man who had delivered far worse news to far more dangerous rooms than this one.The moment the doors closed behind him, my father ex
Last Updated: 2026-09-08
Chapter: Chapter 2(The Daughter They Chose to Sacrifice)The pup in my lap wouldn't stop shaking. He was the smallest of the litter we'd found near the eastern wall three days ago, half-starved, one ear torn from something that had tried to make a meal of him before the border patrol found him first. I'd been coming to the kennel every morning since, sitting on the cold stone floor with a bottle of warmed goat's milk, waiting for his trembling to slow.It hadn't, not yet. But it would. Everything did, eventually, if you were patient enough to wait it out."There," I murmured, running my thumb along his spine. "You're safe here."I almost believed it myself.The estate ledgers sat open beside me on the bench, columns of grain shipments and border taxes I'd been meaning to review since breakfast. My aunt liked to remind me that noblewomen didn't dirty their hands with kennel work or account books, that there were servants for such things, that a lady of House Clifton ought to be seen at needlework or in
Last Updated: 2026-09-08
Chapter: Chapter 1(The King's Demand)The Royal Council Chamber smelled of old wood and older blood."Has House Clifton forgotten who wears the Crown?"My voice was quiet, but I let it cut through the room like a blade drawn slow enough for everyone to hear the metal sing.The Royal Chancellor cleared his throat and stepped forward, a scroll trembling faintly in his grip. "Your Majesty, House Clifton has again refused to relinquish the disputed borders of Blackstone Fortress. They claim ancestral right supersedes the Crown's decree."A general near the front slammed a fist against the table. "Then take it by force. Clifton has grown too comfortable believing his name protects him.""His army is not small," another countered, leaning forward with brows drawn together. "If we march on Blackstone, we risk dragging three border packs into a war none of them asked for.""Cowardice," the first general spat."Strategy," the second shot back, jaw tight.Voices rose. Chairs scraped. A minister threw up his hand
Last Updated: 2026-09-08
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