ONE MORE LAP

 Workplace Sports Romantic Comedy

Wren Mallory arrives at the Ridgemont Ice Center on Day 1 with a color-coded, tab-indexed, laminated marketing binder and thirty days to save a struggling community rink from the flashy competitor that just opened across town. By the end of Day 1, the binder is under the equipment table in bay 3, levelling a wobbly leg.

She makes another one.

Gannon Steele — ex-Olympian, one bronze medal, deeply economical with words — is the rink’s general manager and the one person in the building who hasn’t told Wren her ideas are good. Before she can figure out whether that’s hostility or something else entirely, there’s a viral ferret named Sprocket, a rival rink opening the same night as the Fall Launch, and the very specific way Gannon’s margin notes keep appearing on her pitch decks before she’s asked for them. There’s the 5:30am ice she’s not supposed to know about. There’s the moment he credits her idea in a meeting — two false starts, one restart — and calls it “statistically, yes, the first time.” There are four binders repurposed throughout the rink in non-marketing applications, and then there’s Binder 4: her colour system, forty-two tabs, amber and navy alternating at every fifth section break, on her desk when she arrives.

She’s been pitching ideas with other people’s names on them her entire career. He’s the first person who argued with them like they were hers. That’s the whole problem.

A dry, cozy, October-flavored workplace romance about an ice rink, a man who shows his feelings by memorizing your tab colors, and a woman who finally pitches herself instead of the plan. The kind of book you read in one sitting and then immediately want to press into someone’s hands.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Sports is Hot Mainstream with a 21.7 sales-to-comp ratio — dramatically stronger competitive position than primary rom-com; sports trope is trending ↑ +4 positions vs. 2025 at $363K/month

→ Dual-category stacking: Romance > Sports + Romance > Romantic Comedy gives legitimate positioning in two categories simultaneously, one of which is the market’s fastest-rising trope

→ Grumpy boss ($218K/mo) + slow burn (Competition Index 100) — the combination of the boss archetype and slow burn’s outperformance relative to competition is the strongest character/pacing stack in the February 2026 data

→ Ice rink / fall October setting is unoccupied whitespace — K-lytics Top 30 cover analysis shows no October/rink-positioned titles; no direct competition in this seasonal niche

→ Workplace category reinforcement — Romance > Workplace appears 8 times in Top 100 category usage; this story qualifies as Sports, Workplace, and Romantic Comedy simultaneously

TROPES:

• Grumpy/sunshine
• Workplace forced proximity
• Sports romance
• Boss/employee tension
• Slow burn
• Ticking clock
• Ex-athlete hero
• Sunshine heroine who refuses to fold
• HEA guaranteed

HEAT LEVEL: Moderate

PERFECT FOR FANS OF: Stephanie Archer, Lucy Score, Elizabeth O’Roark, and Katherine Center