Page 4

Just Crazy Enough

Mia

It took a full two minutes for me to stop laughing.

I was so certain this was a joke, a way for Isabella to lighten the mood before she smacked me on the ass and said, “ There she is. Now, come on — we have an album to release. ”

But when I finally wiped the tears from my eyes, my stomach tight from all the contractions — she was just staring at me, waiting.

The pink-haired, Mexican vixen was dead-ass serious.

“Bells,” I said, shaking my head. “That is… insane.”

“Is it?”

She took her phone from me, reading the headline about how Aleks had found himself in trouble yet again after getting into a fight at Boomer’s in Tampa. Then, she looked at me like I should have somehow gathered the missing pieces of the puzzle from her words alone.

When I just blinked at her, she huffed, letting her hands fall against her thighs with a slap.

“Aleks is a bad boy, Mia. Austin is the golden child of Hollywood. Don’t you see? This would be a complete one-eighty. It would give you an edge.”

Something about that sparked curiosity in me, and I leaned forward. “I’m listening.”

Isabella squealed, clapping her hands together before holding them toward me in excitement. “Okay. Let me paint the picture. You and Aleks are longtime friends. You’ve already been seen together over the years — you at his games, him at your concerts, the two of you home with your family from time to time. It’s never been a thing… but what if we started making it a thing?

“There have been breadcrumbs — especially this year. I could feed them to the right rumor-starter and get the Internet buzzing. As your fans love to do, they’d start overanalyzing everything . When we went to his game in New York and he scored a hat trick and didn’t get into a single scuffle on the ice… was it because he was showing off for you, because he wants to be better for you ?

“And when he came to that charity benefit concert we did last month, was it just because it happened to be in the same city as the NHL Awards, or was it because he was desperate to see you after winning the Stanley Cup, that he couldn’t wait to celebrate with his girlfriend?”

She widened her eyes, mouth open in a giant smile as she nodded along with her story and waited for me to come down the path with her.

“Okay… I can see the story,” I said. “There are enough instances over enough of a span of time that we could convince the public that we’ve been dating on the low for longer than anyone realized.”

“Exactly.”

“Dating a professional athlete — especially one with such a rough reputation — gives me an edge.”

“Bingo.”

“And to show he’s changing for me, that he wants to be better… it takes the narrative away from me being a crazy ex-girlfriend to being a woman worth changing for.”

“Ding, ding, ding!” Isabella waved her finger in the air.

But I just laughed, shaking my head. “He’s never going to go for this. I mean, even convincing him to play along with us dating would be a feat. But to say we’re engaged ? It’s too much.”

“I disagree. Look,” she said, pointing to the article on her phone again. “He’s in boiling water with the Ospreys right now. I happen to have an inside source that says he’s walking into a very serious meeting today about his future with the team — and how it could be cut short if he doesn’t get his shit together.”

That made my stomach turn. I knew Aleks in a way perhaps no one else did, which meant I knew his little spurts of acting out came from boredom and numbing himself more than anything else. Everyone else saw him as a brute, stern-browed and severe.

I still saw him as the self-conscious boy my family took in when I was in high school.

There had always been a big part of him that believed he didn’t deserve anything good in life. When he tried hard, he pretended like he didn’t, like everything was easy to him. When he accomplished something, he acted like he didn’t care, like he didn’t need anyone’s approval and it all just happened by accident.

But I knew better.

Hockey was everything to him. It would kill him to lose it.

The issue was that, if he was in one of his low spells, he might not have the energy to even try to save it.

“Besides, just dating him would only add fuel to the ‘she’s on to another boy toy’ fire. But if you were engaged ? That’s serious.”

“And when we don’t get married?”

Isabella deflated a bit, like she hadn’t thought that part out. I was ready to say see and call the whole thing off when she tilted her head and popped that pointer finger up again.

“Easy,” she said. “We hold the control. We’ll… make a big scene, something with him relapsing into his bad boy behavior. We’ll show that you aren’t afraid to stand up for yourself, even when you’re hopelessly in love. That at the end of the day, you have self-respect. You don’t take any shit. You’re strong enough to walk away from a toxic situation.” The more she spoke, the more excited she became. “Honestly, this could lead into even bigger sales for the next album. Think of how many girls have called off an engagement or gone through a divorce? You could write their future anthems!”

“Wouldn’t that play out poorly for Aleks?”

“Of course not,” she said, waving me off. “We’ll make the big breakup something small in the eyes of the NHL. Nothing against team rules, nothing that will call for any game time suspension or anything. Maybe he’ll be seen with a gaggle of puck bunnies, make out with one of them or something.”

She waved me off again, but my stomach soured at the thought. Not that I hadn’t seen Aleks tangled up with plenty of women in the tabloids throughout the years, but that didn’t mean I was ever pleased about it.

He had a very specific type.

The women who garnered his attention were smokey-eyed and dolled up. They wore tight dresses and floss for swimsuits. They confidently claimed him in public, straddling his lap at restaurants or making out with him unabashedly in pool cabanas with their whole ass hanging out.

And those observations were not made with my lip curling or any kind of judgment. They were made with awe, with longing, with respect.

Because those women were hot. They were sexy. They were bad .

They knew what they wanted and how to get it. They lived loudly . And they didn’t give two shits what anyone had to say about them.

That was what Aleks found attractive about them.

I knew because he’d urged me so many times in high school to stop caring about what people thought of me, to stop trying to fit into some sort of box that could be easily sold.

Sometimes I wondered if I had listened to him, if maybe he wouldn’t have rejected me.

If maybe the night I asked him to kiss me, he would have.

Instead, he looked at me with pity like I was a sweet little girl not aware of what she was asking for, like I didn’t understand the world and he was somehow sheltering me from it — from him.

The memory made a soft smile touch my lips, even as the pain of it stung my heart like a rusty butter knife carving into it. “I don’t think he’ll go for this,” I whispered, and this time my doubt wasn’t born from how crazy this all sounded, but more from the fact that I truly was not his type.

“He will. We will make it mutually beneficial, give him something to solidify his place with the team despite what his past record has shown. Trust me — Richard Bancroft wants to sell tickets. He wants to sell suites . He wants to make money off brand partnerships. And this , his team’s bruiser engaged to the hottest pop star on the planet?” She thumped my knee. “ This is a money-making dream come true.”

Isabella stood, walking over to where Cora, my angel of a house maid, had left us a large pitcher of iced tea. I wasn’t particularly fond of people working for me in my home. I preferred to clean my own house and cook my own meals. But over the last couple of years, the truth was that my time to do those things had dwindled to almost nothing. And so, I had a small team of people I trusted — a chef, my house maid, a house manager, and my security. I adored them all like family and paid them more than my financial advisor advised, but they were worth it to me.

Isabella poured each of us a glass before holding hers up toward mine.

“Besides, you know Aleks will want to keep his little bad boy rep. It gets him more super models than his bankroll and fancy cars ever could.” She arched a brow. “If he thinks he’s hit the pussy lottery now, just wait until he’s the ex of Mia fucking Love . The kittens will be clawing each other’s eyes out for the chance to be the woman who helps him get over you.”

I tried to ignore the way jealousy sparked in my chest at that, at how it always had any time I saw another woman with my best friend. Because that’s what Aleks was, what he had been since we were sixteen. He knew me in a way no one else did. He understood what I was never able to say out loud. Even when time stretched between us, when our lives got busy and we didn’t talk for months… he could still take one look at me and just know how I was feeling, what I was thinking, and if I was okay or not.

Everything about this scheme sounded absolutely bat shit crazy to me.

And yet, somehow, just crazy enough to work.

Maybe it was the fresh sting of Garrett Orange’s words simmering in my bloodstream. Maybe it was knowing Aleks was in trouble and I might have the key to getting him out of it. Maybe it was the thrill of doing something insane, something so ludicrous that the whole world would be talking about it.

Whatever it was, something made me pick up my phone.

And I decided if I was going to be fake engaged, there was no one I’d rather pretend with than Aleks.

I pulled up his contact, glancing at a wide-eyed and hopeful Isabella when his name sliced across the screen.

Then, I sent the text that would spiral me into a new life.