Chapter 2 #2
My entire body goes rigid. I’d know that scent anywhere, because I spent the last forty-five minutes wrapped in it while its owner told me things that rearranged my understanding of the universe.
I stare at him. He’s three feet away, looking at his phone, and he has absolutely no idea. No idea that I’m the woman from the elevator. No idea that I’m Sutton Blake. No idea that his jacket still has the warmth of my body in it.
He glances up. Our eyes meet.
Ice blue. The same eyes I saw in that one flicker of light.
Um. Hi?
Something crosses his face. A slight narrowing. The beginning of a thought he can’t finish.
My heart stops. Wait. Maybe he doesn’t recognize me.
And I’m meaning me as in…well, Everly, the coach’s daughter, who—
“E.J.!” Bree’s voice carries across the ballroom like a foghorn. “Line’s not getting shorter!”
His expression shifts. He looks at me. At the tray. At the signing table across the room, where Bree is standing next to a banner that reads “Author of Thriller on Ice—Signing Tonight.”
“Oh—” The color hits his cheeks like someone flipped a switch. He reaches for the Perrier bottle. “You’re that author. I am so sorry. I thought you were—I didn’t realize—”
For one white-hot, cardiac-event-level second when he said You’re that author, I thought he meant Sutton Blake.
Which is crazy, right? Because he means E.J. Hartley. The thriller writer.
Yes, yes, I know. Too many identities. We already talked about this. But he’s looking right at me, and he sees the least real version of who I am.
He doesn’t know I’m Sutton Blake. And he has clearly not recognized Everly Hart—Coach’s daughter, the girl with the pigtails, who he humiliated so many years ago.
However, he’s probably figured out that I’m the girl from the elevator. Because, you know, he graduated from eighth grade.
Stop laughing. That wasn’t funny. He’s not funny!
Especially since I’m standing three feet from Beckett Benson and I am completely, totally invisible.
I take the Perrier bottle off the tray and set it on the buffet table with a precise tap. Icy cool.
“Easy mistake,” I say. And my voice is E.J. Hartley’s voice. Cool, professional, a little wry. “The tray probably didn’t help.”
“Can I—let me at least—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I turn and walk toward the signing table. Steady. Controlled. A woman who has her life together and has definitely not had two identity crises in the last two minutes.
I sit down and smile at the first person in line.
“Hi. Who should I make it out to?”
Under the table, my hand goes to my bracelet.
It’s gone.
My wrist is bare. The silver chain, the tiny book charm—gone. I twist my hand, check the other wrist, feel along my collar, scan the floor. Nothing. The last time I had it—
The elevator. I was gripping it during the conversation. Pressing the charm into my skin. And then the lights came on and I ripped off his jacket and—
“Could you sign it to Jennifer?”
I snap back to attention, smiling up at the woman in line. “Jennifer,” I repeat. My handwriting doesn’t shake. My smile doesn’t crack.
But the romance writer in my chest—the one I keep locked away, the one I never let speak—whispers:
This is how the story starts.
Over my dead body, I tell her. This isn’t a story. This is my life.
But she’s already writing the next chapter.
BECKETT
I once got two penalties in three seconds against Detroit, so the bar for crashing and burning was already impressively low. But somehow, mistaking bestselling author E.J. Hartley for a server still manages to clear it.
And what’s worse? Watching her walk away as though I don’t even exist. I’m going to be replaying this moment probably for the rest of my life. I’ll die, and I’ll still be thinking about the icy click of her setting that Perrier bottle down on the buffet table. Don’t worry about it.
Yeah. I’m gonna worry about it.
I lean against the bar, watching the line curl through the crowd for her signature.
She scrawls a message inside another book, hands it off with a killer smile.
In my defense, the author photo on the back of the book I picked up earlier showed a woman with pin-straight dark hair, bold red lipstick, and a leather jacket.
It’s stark and edgy and, between you and me, the woman at the signing table looks nothing like that photo.
Her hair is short—a dark, choppy bob that frames her jaw.
Without the heavy makeup, her face is completely different.
Softer. She’s put on glasses for the signing—wire-framed, slightly crooked.
They keep sliding down her nose, and she keeps pushing them back up with one finger, and I cannot stop watching it happen.
She’s familiar. Something about the head tilt when she’s listening. The curve of her smile. The slight frown of concentration as she scribbles her name across another page. I know that frown.
She looks up. Our eyes meet across forty feet of ballroom, and now I’m sure I’ve seen her before.
She looks away first.
A hand claps my shoulder hard enough to rearrange my vertebrae.
“Beckett! Have you picked up a book yet?”
Coach Hart. He follows my gaze to the signing table, and his whole face transforms. “She’s fantastic, isn’t she? Crime thrillers. Smart stuff. I keep telling her she should write something with more hockey in it, but—”
“You know her?”
Coach looks at me like I’ve been hit in the head with a frozen fish. “My daughter. Everly.”
The room tilts.
The smile. The jaw. The head tilt. That unforgettable frown.
Oh no. The last time I saw Everly Hart, she was a round-faced thirteen-year-old, sobbing at Sutton Arena, and I was the monster who put her there.
“That’s…E.J. Hartley is your—”
“Everly Jean Hartley. E.J.” He’s already moving. “Come on, I’ll reintroduce you properly.”
I would rather wrestle a bear. But Coach’s hand is on my back with the pressure of a man who has been steering reluctant athletes for two decades, and resistance is not an option.
Everly looks up from signing a book. Her smile for her father is warm, genuine, the kind that makes her nose scrunch. Her gaze slides to me, and the temperature drops so fast I half expect to see my breath fogging the air.
“Evie, you remember Beckett Benson.”
“We’ve met.” Two words. Arctic.
“You look”—don’t say different, don’t mention the hair, don’t reference the tray—“great. The books are—congratulations.”
Spectacular, Benson. Give that man a Pulitzer for conversation.
Coach radiates with the blissful ignorance of a man who has never read a room in his life, then he drops a kiss on Everly’s head that makes her eyes close for half a second, and something behind my ribs aches. He retreats into the crowd.
“I didn’t know,” I say. “At the buffet. I genuinely did not—”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve said that.”
“I’m going to keep saying it because repetition is all I’ve got.”
Something crosses her face. Not a smile. But a ceasefire. “Buy a book. We’re even.”
I buy two. She signs neither.
The ballroom is emptying. Outside the windows, Minneapolis has disappeared under a white curtain so thick the streetlights look like dying stars. I’m retrieving my coat when Coach materializes with a look that says he’s about to ruin what’s left of my evening.
“Hey, Beckett. I need a favor.”
“Name it.” The words slip out before I have the chance to think better of them.
“Everly caught an Uber here. The snow’s getting pretty bad, and I’d give her a ride home, but I caught a ride here with Coach Jace, and he lives the opposite direction.
I don’t want her riding with some stranger if she gets stuck in a snowdrift…
” He doesn’t ask, but the question lingers there, hanging expectantly in the air.
“Coach. Trust me, she does not want me to drive her.”
“She doesn’t have to want it. She has to get home alive.” He gives me the Look. “You owe me, Benson.”
It’s a low blow. Accurate, but low.
“Yeah, all right. I’ll get her home.”
He slaps my shoulder. “Good man.”
I find her at the signing table, wrestling a box that has abandoned its structural ambitions. The cardboard bottom is sagging, books dipping toward the center. She’s holding her phone with her free hand, the Uber app glowing with that smug No rides in your area message.
“Let me get that.” I reach for the box just as her gaze snaps up.
She swerves. “I’ve got it.”
“You demonstrably do not.”
“I have a degree in English literature. I understand the physics of a box.”
“Those two things are not in any way related, so…”
I reach again for the box. She adjusts her grip. My hand lands on hers. Her fingers are freezing, mine are too warm, and the contact jolts through me like grabbing an electric fence—and then the bottom surrenders.
Books spill everywhere. Thriller on Ice copies shoot across the ballroom floor like someone dumped a bucket of pucks at center ice.
Nice one, Beckett.
Her eyes snap to mine. Daggers. Scratch that—ice daggers. “I’ve got it.”
She drops to the floor at the same time I do, and we barely avoid cracking heads.
“Just let me help—”
“I’m good.”
“I think your books would beg to differ—”
“If you would just let me—”
“The box is in three pieces. Three.”
Abruptly, she sits back on her heels, arms full of novels, and blows a strand of dark hair off her forehead. And then—against what appears to be every cell in her body’s wishes—she sighs.
“You okay?”
She shakes her head. “This night needs to be over.”
First thing we agree on.
If you think it was difficult getting her to let me carry that box, it’s nothing compared to convincing her to let me drive her home. I throw in a “Coach said, and you’d be doing me a solid to get on his good side.”
And still, “I’ll walk.”
“It’s six degrees out—and a blizzard bearing down.”
She shrugs. “Heat wave.”
“Negative fifteen windchill.”
Side eye. Contemplation. Desperate glances at the Uber app. And finally, “Fine.”