THE SCANDAL AND THE SCAPEGOAT #2
"They can, and they will," Coach Baxter warned, stopping his pacing to look Julian dead in the eye. "Unless we fix your image. Immediately. You need to look settled. Mature. Grounded. You need the world to see you as a family man in training, not a bar-brawling liability."
"And how exactly do you propose I do that?" Julian asked bitterly. "Adopt a golden retriever and start wearing sweater vests?"
"No," Sarah said, pulling a sleek tablet from her briefcase. "You are going to get a girlfriend. A very specific, very famous, very respectable girlfriend. A high-profile relationship with a woman who needs a shield, while you need an anchor. It’s mutually beneficial."
Julian let out a harsh, barking laugh, leaning back in his chair and crossing his massive arms over his chest. "You want me to fake date someone? Jesus, Sarah. I’m a hockey player, not an actor. I can't fake my way through a relationship. Who the hell would even agree to that kind of circus?"
Sarah tapped the screen of her tablet and slid it across the desk toward Julian. "Her."
Julian didn’t want to look. He wanted to storm out, hit the showers, and spend the next three hours punishing himself on the ice until his lungs burned. But out of sheer, morbid curiosity, he dropped his gaze to the glowing screen.
The breath was violently punched from his lungs.
The world around him—the hum of the arena’s ventilation, Coach Baxter’s heavy breathing, the smell of stale coffee—vanished into absolute nothingness.
Staring up at him from the screen was a photograph of a woman performing on stage.
She was bathed in a haze of violet and blue stage lights.
Her dark hair was wildly tossed over one shoulder, her eyes closed in a moment of pure, raw musical ecstasy as her lips brushed a silver microphone.
She looked like a bruised angel. She looked like a riot.
Elara Vance.
Julian’s heart slammed against his ribs with the force of a freight train. His massive hands, which seconds ago had been perfectly steady, suddenly twitched. He felt a sudden, intense rush of heat flood his veins, pooling heavy and dark in his stomach.
Elara.
The PR team didn't know. Nobody on God’s green earth knew.
They didn't know that for the past two years, Julian Thorne had harbored a deep, simmering, entirely consuming obsession with the woman on the screen.
It had started at a charity gala in New York.
He had been forced to attend, standing awkwardly in a corner, suffocating in a tuxedo.
She had walked in, looking bored, beautiful, and completely out of place in a room full of plastic smiles.
They hadn't even spoken. Not really. A waiter had bumped into her, spilling champagne down her dress. Julian, moving on pure instinct, had stepped forward, handed her his pristine silk handkerchief, and blocked the view of a smarmy photographer trying to snap a picture of her soaked bodice.
She had looked up at him. Those whiskey-colored eyes, wide and guarded, locking onto his gray ones. She whispered a soft, husky, "Thank you."
In that three-second interaction, Julian’s soul had fundamentally rewired itself. He had spent his entire life dominating on the ice, taking brutal hits, and keeping his emotions locked in a steel vault. But one look from Elara Vance, and the vault had been blown wide open.
He had spent the next two years quietly, desperately following her career from afar.
He owned every record she ever pressed on vinyl.
He had anonymously donated to every charity she championed.
He had watched, with a violently jealous rage burning a hole in his chest, as she dated, loved, and was ultimately destroyed by that pathetic excuse for a man, Declan Hayes.
Julian had spent the last month watching the media tear her apart, his hands tied, pacing his apartment like a caged predator, wanting nothing more than to fly to Los Angeles and put Declan through a wall.
And now, Sarah was sitting across from him, offering him the very woman he had dreamed of, fantasized about, and quietly worshipped in the dark for two years. Offering her to him on a silver platter.
A fake relationship.
A primal, deeply possessive thrill coiled tightly in Julian’s gut. The thought of touching her. Of standing beside her. Of wrapping his arm around her waist and daring anyone in the world to try and hurt her again.
He forced his face to remain a mask of pure, disinterested stone. If he showed even a fraction of the feral hunger currently tearing through his bloodstream, Sarah would pull the plug immediately. He had to play this perfectly.
"Elara Vance," Julian said slowly, keeping his voice carefully neutral, though the syllables of her name tasted like honey and sin on his tongue. "The singer. Didn't she just have a massive public breakup?"
"Exactly," Sarah said, entirely oblivious to the thermonuclear bomb detonating inside her captain’s chest.
"Her reputation is in tatters. She looks unstable. Her team reached out to me this morning. They need a grounding force for her. A man who looks like a protector, someone solid and reliable to change the narrative that she's broken. You provide her with a safe harbor,
and she provides you with the ultimate character reference. If America’s sweetheart trusts you, the sponsors will trust you."
Coach Baxter crossed his arms. "It’s a six-month contract, Thorne. Strictly business. Public dates, calculated social media posts, red carpet appearances. No messy entanglements. No sleeping together. No drama. Can you handle that, or are you going to blow this, too?"
No sleeping together. No messy entanglements.
Julian looked down at the tablet again. He imagined the scent of her skin.
He imagined the weight of her beneath him.
He imagined tearing down the walls she had built around her shattered heart, piece by piece, until she looked at him the way she had looked at that microphone—with pure, unadulterated passion.
He wasn't going to fake anything. He was going to take these six months, and he was going to make Elara Vance his. Completely, utterly, and irrevocably his.
Julian slowly lifted his head, meeting Coach Baxter’s gaze with a cold, terrifying calm that made the older man take a half-step back.
"Draw up the contract," Julian murmured, his deep voice carrying a dark, thrilling promise that only he understood. "I'll do it."