nks243
Noah Reed has always been the good one.
Golden boy of USNM's hockey team. The guy everyone trusts. The guy who never messes up-until one fight changes everything.
Mila Keating doesn't have the luxury of mistakes.
At eighteen, she's already a mother, already exhausted, already done pretending life is fair. Cold, guarded, and fiercely independent, she's built her world around survival-for herself and for her four-year-old daughter, Harper.
When a scandal threatens Noah's future and Mila needs money to keep hers afloat, a fake relationship becomes the perfect solution. Strict rules. No feelings. No trust.
But sharing a building means sharing space.
Sharing space means crossing lines.
And somewhere between late nights, bruised knuckles, and a little girl who steals Noah's heart far too easily, the lines blur.
What starts as an arrangement turns into something neither of them planned.
Something dangerous.
Something real.
Because the hardest thing about pretending to love someone
is realizing you might not be pretending anymore.