All Chapters of Vows on Ice: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Linnea’s POVThe 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

Cassian’s POVThe door clicked shut behind her, and the room felt too large.I stood by the long table and looked at the empty chair where Linnea had been sitting. She had left the way she always left, with her chin high and her hands shaking and her back so straight it could have been drawn with a ruler. She had taken the folder. That was something.I didn’t follow her. I never did.My phone lit up on the table. I knew the name before I read it, and I let it ring three times before I answered.“Father.”“I hear you’ve been taking meetings downtown,” Magnus Voss said. His voice was calm and dry and it carried the way a blade carries. “With a Hartwell.”I closed my eyes for half a second. “Who told you?”“Does it matter? Come to the house. Now.”“I’m busy.”“You are never too busy for your family, Cassian.”The line went dead. I stood there with the phone in my hand for a long moment, then picked up my jacket.My father’s study smelled of leather and old cigars. Magnus sat behind the d

Linnea’s POVThree days is not enough time to plan a wedding. It is more than enough time to ruin your life.The news didn’t leak. It exploded. By seven the next morning, every sports blog, newspaper, and gossip channel had the same headline: Hockey Royalty Unites: Hartwell Heiress to Marry Voss Star. Under it, a picture of me at the fundraiser, mid-argument with Cassian, my face contorted in fury. Someone had cropped it so it looked like a quarrel between lovers.Someone had leaked it. Only a few people knew about the contract. I thought of Magnus’s thin, polite smile.My phone buzzed for twenty-four hours without stopping. Reporters camped at our front gate, shouting questions about whether we had sold out. A tabloid ran the headline Gold Digger or Hostage? A sports commentator called me the Hartwell family’s last bargaining chip.But the media wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was my family.Julian found out from a headline, not from me. I walked into the kitchen on the second