When the employee unlocks the door—a woman in her twenties with pink hair and multiple piercings—she looks at me like I’m lost.
“Can I help you?”
“I need hockey romance books.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Yeah, sure. Follow me.”
She leads me to a display near the back. Shelves and shelves of books with shirtless men and hockey sticks and titles that make me question my entire sport.
“Looking for anything specific?”
I show her the pictures I’ve taken of Marnie’s book covers when she wasn’t paying attention.
“These authors. Whatever you have.”
She looks at the list and grins. “Oh, you’re doing research. That’s actually sweet. Give me a minute.”
Twenty minutes later I’m walking out two hundred dollars lighter with a bag containing six books and a plan that’s either brilliant or completely insane.
Probably both.
I spendthe afternoon reading instead of watching game footage.
Not ideal preparation for our upcoming games, but I need to understand what Marnie loves about these books. Need to see what she sees in them.
The first one is calledCross-Checking the Captainand it’s… educational.
The captain in this book is possessive and commanding and apparently very good with things that aren’t hockey. The sexual tension starts on page twelve.
By page forty-seven they’re arguing and it’s clearly foreplay.
By page ninety-three he’s got her pressed against the wall of the locker room after hours, and the descriptions are detailed enough that I’m reconsidering some assumptions about what’s structurally possible in that space.
I’m three books deep when Brody walks into the players’ lounge and catches me with my highlighter out, color-coding explicit content like it’s game play.
He stops and stares at the book in my hands.
“Cap. Is that a romance novel?”
“Research.”
“For what?”
“A complicated personal situation.”
He drops onto the chair across from me and kicks his feet up. “Does this situation involve our head PT who’s been avoiding you for three days?”
“Maybe.”
“And your solution is to read romance novels?” He sounds both baffled and impressed.
“My solution is to understand what she loves and use it to prove a point.” I show him page 147, highlighted in green. “This scene here—it’s about trust. About the couple fighting for each other.”
Brody reads the passage and his eyebrows climb. “That’s actually kind of?—”
“Don’t.”
“—romantic. In a completely unhinged way.” He grins. “What’s the plan?”
