His Pucking Game

Declan Morrow has twelve games. Twelve games to prove he belongs on the Pittsburgh Forge roster, twelve games before the man he is replacing recovers and the organization stops needing him, twelve games to be useful enough that nobody looks too closely at everything else. He has been here before, different city, same borrowed time, same rule he has lived by since he was sixteen years old: be readable in the ways that are safe. Keep the rest locked in a room with no windows. He is very good at this.What he is not good at is Nikolai Voss. Nikolai is the Forge's shutdown defenseman, five-year veteran, alternate captain, and the most precise reader of angles in the league. He does not chase the puck. He positions himself so the puck comes to him. He has applied that same skill to every relationship in his life and he has been doing it so long that he stopped noticing it was a choice.Until Declan. What starts as early-morning ice sessions and film room breakdowns becomes something neither of them has a category for. Nikolai pays attention the way most people breathe, completely and without deciding to, and for a man who has spent years making himself useful and nothing else, being the subject of that attention feels like being held still for the first time. Terrifying. Magnetic. Impossible to walk away from. But Declan has a system and Nikolai has architecture and both of them are about to find out that the thing they built to survive is the exact thing standing between them and something real.Because Nikolai loves by solving. And Declan has been solved before.It did not end well. His Pucking Game is a slow-burn dark MM hockey romance about two men who are brilliant at everything except letting someone see them clearly, the cost of protecting yourself from the wrong things, and what happens when a redirect lands somewhere it was never aimed. For readers who like their hockey rough, their tension slow and suffocating, and their emotional payoff completely earned. Tropes: Forced proximity, enemies to lovers, dark possessive love interest, power imbalance, grumpy and guarded, slow burn, sports romance, hurt and comfort, wounded heroes.