Targeted Age Group:: 20+

What starts as a game ends with two hearts on the line.

Dana “Mac” McPherson is a goaltender without a job, a team, or a city. Until he lands in Denver as a backup goalie. He should be happy, but he’s not. Not only is his new job a step down from the starting goaltender position he’s used to, even worse, he’s uprooting his family from the only home they’ve ever known—and he’s doing it as a widowed single dad of two young children.

Mac decides the move to a new city is the perfect chance to hit the reset button and recapture a slice of his younger self when he was a ladies’ man. But he’s a little out of practice. So when he meets Mia Morales, the dark-eyed beauty helping him and his family find their Denver house, he decides she’s the perfect woman to help him sharpen his skills.

Burned out on her job, her family in turmoil, Mia doesn’t need to add another twist in her already complicated life—like her hunky new client. Mac isn’t just a twist: he’s a huge wrinkle she needs to keep in the client zone because his halting boyish charm threatens to expose her carefully cloistered heart.

Fate has a way of scrambling plans, and as Mac and Mia are continually thrown together, their attraction becomes bigger than both of them. When Mac decides Mia’s more than a candidate to practice his imagined playboy moves on, his determined mother-in-law steps in with an agenda of her own. Meanwhile, Mia struggles to balance the weight of family and job. Her heart’s not all she has to lose if she gives in to her desire to be with Mac.

The path to Mac and Mia’s happily-ever-after is littered with hip-checking hurdles. Some are of their own making, but others are barriers put up by those with a desire to keep them apart. Will they be able to skate around the barricades blocking their way and make it to the goal line, or will they veer so far off the path that they lose out on their happy ending?

What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
I’ve read a number of real accounts of hockey players being traded, and how they can be playing for one team one day, get a phone call hours later where they learn they’ve just been traded, and be playing for their new team the very next day. My mind wanders to how disruptive that must be for them and their families. What if they have kids in school? What happens if their partners have jobs that can’t easily be moved, much less so abruptly? How hard is it to adjust to a whole new set of teammates? A new coaching system? New management? How long does it take to get their feet planted in a new city?

I’ve been wanting to write a romance about a widowed dad, and I got to thinking about how the difficulty of a trade would be magnified under these circumstances. Talk about conflict! As my imagination churned away, a story was born.