Pucking My Coach

A Spicy Dark College Hockey, MM Enemies to Lovers, Age Gap Romance

He's the coach I was hired to save. The enemy I can't stop craving.

David

I live by a simple code: logic, data, and a 400-mile buffer from a past I can't outrun. My revolutionary analytics program, Axiom, is my shield and my weapon, and it’s earned me a one-way ticket to saving the Southwood Ravens hockey team.

The only variable I can’t solve for? Coach Damian Blackstone.

He’s a relic from a bygone era—a former NHL enforcer with a shattered knee and a temper that could melt ice. He’s twice my age, double my size, and sees my algorithms as a personal attack. He’s the brute force to my brilliant mind, and he’s determined to break me before I can prove him wrong.

Damian

Hockey is played with bone and blood, not spreadsheets. I’ve built my career and this team on a foundation of grit, fear, and absolute control. Then David Vance walks in, a quiet, twenty-two-year-old kid in an oversized sweater who thinks he can win games with a laptop.

He’s a ghost in my machine, a constant challenge to my authority, and a temptation I fight with every fiber of my being. I want to ruin him. I want to prove his perfect system is no match for the messy, chaotic reality of my world.

The war for the soul of the team is brutal, but when a campus-wide blackout traps us alone in the arena, the friction between us ignites into a punishing, undeniable passion. Our secret encounters are a volatile cocktail of anger and need, a game more dangerous than anything played on the ice.

But as our unlikely partnership starts forging victories, outside forces close in: a nosy reporter digging for a scandal and the ghosts of David’s past threatening to destroy everything we’ve built. I’m used to being the protector, but what happens when the man I’m desperate to shield is the one variable that could cost me everything?

Pucking My Coach is a spicy, dark, full-length MM college hockey romance with a guaranteed HEA. This steamy, emotionally charged novel features:

✓ An intense enemies-to-lovers dynamic
✓ A significant age gap (Coach/Student-Analyst)
✓ Forced proximity in a snowstorm
✓ Hurt/comfort and found family themes
✓ A grumpy, possessive coach who falls first and harder
✓ A brilliant, resilient analyst who saves more than just the team
✓ Scorching hot, secret encounters

One-click now for a story where the only thing more dangerous than the hits on the ice are the secrets kept off it.

absolutely terrible

This is another one of these texts read by virtual voice that makes me hope to God that the named author is just one more of Amazon's (or some third parties') cute little pretenses, creating an oh-so-silly accidental misimpression that results in readers thinking that a real author, rather than a.i., wrote this.

If instead this book was penned by a human author: my sincerest apologies for directness, but, um, how do I put this ...

But it wasn't, there isn't, and Amazon -- and/or third parties with Amazon's connivance -- very much is living up again to its changing reputation.

Triggers and unaddressed trauma

Very, very odd book.

First, if systematic physical and mental child abuse is a trigger, especially ongoing abuse which isn’t addressed through most basic means (ever) you might want to skip this one.

While the recipient of the abuse eventually is said to have claimed agency in their life, it is not via something as obvious as the law, despite legal force and ethical guidelines being used elsewhere in the book. The primary abuser and cohorts are never charged with their crimes or punished. At all.

So, there’s that.

If you’re familiar with scientific terms and phrases and find it hard to suspend your disbelief when they’re misused, or if you’re conversant with hockey, this book may be irritating. Or oddly puzzling. Occasionally a scientific term shows up in what are supposed to be descriptive sections unrelated to the field, if you can also ignore that, well, this is a very slow burn hockey and Artificial Intelligence (yeah, it’s called that) stuff. It’s something.

If you have a passing familiarity with the origin of the phase “ghost in the machine” (not the anime) the first half of the book might grate on your nerves. On the plus side, there is no sequel to this book that I know of.