Shot Stopper

Cole Ashworth is the best goalie Blackwood University has ever had — right up until the second period, when his hands stop listening to him and the ice starts closing in. Nobody knows about the panic that grips him mid-game. Not his coach. Not his teammates. Not his scouts. If it gets out, his shot at the draft is over before it starts. He needs it to stay buried. He does not need Rowan Kessler finding him hyperventilating in a supply closet forty minutes before puck drop.

Rowan doesn't do favors for hockey players. Not after the last one nearly cost her her license before she'd even finished grad school. Now she's the athletic department's newest — and most closely watched — performance psychology intern, working under the very same standards her father, Blackwood's athletic director, is famous for enforcing. One whisper of favoritism and she's finished before she's begun. So when the team's star goalie corners her with a secret and a request she can't ethically refuse, she tells herself this is strictly clinical. Strictly professional. Strictly nothing she'll think about after hours.

She lies to herself for exactly six weeks.

Between locker-room diagnostics and late-night sessions that keep running long, Cole becomes less of a case file and more of the first person who's ever made her laugh without trying. He's reckless in a way that should scare her and doesn't. She's guarded in a way that should bore him and instead feels like a door he wants to keep knocking on. But everything they're building sits directly on top of the two things they can't afford to lose — his career, and her name — and one mistake could take both.

When the truth comes out anyway, they'll have to decide if what they found in the dark is worth what it costs in the light.

Tropes: He Falls First / Forbidden (Workplace-Adjacent) / Secret Keeping / Slow Burn / Found Family / Grumpy-Sunshine Undertones