Gloves Off: a marriage of convenience hockey romance (Vancouver Storm Book 4)

I’m sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the doctor to get home so we can go to this party with her family, trying not to think about what we did after at the benefit last week, when curiosity gets the best of me, and I open that social media app she was using a few weeks ago.

I’m forced to make an account to view her profile. She’s easy to find, with a surprising number of followers, and I hit the ‘follow’ button before spending a few minutes browsing through her photos. Lots of her with Jordan and Darcy, a few at work, a selfie in Hawaii from the summer. I remember exactly how she looked in a swimsuit—lush curves on display. I’m clicking different parts of her profile when I find the tagged pictures. Another collection of images pops up with her in them.

One of them, though, looks different. @doc.georgia.greene.queen is an account dedicated to her outfits. Some images are pulled from her own account, some are from people spotting her out in the wild, usually walking in or out of the arena.

She has a fan account? I hit Follow.

I’m looking at the picture of us on the plane the other week—hottest couple in the NHL, one comment says—when I get a waft of that familiar violet scent.

“Stalking me?” she says over my shoulder and my watch goes off again.

“Jesus.” I tuck my phone away. “Don’t sneak up on me.”

She lifts her brows and sends a pointed look at my phone. “I saw that. My favorite comment is the one that says, Volkov looks at his wife the way I look at a double quarter pounder with cheese.”

No, I don’t. Do I? The back of my neck feels hot.

She smirks, cool and indifferent, like the library never even happened. Like she hasn’t thought about it once.

And then there’s me—who can’t stop replaying it. Can’t stop jerking off thinking about being buried in her tight, hot pussy. Can’t stop hearing the little panting noises she made as she got closer to the edge, as she started to clasp me harder inside her.

She wants to pretend it didn’t happen? Fine. I will, too.

“Are you ready to go?” I ask, glancing at the time.

“Not even close.” She gives me a strange look before gesturing to the garment bag she draped over the stool beside me. I was so absorbed in looking at photos of her that I didn’t even notice. “We need to go in costume.”

I unzip the bag and recognize the superhero costume in an instant. “Batman? Do you have a mask kink or something?”

“What’s the kink called where I don’t want to look at your face?”

My mouth twitches and the urge to laugh tightens in my abdomen. After what happened at her work benefit, though, the last thing we need is to be laughing together. I’m already having a hard time not thinking about it.

Night and day, all I think about is fucking her. The flare of lust in her eyes when I didn’t let her come.

She liked being told what to do, and even worse, I liked it, too.

Her hair’s down around her shoulders, glossy and wavy, begging to be touched. Makeup done in a way that makes her eyes sparkle harder, her lips more distracting. She’s wearing a T-shirt and those leggings again. “What are you going as?”

She smirks. “You’ll see.” She makes a shooing gesture. “Go get changed. I’ll meet you down here in twenty.”

Twenty minutes later, I sit in the living room wearing the surprisingly high quality Batman costume, holding the mask in my hand, inspecting it.

Where’d she get this? It fits me like it was made for me.

The sound of her footsteps has me looking up to the top of the stairs, and my jaw goes slack. My wife makes her way down in a tight black catsuit, every curve and dip of her body hugged by leather. Heels sky-high, pointy, and sharp.

In an instant, I’m half hard.

My watch goes off and I silence it. Why did we agree not to have sex again?

“You’re wearing that to your parents’ house?” I scratch the back of my neck. “Won’t they, uh.”

Holy fuck, she looks hot. This isn’t good.

“Won’t they what?”

“Hmm?” I jerk my gaze up, and her smile turns deadly. “You’re dressing like that to a family event?”

She snorts. “My mom was the one who lent me these costumes.”

What? I picture a stiff-lipped older woman dripping in jewelry, with a permanent sour look on her face, like Emma’s mother.

This doesn’t make sense.

“Whatever.” I rub the bridge of my nose, praying for this evening to end quickly. “Let’s get this over with.”

The doctor directs me to a modest, two-story home in a quiet, middle-class suburb of Vancouver.

The feeling that I’ve been wrong gathers energy inside me.

My parents live three blocks away. They wouldn’t let me buy them anything expensive when I started getting the big paychecks, because my mom didn’t want to clean a big house. I said I’d hire a cleaner, and she just laughed.

Those Greenes wouldn’t live in this neighborhood. They’d live in Shaughnessy, in something like the mansion where the benefit took place.

We park the car, my wife gets out, and as she walks in front of me, my gaze falls to her ass in that catsuit. Her body looks incredible. Georgia Greene was born to wear a black leather catsuit.

She leads me to a house where the front lawn has been made to look like a graveyard, realistic-looking gravestones spaced out across the grass, fog spilling out among them. Ghost-like figures hang from the trees, swaying in the wind and illuminated by creepy lights. In front of the gravestones, mounds of dirt and⁠—

“Fuck!” I yell as a hand shoots out of the mound nearest me. My watch goes off again.

Georgia snorts. “It’s wired to a motion sensor.”

The hand retreats back into the dirt, and I give her a baffled look, my pulse returning to normal. This is her parents’ house? It’s average. Middle class. We can hear people inside, talking and laughing. Music playing.

She reaches to open the front door but my hand comes to her arm. “You’ll need to call me Alexei.” It never bothered me before, but it bothers me now. “We’re married. Married people don’t call each other by their last names.”

“You call me Doctor.”

“That’s different. Everyone thinks it’s a cute nickname.” The corner of my mouth threatens to tug up. “I could call you gniloy kluben if you prefer.”

If she knew what it meant, though, she wouldn’t prefer it.

“Right.” Her eyes narrow, the cogs in her head turning. “What does that mean again?”

“Sweetheart.”

“Hmm.” Her eyelids are tiny slits now. “I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.” I shrug. “But you’re my wife. You should call me Alexei.”

“Alexei,” she repeats slowly, and I’m distracted by the way her lips look.

“There you go. Not so hard, is it?”noveldrama

“Shut up, Alexei,” she says to herself. “Don’t choke on your dinner, Alexei. Your tooth fell into your drink, Alexei. Hmm. You’re right. It’s not so bad.”

I clear my throat, shaking my head to myself. There she is. “Done?”

“For now.”

“All right. Let’s go.”