Pucking Inconvenient: a hockey romance

* DISCREET SPECIAL EDITION WITH PRINTED EDGES! *
A hockey player who falls first, hardest, and forever. His secret new wife? That’s his coach's daughter.

My coach hates me, and that’s fine, because the feeling is mutual, but I can’t get traded when I’m playing like crap. So I skip the New Year’s Eve partying with my teammates when we’re in Vegas for a road game, and I take myself to a hotel bar for a single drink, feeling sorry for myself for superstitious reasons.

It’s my birthday, you see, and December 31st being my birthday is why I’ve never made the playoffs. No, I cannot elaborate without sounding unhinged.

Enter Francesca. No last name, no details. A bright burst of sunshine who immediately makes me feel better. We agree not to talk about work—because mine is frustrating—or families—because hers is infuriating—and we throw ourselves into a spontaneous birthday party that starts and ends with bubbly beverages, and in the middle…

Well, we get married.

The next morning, she runs scared.

That’s when I take my first sober look at our wedding license and figure out who the pretty blonde medical student really is: Frankie Wilson, the estranged daughter of the meanest coach in the NHL. The man who just benched me.

The wedding ring on my left hand represents vows I have no intention of breaking, but convincing my wife of that fact is going to be f*cking hard since we live on opposites sides of the country and I have forty hockey games to play between now and the end of the season.

The only chance I have of keeping her fragile trust is keeping our marriage a secret and convinging my bride to give me a second chance during our too-brief west coast swing two days later. And then with letters and video calls and good old-fashioned sexting, because we barely scratched the surface of her untapped praise kink, and my smart little wife?

She’s a very good girl.
Even—or especially—when she finds out that our brief time together had an unintended consequence…

One magical night in Vegas changes of everything with a marriage that is Pucking Inconvenient but also absolutely pucking perfect.