Trade Value

POV: you built the model that says the captain everyone loves is worth less than the cheap rookie he's being paid to train. Then you have to ride his team charter all season and pretend you're not the knife. An enemies-to-lovers, forced-proximity hockey romance with an aging captain, the analyst holding his trade value in a spreadsheet, a slow burn, and a hot back half.

Wes Corrigan is the Halloran Ironmen's captain. Number nine, thirty-four years old and turning thirty-five inside the final year of his contract, a center who walks into every room counting heads before he takes his coat off, who brings the whole team its coffee and never once mentions it. A split steel town has loved him for a decade. What nobody sees is the math he runs alone at midnight, the half-step he's lost, the quiet certainty that he has been reading his own obituary since he was thirty and is worth exactly the production that is running out.

Priya Anand is the club's first head of analytics, an outsider from outside the sport who trusts numbers because numbers never valued her and then threw her away, the way her family did, the way every job since has. She has confused being right with being worth keeping, and she has built a whole life out of being the most accurate person in any room. On her first morning the new front office hands her a model and a mandate to take the sentiment out of roster decisions. The name it flags is the captain's.

The GM already made the call. The model is just his paper trail, and Priya is the human face he needs on it, assigned to shadow Wes all season for a warm on-camera series called "Captain's Access" while the real assignment is succession management: get the captain to build his own replacement on film. The rules are simple. Stay objective. Stay employable. Never let the man you are being paid to price become a man you can't. Then he hands her a coffee she never asked for, made exactly right, and the first rule goes quiet.

Film rooms, red-eye charters, the coffee machine at dawn. The distance she keeps for a living starts costing her more than it saves, and somewhere in there her best prediction of Wes stops being the data and starts being that she simply knows him. When she finally reads the paper trail all the way through, she understands she is co-authoring the document that ships him, and that a no-trade clause is worth nothing against a spreadsheet. So they stop playing along and start sabotaging the exit together, and the caring turns real long before either of them says a word about it.

Then the thing that could save Wes and the thing she wants become the same forbidden act. She is the club's evaluator of his trade value; the instant the building can call her model biased, the honest numbers die and he is gone by the deadline. Terrified of being valued and discarded one more time, Priya's oldest reflex is to shrink, apologize, and protect the work by walking away from the man. But Wes has spent his whole life believing that anyone who loves him loses, and for once he refuses to let that be the trade.

What is a person worth after the number stops, and who gets to decide?

The model was built to end him. Read honestly, it might be the only thing that can prove the club asked the wrong question about a man who was never just a line item.

Trade Value is a full-length, standalone hockey romance with a slow burn and a scorching back half, an aging-captain hero, a brilliant heroine who saves him by publishing the truth instead of hiding it, found family, and a hard-won happily ever after. Halloran Ironmen, Book 2.