Offsides

By: Juno Reardon

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.

US team captain Darcy Kessler ended things with Arden Voss five years ago and she has exactly zero regrets. The program needed her. The roster needed her. The fact that she has built her entire identity around the residency and has not been in a serious relationship since is a coincidence and not up for discussion.

Arden plays for Canada now. She's faster than anyone in international women's hockey, she's furious about it on a deeply personal level, and she has been not-over Darcy Kessler for five years while being extremely busy about it. She left. Darcy chose the program. That was the deal. She does not look for Darcy in every arena she walks into.

She does, though.

When the Women's World Championship bracket puts them on a collision course for the gold medal game, every sports outlet in two countries decides the storyline writes itself: ex-lovers, opposing captains, enemy ice. Both federations are watching. Both coaching staffs have opinions. The media is insufferable. And Darcy is playing worse every time Arden is within twenty feet of her, which is a systems failure she cannot explain away.

The anger between them is just grief in skates. The problem is that grief doesn't care about tournament brackets, and neither does the way Arden still looks at her.

They are both complete idiots about this. They already know exactly what they lost.

Will five years of distance be enough to keep them apart — or is the gold medal game the one thing neither of them can outskate?

No more virtual voice

The story is actually really cute but the virtual narration is awful. Let’s not do that anymore!

Icy

The VV sucked - repeats and mispronunciation galore. I wanted to like it but the VV made it hard to follow.

Who wrote this?

The story concept was a good one, but it was sorely executed! The writing sounds as if AI was given a concept for a story and created. The virtual voice was horrible. I finished the whole storage just to make sure that I wasn’t tripping, I should’ve just left it where it was. I’ll never get that time back.