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The Fake Date
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-08-26 06:31:55"Explain to me," Coach Reyes said, dropping a phone on his desk with a photo already pulled up, "why half the internet thinks you have a secret girlfriend, and the other half thinks you're sleeping with your stepsister."
Cameron stared at the screen. It was a grainy shot from the rink last week, him and Lena, tangled together after her fall, his hand in her hair, her palms flat against his chest. Someone had caught it through the hallway window. Someone had posted it with the caption ‘Cameron Hayes and mystery girl???’ and it had exploded overnight.
"It's not what it looks like," Cameron said.
"I don't care what it looks like. I care what the scouts think it looks like." Reyes leaned back, arms crossed. "You've got NHL people watching every move you make this season. They don't want drama. They want a kid who shows up, plays clean, and doesn't turn into a headline. Right now you're a headline."
"So what do you want me to do?"
"Kill the story. Make it boring. Give them something normal to write about instead of whatever ‘this’ is." He tapped the photo. "A girlfriend. A real one, with a name and a face, so this mystery-girl nonsense dies. Or better yet, figure out who she actually is and clear it up before it turns into something you can't walk back."
Cameron didn't say anything. He was still staring at Lena's face in the photo, frozen mid-fall, mid-something, and the memory of exactly how she'd felt against him hit harder than it should have three days later.
He left the office with a plan already forming, and he hated how much he liked it.
*****
"Absolutely not."
Lena didn't even look up from her laptop, typing hard enough that Cameron half expected the keys to give out.
"You haven't even heard the whole plan."
"I heard the part where you want me to pretend to be your girlfriend. That's the whole plan. That's plan, singular." She finally looked at him, standing in her doorway like he owned it, which, fine, technically he did. "The answer is no."
"It's one week." He stepped inside without an invitation, because apparently boundaries were optional in this house. "The gossip dies down, the photo stops trending, my coach stops looking at me like I personally cost him a national title, and you go back to hating me in peace."
"I don't hate you." The words were out before she could stop them, and she watched something flicker across his face, surprised, pleased, dangerous. She cleared her throat and pushed forward. "I dislike you strategically. There's a difference."
"Noted." He sat on the edge of her desk, entirely too close, entirely too comfortable. "One week, Lena. Some hand-holding at a team dinner. A few photos on my I*******m, so the algorithm believes it. That's it."
"And what do I get out of pretending to date the most insufferable man on campus?"
Something shifted behind his eyes, calculating now, careful. "What do you want?"
She thought about the text still sitting in her phone. ‘Ask Cameron what really happened to your dad's career.’ She thought about the way he'd gone pale in the rink, the lights cutting out, the door locking before either of them could finish that conversation and he'd sworn up and down afterward it was just a facilities error, nothing more, and changed the subject so fast she still didn't believe him.
"Answers," she said finally. "You tell me everything you know about my father and yours. All of it. No more half-truths."
His jaw tightened. For a second she thought he'd refuse outright.
"Deal," he said instead, quiet. "After the week's over. I'll tell you everything."
"Why not now?"
"Because some of it isn't just my secret to give away." His eyes held hers, steady, serious in a way she hadn't seen from him before. "Trust me for a week, Lena. That's all I'm asking."
She hated that some reckless part of her already wanted to.
"Fine," she said. "One week. Fake girlfriend. Then you talk."
"Deal." He held out his hand, the same way he had that first night, and this time she took it. His fingers closed around hers, warm, sure, and neither of them let go quite as fast as the handshake required.
The team dinner was worse than she expected and better than she wanted to admit.
Cameron kept a hand at the small of her back all night, introducing her with an ease that felt unsettlingly real, laughing at things she said like he actually found them funny and not just performance for an audience of hockey players and their skeptical girlfriends. When Marco cornered her by the bar and asked, too smug, whether the rumors were true, Cameron appeared out of nowhere with two drinks and a look that sent Marco retreating without another word.
"You're good at this," she murmured, once they'd found a quiet corner.
"Good at what?"
"Pretending."
Something crossed his face, quick, gone before she could name it. "Maybe I'm not pretending all of it."
Her breath caught. "Cameron…"
"Don't." His voice was low, rough. "Don't say my name like that unless you mean something by it. I've been trying really hard to remember this is fake, and you're not making it easy."
"You're the one who put a hand on my back all night."
"You're the one who leaned into it." His eyes dropped to her mouth, and neither of them moved to close the last foot of space between them, though every instinct in her screamed to. "This was supposed to be simple."
"It was never going to be simple." She stepped closer, close enough that his breath caught audibly. "I don't think either of us is very good at pretending."
His hand came up to her jaw, thumb brushing her cheekbone, and for a moment the noise of the party fell away completely.
"One week," he said, barely a whisper. "That's what we agreed to."
"One week," she echoed, and neither of them sounded convinced.
His phone buzzed hard against the table between them, breaking the moment, and Cameron cursed under his breath as he grabbed it.
She watched the color drain from his face as he read the screen, a message from a number she recognized instantly, because it was the exact same one that had texted her three nights ago.
‘Enjoy the fake romance, Cameron. Won't be so fake when I release what I know about your father — and hers.’
Bab terbaru
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Eight months is long enough to rebuild a life, if you're willing to do the work.Lena learned that standing in the newsroom of the ‘Metro Tribune’ on her first day as a junior sports reporter, business card in hand, her own byline waiting on a story about a local youth hockey program that had nothing to do with scandal or secrets, just kids, just a game, just the kind of clean, hopeful journalism she'd always wanted to write before her own life had turned into a headline."Nervous?" her editor asked, watching her hover by the door."Terrified," Lena admitted. "In a good way.""That's the only kind worth having."She threw herself into the work the way she'd once thrown herself into digging through financial records at 2 a.m., thorough, relentless, refusing to let a story go until she'd told it right. Six months in, a feature she'd written on athletes navigating public scandal got picked up by a national outlet, her name suddenly attac
My Forbidden Hockey Star The Truth Comes Out
"I don't have anything to say to you," Lena said, backing a step, phone already gripped tight in her hand."I think you do." Delgado's smile stayed fixed in place, unnervingly calm for a man who'd just been caught orchestrating a fifteen-year cover-up. "You've been very thorough, Ms. Carter. That wire transfer you found, clever girl. I underestimated you."Her blood went cold. "You know about the wire transfer.""I know about everything you've dug up. I've been watching since the first envelope." He took a step closer, and Lena forced herself to stand her ground, thumb already hovering over her phone's record button. "Here's what happens now. You hand over every copy of that evidence, and I disappear. Quietly. No more threats, no more attacks, no more digging up things better left buried. Or I release a very different set of documents tonight, ones that make it look like your father ‘and’ Richard Hayes conspired togethe
My Forbidden Hockey Star The Championship Night
They didn't call the police. They'd tried that route once already, after the parking lot attack, and the two ski-masked men had vanished without a trace, no leads, no arrests, nothing but a case number and a detective who clearly thought campus drama was a waste of his time.So instead, three days before the championship, Lena went back to the beginning.She sat cross-legged on her dorm room floor at 2 a.m., surrounded by every printout Richard had handed over, every scrap of financial record she and Cameron had pieced together, searching for the one thread that would actually be enough, not just enough to scare Delgado, but enough to bury him.She found it an hour before sunrise.A wire transfer, buried three shell companies deep, moving money from the folded franchise directly into a personal account under Frank Delgado's late wife's maiden name, an account still active, still receiving deposits, the same account that had p
My Forbidden Hockey Star The Scandal
By Monday morning, Cameron Hayes was trending for reasons that had nothing to do with hockey.‘#CamenaScandal’ sat at the top of every sports blog's feed, the parking lot kiss dissected frame by frame, paired now with older photos someone had dug up, the rink, the team dinner, months of moments neither of them had realized were being documented. A tabloid ran the headline ‘HOCKEY'S GOLDEN BOY'S FORBIDDEN STEPSISTER ROMANCE’, and it spread faster than anything Lena had ever seen move online."This is insane," Priya said, scrolling in horror as they sat in the dining hall, Lena's untouched breakfast going cold in front of her. "There's a whole subreddit now. People are debating whether it's illegal. It's not illegal, right? You're not blood related…""It's not illegal," Lena said quietly. "It just feels like it should be, based on how everyone's reacting."Her phone hadn't stopped buzzing since 6 a.m. Reporters. Strangers. A journ
My Forbidden Hockey Star Protecting Her
"Explain that," Cameron said, struggling to sit up in the hospital bed despite Lena's hand on his shoulder trying to keep him still. "You married Diane because of Frank Delgado?"Richard sank into the chair by the window, looking older than Lena had ever seen him, all his usual polish stripped away. "Fifteen years ago, Frank and I ran a franchise together. We cut corners. Fixed some games, laundered money through a couple of coaches' contracts to cover it. Your father…" he looked at Lena, guilt written plain across his face, "your father found out. He was going to report us.""So you framed him instead," Lena said, voice flat."Frank framed him. I let it happen." Richard's hands were shaking. "I told myself it was the only way to protect my son's future, my reputation, everything I'd built. Frank handled the evidence. Your father lost everything, and I let the world believe he deserved it.""And my mother?" Lena's voice cracked.
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‘Insurance. It wasn't love. It was insurance.’Lena read the text four times, then shoved her laptop open and started digging in a way she hadn't let herself do since the first envelope arrived.She started with public records, property filings, old business registrations, anything with Richard Hayes's name attached going back twenty years. Most of it was mundane, dealership paperwork, real estate. But buried in a filing from sixteen years ago, she found something that made her stomach drop.A business partnership. Richard Hayes and a man named Frank Delgado, co-owners of a minor-league hockey franchise that had folded under mysterious financial circumstances the same year her father's career ended.She searched the name Delgado and found almost nothing, no social media, no recent records, like the man had deliberately scrubbed himself from existence. Except one thing. A single old news article, barely indexed, about a league i
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