I Seduced His Rival: Now the Hockey Star Wants Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Furniture
At the hockey house party, the captain Finola has loved for three years calls her furniture and hands her his empty cup, so she walks across town and asks his worst enemy to be her boyfriend.
"Finola? Finola's furniture," Chase Prentiss said. "She comes with the house."
The whole kitchen laughed.
I was standing four feet from him with a speech in my mouth I'd practiced for three years.
Chase had one arm around Brynn Coakley and a red cup in his other hand.
He was still flushed from the game. Bayhill had beaten St. Brendan's three to two, and he'd scored twice.
His teammate had only said, "Yo, Prentiss, your girlfriend's here."
He meant me.
Everybody knew he meant me.
Brynn tipped her head back against Chase's shoulder and looked me up and down.
"Oh my God, babe. Is that the tutor?"
"That's the tutor." Chase grinned. "Two years. Never missed a Sunday. Right, Finola?"
"Right," I said.
My voice came out fine. I was proud of that later.
He drained his cup and held it out to me without looking.
"Grab me another, would you? Keg's on the porch."
I looked at the cup.
Then I looked at his face.
I'd memorized that face from the far end of rink two at six in the morning since I was eighteen.
The golden hair. The blue eyes. The little bump on the bridge of his nose he said was from a puck.
He wasn't even looking at me.
He was looking at Brynn's phone, where she was filming the kitchen.
"She's literally the help," Brynn said to her phone. "It's so cute."
Somebody behind me snorted.
I took the cup.
There was an inch of warm beer left in the bottom.
I turned it over and poured it out on the floor between his white sneakers.
The laughing stopped.
"Get your own," I said.
Then I set the empty cup on the counter, very gently, and walked out the back door.
Nobody followed me.
That told me everything the speech would have.
It was a two-mile walk from the hockey house to Brighton.
I didn't decide to make it.
My feet decided around Packard's Corner.
By the time I was climbing Chestnut Hill Ave, I knew exactly where I was going.
Every hockey fan in Boston knew where St. Brendan's drank after a game.
A basement bar with green neon over the stairs and a jukebox nobody had fixed since the nineties.
Tonight they'd lost.
They'd lost to Chase.
I still had my Bayhill scarf on, red and white, wrapped twice around my neck.
I didn't take it off.
The stairs smelled like old beer and fryer oil.
The room was full of big, sore, angry men in green St. Brendan's jackets.
The jukebox stopped between songs right as I walked in.
Thirty heads turned.
"You lost?" somebody said.
"No," I said.
He was at the end of the bar with a bag of ice on his knuckles.
Luc Thibodeau.
Their captain. Number seven.
Freshman year he'd sucker-punched Chase in the Bayhill locker room, broken his nose and gotten thrown off the team.
That was the story everyone told.
Chase never said his name. He called him "that animal from Maine."
Up close he was bigger than he looked on the ice.
Dark hair curling at the back of his neck. A scar cutting through one eyebrow. A nose that had clearly been broken more than once.
He watched me cross the whole room and didn't move.
I stopped in front of him.
"I'm Finola Keogh," I said. "I'm a figure skater at Bayhill."
"I know who you are."
That threw me for half a second.
"Then you know I tutor Chase Prentiss."
"I know that too."
His teammates were crowding in to listen. One of them was already filming.
Good.
"Tonight he told his whole team I'm furniture," I said. "So I need a boyfriend until the end of the season. And I need it to be you."
A big guy at the next stool choked on his beer.
Luc didn't laugh.
He set the bag of ice down on the bar.
"You want to make him jealous."
"I want him to choke on it."
"Why me?"
"Because he hates you more than anyone alive."
He looked at me for a long time.
Long enough that I felt the heat come up my neck under the scarf.
Long enough that I almost turned around.
"You came here alone?" he said.
"I walked."
"From Comm Ave."
"Yes."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"One condition."
"Fine. What?"
He stood up off the stool, and I had to tip my head back.
"No faking it halfway," Luc said. "You hold my hand, you mean it for that second. You kiss me, you kiss me. I don't do pretend."
"That's the opposite of faking."
"That's my condition."
The bar had gone completely silent.
I thought about the cup in my hand and the warm inch of beer.
"Deal," I said.
He reached up and unwound my Bayhill scarf, slowly, one loop and then the other.
He dropped it on the bar.
Then he put his hand on the side of my jaw, rough and warm and still cold from the ice, and kissed me.
It wasn't a stage kiss.
It was slow and sure, and my hands ended up fisted in his jacket without my permission.
Somebody whistled. Somebody yelled, "Captain!"
Every phone in the room was up.
When he pulled back, I couldn't remember the speech I'd practiced for three years.
I couldn't remember a word of it.
"Now he'll know," Luc said quietly.
He walked me home.
He didn't try to come up.
At seven the next morning my phone woke me.
It was Chase.
In two years, every text he'd ever sent me had asked for something. Notes. A formula. A ride.
This one didn't.
"Stay away from Thibodeau. Ask him what he did to my face."
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