AGAINST THE ICE

She’s been head of sports medicine for the Pittsburgh Falcons for eighteen years. She built that career the hard way — after the man she loved left for a trade at twenty-two and never looked back.

Nadia Vasquez is forty-four, excellent at her job, and has a very efficient system for not needing people who leave.

Then Cole Hargrove takes the head coaching job at her franchise.

He’s forty-two, retired, and back in Pittsburgh for the first time since he left — and his right knee is worse than he disclosed. Which means he needs clearance to be on the bench. Which means he needs her. Twice a week. Treatment room. Forty minutes. For the foreseeable future.

It works, until it doesn’t — a hotel bar in Chicago at 11 PM, a hallway after a home win, twenty years dissolving like they never happened.

Then Nadia sees a name in her daughter’s phone contacts.

Then Cole rounds a corner and meets a twenty-one-year-old with her mother’s eyes.

Then the math happens — fast and devastating and entirely without warning.

She found Cole two years ago at a hockey camp. Built a relationship with him in secret. Neither parent knew the other was in her life. Neither parent knew there was a secret to keep.

Second chance. Secret child. Forced proximity. Hockey. Later in life. Steamy.

The kind of book where the grand gesture is a man showing up with his complete medical file, no speech prepared, and the one true thing he should have said twenty years ago.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Sports Romance averages 45–70 daily sales per Top 20 title with a 6.8 sales-to-comp ratio — Hot Niche with consistent demand and a fiercely loyal readership
→ Later-in-life romance is the fastest-growing underserved niche in contemporary romance — readers in their 30s and 40s are actively hunting protagonists who feel like actual adults, and the market isn’t keeping up
→ Five stacked high-conversion tropes in a single story — second chance, secret child, forced proximity, workplace forbidden, and slow burn each bring their own search traffic and reader community
→ The “secret child with an adult child” variation is virtually untapped — most secret baby romance features infants; a twenty-one-year-old daughter who made her own choice to find her father is a genuinely fresh emotional engine
→ Built for series read-through from page one — the Pittsburgh Falcons 4-book arc is fully architected with named protagonists, planted seeds, and an escalating franchise world that rewards readers who stay

TROPES:
• Second Chance Romance
• Secret Child
• Forced Proximity
• Workplace / Forbidden
• Later in Life / Over 40
• Sports Romance — Hockey
• Slow Burn
• Grumpy / Composed Sunshine
• Found Family
• Single Parent
• He Falls First
• Small World / Shared World

HEAT LEVEL: Steamy — two fully realized intimate scenes written with emotional weight and explicit detail

Perfect for fans of: Kate Clayborn, Kennedy Ryan, Emily Henry, and Hannah Grace