Romance

The Center's Mistake

A One-Night Stand Sports RomanceBy Harper Nash

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Length7h 45m

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*That's my brother out there.* Leona Vargas says it to nobody in particular, and then Javier splits the defence, deks the goalie and slides the puck five-hole to win a North American Hockey League semifinal. Then he is on his back near the blue line with his knee pointing the wrong way, and a teammate is standing over him with his gloves off, looking sorry. Leona memorises the face and the number on the jersey. *Cole Renford. She would never forget it.* She becomes an athletic therapist. Top of her class, hired out of Minnesota, and on the first morning of camp she is the new hire sorting bottles into a medical cart in the trainer's room of the Port Harbor Wolves. Cole Renford still plays for them. He wears an assistant captain's letter, a repaired shoulder he will not stretch properly, and a scoring year he would rather not talk about. He signs her consent form because refusing would mean admitting he remembers her. *I didn't ask for you.* *Neither did my brother.* What neither of them can get around is that the treatment is real. Her hands know exactly where the scar tissue sits. His shoulder does exactly what she predicts it will do. And somewhere between the posterior capsule stretches and the road trips, the thing they are both refusing to name stops being refusable. Then an anonymous complaint reaches league security: conflict of interest, a player and a member of the medical staff. The front office opens an internal investigation and lays out her options. Stay, keep her hands off him, and submit to random audits of her treatment logs. Or be reassigned to the affiliate in Des Moines while the league keeps digging and Cole faces a conduct hearing of his own. And there is the thing Cole has never told her, the detail he deliberately left out so she would go on hating the simple version of him. His younger brother, Finn, has been carrying it for years in the minors. *But the hit wasn't about jealousy. It was about family.* Derek Pyne, who shares the room with Cole, has photographs and access he should not have. Javier has a letter he wrote a long time ago that Cole has never opened. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, a fund Javier's mother never mentioned has been quietly paying for rehab and physical therapy and tuition. A hockey romance about the person who caused the injury, the person who sat in the hospital waiting room, and what it costs both of them to be in the same room every day. Closed-door.

Enemies to Lovers Family Betrayal Redemption Healing Forbidden Love Secret Relationship Identity Political Intrigue Revenge Psychological Grief