The Save

Hartley's happiest goalie has the whole team fooled. Then the department embeds the one woman trained to see straight through him.

The golden boy who turns every bad night into a feast…

Beau Tremblay is the loudest, warmest man at Hartley — the Hawks' goalie who feeds the whole hockey house, names every group chat, and says the sincere thing out loud while everyone else is still dancing around it. What no one knows is why he's really back for a fifth year. Last March his game came apart in overtime of an elimination game, in front of eight thousand people, and it never came back. The superstitions have stopped working, his glove hand shakes when he thinks no one's watching, so he does the only thing he's ever known how to do — performs joy at full volume, cooks for the house at 3 a.m., and makes sure no one on the team he loves looks too closely at the wall that stopped holding.

…and the deadpan fixer paid to see through exactly his kind of smile.

Delaney Cho has one job: embed with the program as its quiet wellness resource and get the goalie back on his feet without a single headline. She reads Beau's act in four minutes flat, and she's right — the joy is hiding something. What her instrument has no category for is that the man underneath it is real. Her fellowship comes with one unbreakable rule — no personal involvement with any athlete in the program — and a prior file that won't survive a second incident. She grew up watching a bright, beloved man perform warmth to cover what it cost, and built an entire life on never being that mark again. Beau is exactly her father's genre. He's also the first warm thing she can't make confess.

He falls first — loud, instant, half in French. She's the one person paid to see through him, and the last person he can afford to be seen by.

For readers who love: role-reversed grumpy/sunshine with a golden-retriever goalie hero and the deadpan sport-psych heroine paid to see through him, the forbidden professional line, forced proximity in a two-chair office and a 3 a.m. kitchen, a he-falls-first hero hiding a collapse behind the charm, found-family team banter, and a hard-won, guaranteed HEA.

The Save is a witty, banter-forward, high-heat new adult college hockey romance with role-reversed grumpy/sunshine, a forbidden off-limits line, forced proximity, a he-falls-first hero, hidden-struggle heat, and found-family team energy. Hartley Hawks, Book 3 — a standalone with all-new leads. Dual POV. HEA guaranteed. No cheating. No cliffhanger. Adult. 18+.