Se connecterPartager
Chapter 14 — The First Real Conversation
Date de publication:
2026-08-23 02:45:27
Dernier chapitre
Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King Chapter 34 — The Board Reacts
POV: 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
Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King Chapter 33 — The Spy Story
POV: 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
Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King Chapter 32 — Ordinary Days
POV: 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
Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King Chapter 31 — Old Emails
POV: 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
Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King Chapter 30 — The Thorne Alliance
POV: 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
Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King Chapter 29 — An Offer for Arthur
POV: SERENAArthur Ashcombe kept an office downtown that looked more like a museum than a workplace, with dark wood, old paintings, and a silence so complete it made me want to whisper the moment I walked through the door.Everything in the room looked older than me, and probably older than my mother too: heavy furniture and framed photographs of men who all seemed to share the same cold, assessing eyes that Arthur himself was currently aiming at us.Julian had arranged the meeting through an old contact from his agency days, but it was clear the moment Arthur's assistant showed us in that we were the ones asking for a favor, not the other way around.We had waited nearly twenty minutes in a small anteroom before being called in, long enough for me to wonder whether he was making us wait simply to establish who held the power in this arrangement.Arthur didn’t stand when we entered. He merely gestured to the two chairs across from his desk and waited, unhurried, for one of us to expla
Vous vous intéresseriez aussi à
Her Accidental Billionaire Husband
Lexusstar writes694.1K VuesSweet Dreams
Josie frank1.1M VuesSatisfying Her Darkest Fantasies
Shile1.0M VuesThe Wrong Woman
Ginny Not Genie1.2M VuesClaimed By The Other Hawthorne Brother
_Twi~Light35 VuesWORLD BETWEEN US
AG Mocumi100 VuesAfter Hours: My Deal with Professor Bancroft
Fidelia_j156 VuesMy Sister Stole My Husband, His Enemy Stole Me
Ihechiink80 Vues
