“One series at a time,” Ryan says, which is the most captain thing a person can say at a breakfast table.
“Boring,” Emma decides.
“He’s right, though,” I say, and Ryan looks at me like I have handed him something. “You take the game in front of you. You don’t skate the whole postseason at once.”
“Look at that,” Dad says from the counter. “She’s learning the sport.”
“I understood the sport fine. I just refused to be nice about it in print.”
Susan laughs, then presses a hand to her chest and waves off the three of us who move toward her at once. “Sit. All of you. I survived open-heart surgery. I can survive a laugh.”
So we sit. We eat eggs Dad overcooked and toast the twins fought over. Ryan’s phone buzzes with the team’s travel schedule, the next hard days of a run that could go anywhere or end fast. Somewhere out there the playoffs are waiting to take another swing at all of us.
But that is Thursday’s problem. That is the next story.
I stay for one more cup of coffee.
Nobody asks me why.
The Grumpy Defenseman
You've watched Evan McKinney steal pucks, break structure, and say the thing nobody else in the room will say. Now watch him meet the one person his walls don't work on. Keep reading for a preview ofThe Grumpy Defenseman.
Evan and Samantha's story is for readers who love grumpy × sunshine, workplace romance, secret relationships, and a shutdown defenseman who falls first — and falls hard.
I was sent to photograph the grumpiest man in the NHL. Falling for him could ruin us both.
She came to San Antonio for one summer assignment and a clean exit. He's a shutdown defenseman in a contract year with broad shoulders, sharp edges, and a stare built to keep the world out. He treats every camera like a weapon.
She's the one aiming it at him.
But her lens keeps catching what he works so hard to hide — and one drink turns into a night neither of them can stop replaying. With his contract year on the line and the leaguewatching, one leaked story could cost him everything… and cost her the job, the exit, and the man she was never supposed to want.
Tropes:
Grumpy × Sunshine
Photographer × NHL Defenseman
Workplace Romance
Forced Proximity
Secret Relationship
He Falls First
?? ?? ??
The Grumpy Defensemanis an open-door contemporary hockey romance. It contains several on-page intimate scenes and explicit language, and is intended for mature readers. Can be read as a standalone in The Stampede Series.
Turn the page to meet Evan and Samantha in Chapter One…
Chapter One Samantha
The first thing I noticed was the light.
Not the fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead like dying insects, though those were bad enough. Not the afternoon sun slanting through the community center’s high windows at exactly the wrong angle, bleaching every surface into something too bright and exposed. What I noticed was the strip of shadow between them, where artificial light and natural light refused to meet and the air went gray.
