Cole MacKinnon-Briggs was born to play hockey. First-overall draft pick. Nashville Predators. A rookie season that made good on every promise scouts had been making about him since he was fifteen. Then a Rangers enforcer's cheap shot ends his night in a New York training room, counting ceiling tiles and reaching for hours he'll never find.

The gap in his memory is permanent. The concussion protocol is relentless. And the apartment in The Gulch is very, very quiet.

Walking is on the approved list. So Cole walks — south, toward a city he's lived in for two years without seeing. He finds a coffee shop on a corner that has been there since before the neighborhood was a thing and intends to stay. He finds a corner table. He finds coffee made before he finishes paying by a woman who asks about his book like the answer matters.

Savannah Cole grew up in Franklin, Tennessee, in a house where her father built things, and her mother made them worth coming home to. At nineteen, she runs a coffee counter with the authority of someone born to read people across it — and she reads Cole from the first morning. Not the draft position. Not the shooting percentage. The man underneath: the specific quality of someone working very hard to be okay in a room.

She has been patient with things worth being patient for her whole life. She decides this is one of them.

What follows is a love story built in the margins of a recovery — in approved walks and cognitive tests and the particular silence of a life stripped to its essentials. In Broadway bars where the music is the real thing and the wrist-grab in a crowd that neither of them comments on. In a cereal at one in the morning and a stick propped against a nightstand, and the question of what a man is worth when no one in the room knows his statistics.

Cole came to Nashville knowing exactly what he was worth on the ice. Savi never asked. By the time he's ready to go back, he's found out what else was there — and discovered that the ice was waiting, just as it always had been.

So was she.

NASHVILLE HEAT is a contemporary erotic romance (heat level 5) set in Nashville, Tennessee. It features a slow-burn relationship between a recovering NHL player and a Nashville barista, explicit intimate scenes, authentic concussion recovery portrayed with clinical accuracy, and a traditional-values heroine who knows exactly who she is.