Offside

The best goal scorer on Hartford's new hockey team hasn't scored in nineteen games. The woman who works out why in four seconds is his goalie's sister.

Jo Tollefsen was one half of a pairs team for nine years, until her partner walked out two weeks before the World Championships and a torn knee ended her comeback on her own. Now she is sleeping on her little brother's couch in Hartford and teaching five-year-olds to fall down safely.

Eli Santangelo is the loudest man in any room: the golden retriever, the good time, the guy every girlfriend has loved and then left for someone quieter. When he lands flat on his back in the middle of her Learn-to-Skate class, she tells him what nobody else has spotted. He has been pushing off his toe since October.

Six a.m. sessions. Four hundred figure eights. A bet on a spin, a snowstorm that strands them overnight at the rink, and one very clear instruction from her brother, the team's goalie: not my sister.

But Jo has a job offer in Colorado with a deadline on it, and Eli has spent his whole life saying goodbye first so that nobody else gets to. If he wants her to stay, he is going to have to fall down in front of thirty thousand people and not laugh.

Offside is a dual-POV, forced-proximity, teammate's-sister hockey romance with a figure skater who counts everything, a winger who falls first, a Christmas Eve full of glitter and an outdoor game on New Year's Day. Open door, not explicit. Swoony, funny, and a guaranteed happily ever after.

Book two of the Hartford Hounds Hockey series. Every book is a standalone romance with a new couple.