The Boyfriend Penalty: A Boston Icehawks Hockey Romance

Some penalties are worth taking.

Eli Shepard’s knee folded sideways on national television two years ago. His ex-wife moved out while he was still in the surgical ward. Now he’s the assistant coach of the worst team in the NHL, he hasn’t slept past four in the morning in twenty-three months, and the franchise’s billionaire owner has just hired a “culture consultant” to fix the room from the inside out.

Dr. June Calloway arrives at the rink at 4:50 a.m. with a broken keycard, an unerring smile, and a clearance-rack orchid. She’s been reinstated to practice after a forty-four-month suspension from the sport she once medaled in. She’s not here to make friends. She’s here to keep the only job she has left.

Eli does not want her. June does not want him. The room wants both of them.

Across eighteen months, one dying coach, one star rookie sleeping with the broadcaster’s wife, eleven pucks left on a doorstep, and the season-long thread of a billionaire’s ultimatum, the room will hold them — in their cold, in their dark, in the small honest grammar of two people learning, slowly, hour by hour, to let themselves be heard.

The Boyfriend Penalty is the first book in the Icehawks Series, a slow-burn hockey romance for readers of Elena Armas, S. Massery, and JT Geissinger. It contains a grumpy hero, a sunshine heroine with bite, a found family, a trapped bird, and the only orchid in professional sports.