The Center's Wager
A Public Humiliation, Betrayal Sports RomanceBy Harper Nash
Length7h 55m
About this audiobook
Leo Madsen has a way of surviving press conferences. You pick a spot on the back wall, just above the camera lights, and you pretend the questions are coming from there. Tonight the spot is a water stain the shape of Idaho, and the woman in the third row is not asking about hockey. *"Your penalty minutes are up thirty percent from last season. Your shooting percentage is down."* Leo walks off the stage before he says something that ends up on SportsCenter.
His agent's solution arrives with a tablet. Briar O'Donnell is handed a contract by the Thunder's PR chief that reads three months, confidential, one client. Not the roster. Just Leo Madsen, the team's top scorer for three seasons, with an expiring deal and a growing reputation as a problem.
Leo makes his position plain at their first meeting. *"I'm here because my agent made me. Three months. That's what I agreed to. After that, you're gone."*
So she sits behind the glass at practice with a notebook while his teammates enjoy themselves. Kurt Vickers calls her his shadow, then his girlfriend, then the little PR girl, and watches Leo's skate blade catch every time. Then she is on the road trip. Then there are photographs, and a version of events that Leo stands up in front of his own locker room and defends: they have been seeing each other quietly, the photos are real, the relationship is real, this is not a stunt. Three lies and a half-truth wrapped in a bow.
What Briar gets underneath the arrangement is the part nobody has been paid to package. A framed photograph on his nightstand inscribed *For the boy who will carry my heart.* A mother who drove hours to sit in cold bleachers with a thermos and never complained, who died three weeks after his sister won nationals. A sister who stopped skating the next season because she said she couldn't hear the music anymore, and who Leo has been watching move through the world ever since.
Then PuckDrop publishes, quoting a team insider: *Thunder's Love Story Exposed: Paid Actress Behind Leo Madsen's Redemption Campaign.* Leo counts the people who knew about the hotel and comes up with five, and he says the cruelest available thing to the one standing in his living room refusing to leave.
With a trade offer on the table and a season still alive, what he decides is whether he can stop performing long enough to keep her.
This is a contemporary sports romance built on a fake arrangement, a leaked story, and a man who has been managing his own face since he was sixteen. The heat is closed-door.
Audiobook details
GenreRomance
Length7 hrs 55 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1 - The Face I Strap On Every Night
2Chapter 2 - The Art of Fixing a Man Who Doesn’t Want to Be Fixed
3Chapter 3 - I Didn’t Ask for a Babysitter
4Chapter 4 - Everything I Told Myself I’d Never Do Again
5Chapter 5 - The Scar I Keep Under My Knee
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 6 - The Price of Being Good at My Job
7Chapter 7 - The Fine Print of a Fake World
8Chapter 8 - One Real Meal in a Fake World
9Chapter 9 - The Lie That Becomes More Comfortable Than the Truth
10Chapter 10 - The First Public Kiss Is Not the One You Dreamed About
11Chapter 11 - The Crack in My Armor That I Didn’t Want
12Chapter 12 - The Lie I Tell Myself When I Want to Stay
13Chapter 13 - The Night I Stopped Pretending
14Chapter 14 - The Moment I Choose Myself
15Chapter 15 - The Rival Inside My Own Locker Room
16Chapter 16 - The Article That Destroys Everything We Built
17Chapter 17 - The Wall I Build to Protect What’s Already Broken
18Chapter 18 - The Phone Call I Almost Didn’t Answer
19Chapter 19 - The Wager That Costs Everything
20Chapter 20 - The Assist I Never Saw Coming
21Chapter 21 - The Truth That Was Always Right There
22Chapter 22 - The Enemy in My Own Camp Is Exposed
23Chapter 23 - The Game We Play for Each Other
24Chapter 24 - The Center’s Wager: Paid in Full
25About the Author
26The End
27About the Author
28Also by Harper Nash
29Acknowledgements
30A Note from the Author
Series
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