A Patch, a Puck, and the One He Lost

Holden "Crew" Ash was born into a motorcycle club and clawed his way out of it onto professional ice — and he never once picked which man he was. On the road he's the enforcer, the goon, the guy who drops his gloves so the skill players don't get hurt. Back home in Grafton he's a Northgate son, his brother's blood, his dead father's boy. And somewhere in the gap between those two lives, he lost the only thing that was ever actually his. Piper Nash married a man with two lives and told herself she could be the third — the home he came back to from both the club and the game. For eight years she was the steady center, the roadhouse light left on. And then, on a long dark road stretch last season, when the loneliness got heavy, Crew didn't come home. He found a warmer place to be no one, with a woman named Brynn, and told himself the road didn't count. It counted. Piper found out, and Piper left — and three months later she's still running the Grafton roadhouse, steady on her own, in a town that is quietly, permanently hers now instead of theirs. When the season ends and Crew comes home to a closed door, buying his way back doesn't work. Grand gestures don't work. Promising to quit one world for the other doesn't work — because the problem was never the club or the game. The problem is a man who used two half-lives as alibis for each other and was never fully present in any of them, least of all his marriage. If Crew wants Piper back, he has to do the one thing he's avoided his whole life: stop being two men. Become one whole one. And put her at the center of it — not the pit stop between the only two things he ever thought he belonged to. An emotional hockey-and-motorcycle-club cheating second-chance romance about the affair that happens in the gap, the difference between motion and presence, and a woman who refuses to be anyone's home base ever again. A real, honestly-reckoned physical affair; a hard-won grovel from a man learning to be whole; and a heroine who decides, on her own terms, what she takes back. Full-length novel with a guaranteed happily-ever-after.