Vows on Ice

Linnea’s POV

The lights in the hotel ballroom were too bright. They made the chandeliers sparkle and the champagne glow, and they made me feel like a girl who had wandered into the wrong party in a dress she had already worn twice.

All around me, rich people in tailored suits and glittering gowns laughed over their glasses and talked about hockey. I smoothed down the front of my blue dress. My palms were damp. I hated this room. I hated asking people for money. But the Hartwell Hockey Foundation was everything my family had ever built, and right now it was dying.

For three generations, we had given kids who couldn’t afford ice time a place to skate. We paid for coaches, for gear, for scholarships. Now we were four months behind on the rink’s loan, our sponsors were disappearing one by one, and nobody in this ballroom wanted to be the person left holding the bill.

Nobody except me.

I spotted Mr. Whitlock near the bar, the one investor who had said maybe instead of no. I put on my best smile and started toward him. I was ten steps away when I heard him talking to the man beside him.

“Hartwell? Leonard Brandt says that foundation is finished,” Mr. Whitlock said, not bothering to lower his voice. “I’m not throwing money into a sinking ship.”

Then he saw me. He turned his back so smoothly it almost looked polite.

I stood there with my smile glued to my face. The worst part was that I couldn’t even be angry. If I had been Mr. Whitlock, I might have said the same thing.

That was when the room changed.

It wasn’t loud. The band kept playing. But conversations dipped, heads turned, and a ripple moved through the crowd the way it does when someone important walks in. I knew who it was before I looked. There was only one man in the city who could do that.

Cassian Voss had arrived.

He was twenty-eight now, tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair that fell a little over his forehead. His black suit fit like it had been stitched onto him. People clapped. Women smiled. Men patted his back. He was the captain and star of the Voss organization, the best hockey player in the country.

And he was the reason my family’s life had fallen apart.

Ten years ago, my older brother, Julian, was the best young player anyone had seen. Everyone said he would be a legend. Then came that game, that crash on the ice. Julian’s knee was shattered and his career was over. Everyone said it was an accident. But I had seen the replay a hundred times. Cassian Voss was the one who checked him. And right after Julian was gone, Cassian took his place and became the hero.

While Cassian got the fame and the cheering crowds, Julian sat at home staring at his old skates like they were broken glass.

What made it worse was how nice Cassian was to everyone. I watched him stop to shake an old man’s hand. I watched him ask a waiter about his daughter by name. He made a cluster of strangers laugh, then bent his head to hear a woman in a wheelchair, listening as though nothing else in the room mattered. He had a gift for making people feel chosen.

I had spent ten years not believing a word of it.

My chest tightened. I wanted to slip out the back door. But before I could move, his dark eyes cut across the room and landed on me. And he started walking straight toward me.

I planted my feet and crossed my arms, trying to look like stone.

“Linnea.” His voice was low, warm, and calm. It drove me crazy. “You look tired.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“That wasn’t an insult.” He glanced at the room, then back at me. “When did you last eat?”

I stared at him. “Are you serious?”

He didn’t answer. He lifted two fingers, and a waiter appeared as if by magic. Cassian took a small plate of appetizers and held it out to me. “Eat something. Then you can go back to hating me.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

He didn’t argue or look hurt. He just set the plate on a nearby table, exactly where I could reach it, and let it sit there. That made me angrier than if he had insisted.

“What are you even doing here?” I demanded, my voice shaking just a little. “Did you come to laugh at us? Did you come to watch the foundation burn down just like you watched my brother’s career burn?”

“I didn’t come to laugh.”

“Then why?”

For a moment he said nothing. His eyes moved over my face as if he were reading something written there. “I heard you’d be here,” he said at last. “That’s all.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I have tonight.”

I stepped closer, close enough to catch his clean, spicy cologne and hate that I noticed it. “You stole Julian’s life,” I said through my teeth. “You stood on that ice, and you took everything from him, and you’ve been smiling ever since.”

Something flickered across his face. I almost missed it. His smile disappeared, and his jaw tightened, and for a second he looked like a man standing very still so that nothing inside him would break.

“I won’t argue with you about that night,” he said quietly. “Not here.”

“Because you can’t.”

“Because this isn’t the place.”

“I hate you,” I said. My voice came out hard as ice. “I have hated you for ten years.”

“I know,” Cassian said. He said it gently, like a man reading a fact off a page. “I’ve gotten used to it.”

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed in my clutch. I almost ignored it. But it buzzed again, and again, so I pulled it out with a shaking hand.

It was a message from Naomi, our office manager.

Emergency, Linnea. I’m so sorry. Northline Industries just called. They’re pulling their sponsorship, effective immediately. They wouldn’t say why.

I read it twice. Northline was our biggest sponsor. They paid the coaches and bought the gear and kept the lights on at the rink. Without them, we had maybe five weeks. The ballroom tilted around me.

I looked up from the screen, wide-eyed and sick, and my eyes met Cassian’s.

He was watching me.

And he didn’t look shocked.

He didn’t look pleased either. He looked like a man hearing the end of a sentence he had already guessed. There was no surprise in his face at all.

“You knew,” I whispered.

“Linnea—”

“You knew about this.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” I shoved the phone into my bag and stepped back so fast that I nearly knocked over the plate he had left for me. “Stay away from me. Stay away from my family.”

I walked out of the ballroom with my head high and my eyes burning. The cold night air slapped my face as I stepped outside, and I took one hard, shaky breath.

Whatever Cassian Voss wanted from me, I told myself, I would find out before he got it.