Veteran Move

Mason Rourke doesn't do reckless. Fourteen seasons into his career, fresh off a quiet divorce, the veteran Denver Frost defenseman has built his whole identity out of being the guy everyone trusts to handle things calmly. So when the team asks him to put up a rookie whose apartment fell through, he expects two weeks of mild inconvenience. He does not expect Luca Bennett.

Luca is twenty-two, loud, funny, and thirteen years younger than Mason in every way that should matter. He's also sharper than anyone gives him credit for, carrying more pressure than his easy confidence lets on, and completely unwilling to let Mason decide, on his behalf, what he can and can't handle. What starts as a favor to the front office turns into breakfasts, late-night conversations, and a friendship neither of them saw coming, followed by a wanting Mason spends months trying to talk himself out of.

Mason's real fear was never about a man. It's about a career winding down and a life he doesn't know how to offer someone at the start of his. Luca refuses to be protected from a future he's already chosen. And Mason is going to have to decide, on the ice and off it, whether fear gets to keep making his decisions for him.

A slow-burn, explicit age-gap romance about the veteran who forgot how to want anything and the rookie who reminds him, set against a hard-fought playoff run, with a guaranteed happily ever after.