Fake Engaged to My Hockey Rival

[POV: Lanaya Roux]

The arena smelled like blood, crushed ice, and Zamboni exhaust.

It smelled like losing.

Lanaya Roux pushed her burning lungs past the point of reason, her skates carving parallel gashes into the fresh sheet. Five minutes on the clock. Down by one.

The scoreboard glared a neon threat: Thornhill 2, Redstone 3.

Her fault. She'd missed a wide-open shot in the second period, and the missed opportunity had been gnawing at her ribs ever since.

"Roux! Left side!" Rip's voice cut through the deafening roar of eight thousand screaming fans.

She pivoted hard. The puck hit her stick blade with a sharp, satisfying snap. For a fraction of a second, victory tasted metallic and real at the back of her throat.

Then the shadow dropped over her.

Maverick Hayden.

Six-foot-four of pure suffocating pressure dressed in black and crimson. He came into her peripheral vision and she heard the exact moment his skates slowed — that particular drag and reset of a body that had been moving at full speed and then simply stopped. She almost didn't look up. When she did, he was already watching her. His grip on his stick had gone loose. Not relaxed. Loose, the way a fist goes loose when something surprises the muscles into forgetting themselves.

It lasted less than a second. Long enough for something old and nameless to surface in his face, something that had no business being on a hockey rink, something that looked almost like recognition before it curdled into something harder. Then his grey-blue eyes locked on hers and the coldness slid back into place. Hard. Deliberate. Like something he had to do, not something he was.

"Huntress." His voice was a low, rough rasp that scraped directly down her spine.

"Move, Hayden."

"Make me."

"Gladly." Lanaya feinted right, then dropped her shoulder left.

He didn't bite. His stick flashed out, hooking her ankle in a blatantly illegal move.

She went down hard. Her shoulder slammed into the boards, the impact rattling her teeth, sending a sharp familiar spike of pain through her collarbone.

She waited for the whistle. It didn't come.

She scrambled up, blood thundering in her ears. Maverick was already skating away, his broad back turned to her.

"Coward," she hissed.

Twenty seconds left. Rip won the face-off. The puck found her stick again. She didn't think. She just drove.

Maverick swerved to cut her off. This time she didn't try to go around him. She dropped her shoulder and plowed straight into his chest, used the momentum to fire the shot.

Top shelf.

The goal lamp flared red. The horn blared so loud the ice vibrated beneath her blades.

3-3.

Her teammates swarmed her, shouting, but Lanaya shoved through the mass of blue and silver jerseys and skated straight to center ice, stopping inches from Maverick's chest.

"Still bitter, Reaper?" she sneered over the crowd chanting her name.

A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Lucky shot."

"Luck had nothing to do with