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Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Hockey Temptation : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

52 Kabanata

Front Page

Just the entrance and very of the restaurant was very classy and aesthetically appealing.Everything looked intentional.I turned to him as he came around the car again. “This is not what we said,” I told him immediately.He raised a brow. “What did we say?”“Drinks,” I replied. “Something simple.”He smiled like I had told a joke. “Yes,” he said easily. “I decided to upgrade it a bit.”I stared at him. “Why?”He shrugged. “Because why not?”I shook my head slightly, but I was smiling now despite myself. “That’s your reason for everything?”“It works,” he said.He opened the door for me again.This time I didn’t hesitate.Inside, the restaurant was warm, dimly lit. We were guided to a table near the side. I sat down and immediately picked up the menu.The prices made me froze. It was freaking expensive.It seemed like he noticed because he stretched his hands towards mine.“Don’t worry about it,” he said before I could even speak.I looked up at him. “That’s not the point.”He leaned

Earned, Not Given

Aria POVTwo of the junior reporters were pretending to read something on Maya's screen, but their shoulders were angled toward us. They were listening. Of course they were. Vanessa's desk confrontations were basically office theater at this point.Vanessa noticed them too. I could tell because her posture shifted slightly, straighter, more performative.She lowered her voice, but not enough that someone nearby couldn't hear. "I'm just saying, Bennett. Don't get comfortable. Stories like this have a way of swallowing people who aren't ready for them.""Good thing I'm ready, then.""You think you are.""I know I am."She laughed, through it didn't match the tightness around her eyes. "You're so confident for someone whose last three pieces were basically rewritten press releases."That stung.Not because it was true, it wasn't. My last three pieces had included an investigative look at city council budget discrepancies and a feature on homeless veterans that Daniel had personally call

Deal

I watched her go.Around me, the newsroom slowly returned to life. A copy editor yelled something across the room about a missing fact-check.I exhaled.My hand was shaking slightly. I hadn't noticed until now the adrenaline, the effort of staying calm while someone tried to pick a fight in front of half the staff.But I had held my ground.I had said what needed to be said, and I hadn't said it cruelly. Honestly, maybe even kindly.I looked down at my notes again.Mason's face flashed through my mind. The way he looked at me in that hallway. The way he said "You came here, didn't you? Why am I the one at fault?"Right. That was my actual problem. Not Vanessa. Not the office politics. The problem was Mason Rossi, who had walked back into my life like a storm I hadn't finished recovering from.I picked up my pen again.But before I could return to my transcripts, a shadow fell across my desk.I looked up.Daniel.He was holding a cup of coffee, his third of the morning, probably and

The Story Beneath The Story

Vanessa stepped closer to his desk, close enough that he could see her face clearly, read the expression she was deliberately arranging."You want front-page stories," she whispered. "That's what you keep telling everyone in morning meetings. You want stories that people actually read. Stories that get shared. Stories that make this paper look relevant."Daniel nodded slowly. "Go on.""I can give you that.""You already give me that. You're a good writer, Vanessa. Nobody's disputing that.""But I'm not a front-page writer." She held his gaze. "Not in your eyes. Not in the eyes of anyone who matters around here."Daniel didn't deny it.That stung more than she expected it to."So here's my proposal," she continued, forcing her voice to stay steady. "You keep Aria on Rossi. Fine. She can have her hockey player and her quotes about pressure and her emotional deep-dives into team dynamics."She paused. "But I'm going to find a better story."Daniel's eyebrow arched again. "A better story

The Article

The search results were... underwhelming.Yes, I knew his family well enough, why wouldn’t I? But it wasn’t on a deeper level, we were in a situationship I guess, more like friends with benefits.We didn’t want to put a name to it then, so I had barely any deep knowledge about his family.Mason's father, Vincent Rossi, was listed as the CEO of Rossi Industries, a conglomerate with interests in real estate, logistics, and apparently a handful of manufacturing plants I'd never heard of. His mother, Katherine, was mentioned in a few society page articles from the early 2000s. Charity galas. Museum openings. The usual wealthy-people-in-evening-gowns photos.Nothing about the family dynamic. Nothing about feuds or fractures.I tried different searches.Rossi family feudVincent Rossi controversyRossi family estrangementMason Rossi family problems.But nothing popped up.Well, not nothing. There were the usual tabloid scraps, speculation about Mason's relationship with his father, rumor

Missing Piece

My phone buzzed on the desk, jolting me out of my thoughts.I glanced at the screen.Ethan.I stared at his name for a moment, then let the call go to voicemail.I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet. Iwent back to my research.Sarah Mikowski. Former VP of Operations at Rossi Industries. Left the company in 2019. No current employment listed. Last known location: Chicago.David Chen. Former Senior Financial Analyst. Left in 2020. Now working at a mid-sized accounting firm in New Jersey. Probably a dead end—people who found new jobs quickly usually didn't have dirt to spill.Linda Hartwell. Former Executive Assistant to Vincent Rossi. Left in 2018. No current employment listed. No social media presence that I could find. That was interesting. Most executive assistants had at least a LinkedIn profile, even if they weren't actively job hunting.I added notes next to each name.Mikowski: priority. No current job. Possible non-compete? Possible burnout? Possible exit with settlement?Chen:

Fired

Adrian closed the report.He left his office, and walked down the hall. Past the empty corner office, past the reception desk, even past the elevator banks, toward the bullpen where the lower-level employees worked.He didn't have a reason to go there. His job didn't require it. But he went anyway.The bullpen was open-plan, rows of desks, cheap chairs, fluorescent lights that hummed overhead. The people who worked here were young, ambitious and desperate to prove themselves.They looked up when he walked in.Adrian ignored them.His eyes landed on a desk near the window, messy, covered in sticky notes and empty coffee cups. A young man sat there, typing furiously, his back to the room.Adrian walked over. "You," he called out.The young man's fingers froze on the keyboard. He turned slowly, blinking up at Adrian like a deer caught in headlights."Mr. Rossi," he said. "I didn't, I didn't know you were coming down today.""Clearly."The young man's name was Peter. Adrian remembered bec

Spilled Coffee

Third Person POVThe afternoon air was a bit crisp.Brielle walked fast, she was already very late as it was. It was mid afternoon and she had still not opened her bar.Her heels clicked against the pavement in a rhythm that matched her mood rushed, she was already irritated with the day before it had properly begun. Her keys were somewhere at the bottom of her bag, buried beneath receipts, a half-empty tube of lipstick, and God only knew what else.She shoved her hand deeper into the chaos, fingers brushing against loose change, a broken pen, the edge of her phone.“Where the hell are you?” She searched for the keys.Her mind wasn't on the street. It was on the delivery that hadn't shown up yesterday. On the staff member who'd called in sick for the third time this month. She was so focused on the mess inside her bag that she didn't see tge stranger coming, until,Thud.Her bag flew out of her hand, the contents scattering across the sidewalk. Her shoulder collided with something s

Behind Closed Door

…In another part of the city,The modeling agency hummed with its usual controlled chaos.Isabella sat in the center of it all, her reflection staring back at her from the massive, brightly lit mirror that stretched across the entire wall. Makeup brushes danced across her face, foundation, concealer, contour, the endless layering of products that transformed her from a person into a canvas.Another stylist worked on her hair, sectioning, curling, pinning, creating the effortless waves that would take hours to perfect and minutes to unravel on set.Isabella barely noticed any of it.Her phone was in her hand, her thumb scrolling lazily through her feed. She'd been doing this for years.Her thumb paused over a post from someone she used to know, a girl from her childhood, now married with two kids, posting about a family vacation somewhere warm and sunny. Isabella stared at the image for a moment. The smiling faces, the easy happiness, the life that looked so simple from the outside

A Shoulder To Cry On

Third Person POVThe shoot had been brutal.Seven hours of posing, changing, re-posing, smiling until her cheeks ached, holding positions that made her muscles scream in protest. By the time they finally wrapped, she was running on fumes and stubbornness.She didn't go home.She went to Mason's apartment.She didn't even think about it. Her feet just carried her there, like they knew where she needed to be even when her brain couldn't articulate it.When she was close by, she tried calling Mason but it didn’t go through.Finally…The elevator ride up was interminable. She checked her phone, no messages from Adrian. Nothing from Mason, either, but she hadn't expected anything. He was terrible at checking his phone.The hallway was quiet when she stepped out. She reached his door and knocked but she didn’t get a response.She knocked again, harder this time. "Mason? It's me, Isabella"Still nothing.A flicker of irritation sparked in her chest. It seemed like he wasn’t around or he wa

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