Bred By The Pucking Mountain Man
(2027)(A book in the Mountain Man Hockey series)
A novel by Demi Wilder
I didn't come to Bear Creek Valley to fall in love. I came to disappear.
Fourteen seasons in the NHL and all I've got to show for it are two blown knees, a face held together by surgical wire, and a highlight reel nobody watches anymore. The league didn't retire me. My body did. So I bought a run-down rink outside town, figured I'd coach peewee hockey and drink beer until the silence stopped feeling like failure.
Then Jolie Marchand walks into my rink.
She's the new physical therapist Doc Winters sent over — something about "community outreach" and "you can't keep icing your knees with frozen peas, you stubborn idiot." She's all soft curves and no-nonsense mouth and hands that know exactly where I'm broken.
She touches my knee and I forget I used to be someone.
She's thirty-three. Recently divorced. Started over in a town where nobody knows her name or her mistakes. She doesn't care about my stats or my career or the fact that I once dropped gloves on national television.
She cares that I showed a seven-year-old how to hold a stick without crying.
I shouldn't want her this badly. I'm forty-one with a body that sounds like a gravel road when I stand up. I've got nothing to offer a woman like her except a cold rink, a dog who sheds on everything, and hands that shake when she's close because I want to touch her so badly it rewires my brain.
But Jolie looks at me like I'm not done yet.
And when she whispers that she wants everything — everything — no protection, no pulling back, no pretending this is casual —
I stop thinking about what I used to be.
I start thinking about what we could make.
Bred By The Pucking Mountain Man is a scorching breeding-kink romance featuring a retired NHL enforcer who thought his best years were behind him, the curvy physical therapist who proves him dead wrong, and the mountain town rink where two people discover that the most beautiful plays happen off the ice. Guaranteed HEA with no cheating.
Genre: Romance
Fourteen seasons in the NHL and all I've got to show for it are two blown knees, a face held together by surgical wire, and a highlight reel nobody watches anymore. The league didn't retire me. My body did. So I bought a run-down rink outside town, figured I'd coach peewee hockey and drink beer until the silence stopped feeling like failure.
Then Jolie Marchand walks into my rink.
She's the new physical therapist Doc Winters sent over — something about "community outreach" and "you can't keep icing your knees with frozen peas, you stubborn idiot." She's all soft curves and no-nonsense mouth and hands that know exactly where I'm broken.
She touches my knee and I forget I used to be someone.
She's thirty-three. Recently divorced. Started over in a town where nobody knows her name or her mistakes. She doesn't care about my stats or my career or the fact that I once dropped gloves on national television.
She cares that I showed a seven-year-old how to hold a stick without crying.
I shouldn't want her this badly. I'm forty-one with a body that sounds like a gravel road when I stand up. I've got nothing to offer a woman like her except a cold rink, a dog who sheds on everything, and hands that shake when she's close because I want to touch her so badly it rewires my brain.
But Jolie looks at me like I'm not done yet.
And when she whispers that she wants everything — everything — no protection, no pulling back, no pretending this is casual —
I stop thinking about what I used to be.
I start thinking about what we could make.
Bred By The Pucking Mountain Man is a scorching breeding-kink romance featuring a retired NHL enforcer who thought his best years were behind him, the curvy physical therapist who proves him dead wrong, and the mountain town rink where two people discover that the most beautiful plays happen off the ice. Guaranteed HEA with no cheating.
Genre: Romance