The Billionaire Takes a Bride

Music started, and the thumping beat of Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” filled the stadium. The track was suddenly filled with girls in purple and pink, skating in circles and vamping for the audience. They wore helmets and moved so fast that he craned his neck to see if he could find Chelsea among the team.

The announcer began to call out names.

Good Whip Lollipop.

Morning Whorey.

Drool Whip.

Lady ChaCha.

Kid Vicious.

Sandra Flea.

Tail Her Swift.

Sebastian laughed at the names. They were clever and badass all at once. As each girl’s name was called out, the others pointed at her, and she posed for the crowd.

Chesty LaRude.

Chelsea did a little hop and jiggled her breasts at the crowd, which made them roar. Then she licked her thumb and pressed it on her arm, pretending that she was sizzling.

Damn. He laughed again, clapping a hand against his beer. Why had she kept this from him? He didn’t know anything about the sport, but seeing her vamping it up on the track with the other girls? That was awesome. It was so incredibly not what he expected, but seeing her out there in the derby uniform he’d thought was nothing more than a Halloween costume?

She fit. She totally fit.

The other team was called out, and the skaters were announced one by one as their team’s music played.

“Bout’s gonna start,” Diane said at his side a few minutes later. “Get ready to watch some moves.”

The teams lined up in position, and he saw Chelsea was playing in the first round. Bout. Tussle. Jam. Whatever. The women readied, and Sebastian got on the edge of his seat.

The whistle blew.

The women began to skate forward, and immediately Chelsea snarled, displaying a bright pink mouth guard. She flung herself bodily at the woman next to her, knocking them both down. The girl with the star on her helmet—the jammer—jumped over their fallen bodies and skated ahead.

“Damn,” Diane said at his side. “Chesty’s not wasting any time tonight!”

He watched, mouth dry, as Chelsea pulled herself up off the track and began to skate back after the pack again, then rejoined them. For the rest of the jam, she flung herself into the pack with abandon, body-checking and skating in front of others to block them. She got pushed. She got knocked around. She went down. She caught an elbow to the face and shook it off.

Then the jammer tapped her hands on her hips, and the whistle blew.

“End of the jam,” Diane told him. “They scored four points. Good one.”

For the first half of the “bout,” he watched as Chelsea endured more hits than a football player, more falls than a beginner ice skater, and kept getting back up to throw herself into the game. She was brutal. Utterly brutal. She didn’t use her elbows, but she was downright cruel on the track, getting in other girls’ faces and yelling at them, pushing them aside for her own jammer, and doing whatever she could—at whatever cost—to get her jammer through.

And the audience both hated her and loved her at the same time. They booed her whenever she attacked someone a little too roughly, and it didn’t faze Chelsea at all. She just got right back into things.

As she picked herself up after skidding five feet and out of bounds, he swigged his beer, unable to take his gaze off of her. No wonder she was covered in bruises. Jesus. She also got penalties, too, and had to sit out, which apparently pissed her off even more. He noticed some of her teammates were giving her unhappy looks.

He grew concerned.

No one else was playing as hard as she was. Even Diane commented on how dirty Chelsea was playing tonight. When the second penalty flew and both Chelsea’s teammates and the opposing team gave her unhappy looks, he grew even more worried that she was in a bad frame of mind.

This wasn’t fun. She was making this . . . well, war.

By the time the halftime bell rang, she looked supremely pissed and sweaty. And as the Rag Queens gathered and moved off the track to head to their locker room and cheerleaders took the center of the floor, he got up from the bleachers.

He needed to talk to Chelsea.

This wasn’t just playing the game for the sheer hell of it. This was her taking out some serious rage on the other team. Even her own teammates were a little concerned, shooting her pissy looks.

Something was going on, and he needed to talk to his wife.

“Save my seat,” he told Diane. “I’ll be back.” And he hopped down from the bleachers and sprinted across the floor.

As he headed to the backstage area, he saw Rufus tailing behind the crowd of women on skates. He followed the bodyguard and when the man parked outside of a room, Sebastian waited.