Rookie Mistake

He’s fast, loud, and hiding behind the best smile in the league.

Eli Mercer talks his way through everything: draft interviews, locker rooms, the fact that he’s bisexual and has never told anyone in professional hockey. The grin is real. The grin is also a wall. And Atlanta’s training camp is the worst possible place to let it crack — especially when the man making it crack is a thirty-year-old Russian defenseman who folds his T-shirts like it’s a competitive sport.
Nikolai Sokolov doesn’t do chaos. He doesn’t do loud. He doesn’t do rookies who show up nine minutes late with a coffee stain and a smile that rewires his entire nervous system. He especially doesn’t do trust — not since the last person he let in used the access to destroy him.
One night of forced proximity. One elevator kiss that should not have happened. One season of pretending the thing between them is manageable.
It’s not manageable.
When Eli’s bisexuality becomes a headline he didn’t choose and Nikolai’s past walks back into the conference, every wall they’ve built gets tested. The grin. The control. The carefully maintained distance between “this is just camp” and “I’m in love with you.”

Rookie mistake: falling this fast.
Best mistake he ever made.

Rookie Mistake is a full-length MM hockey romance featuring a bisexual sunshine rookie, a grumpy Russian veteran with trust issues, forced proximity, an age gap, an elevator kiss that violates structural code, and a security guard who has been watching people fall in love in this building for thirty-two years. HEA guaranteed. This book can be read as a standalone but contains characters from the Power Play series.