He married his teammate to keep him in the country. Nobody warned him it would be the first honest thing he ever did.
Cole Brandt has never once doubted that he likes women. He’s an Anchorage Frost winger with easy charm, a locker room that loves him, and the best hockey of his life — all of it clicking into place beside Erik Lindholm, the quiet Swedish defenseman who reads him on the ice and off.
Then a paperwork gap around a mid-season trade tanks Erik’s visa, and deportation is suddenly weeks away. So Cole hears himself say the one thing that fixes it: marry me.
A courthouse signature. A staged condo. A rehearsed how-we-met, and one ironclad rule — the team can never know it’s fake. It’s just paperwork. Except living inside Erik’s steady orbit, his coffee and his plain warmth and the wanting he’s hidden for a year, starts unmaking everything Cole believed about himself. And the lie he’s keeping from the world is nothing next to the one he’s been keeping from himself.
With a skeptical immigration interview closing in and a teammate starting to suspect, Cole has to decide whether to keep performing — or finally stop pretending and choose Erik out loud, for keeps.
A steamy, tender marriage-of-convenience hockey romance with a bi-awakening, forced proximity, and a guaranteed HEA.
Perfect for fans of Sarina Bowen & Elle Kennedy and Rachel Reid.
