Knockout

Marek has driven across Italy for two years to spend nights with Enzo, and never once stayed until morning. Eventually, he just stopped showing up. Now the World Cup has dropped both their national teams in the same city, three blocks apart.

Marek Kovár’s a Czech international with his whole life sorted into sealed boxes: the footballer, the teammate, the man nobody knows drives to Naples on his off-days. Enzo is the one box he can’t keep shut. And the bracket has them on a collision course for the quarterfinal, Czech Republic against Italy, where Marek’s only job is to mark the man he’s spent two years pretending he can live without.

Enzo Valenti has never hidden a day in his life. He’s out to the people who matter, rooted to the bone in the city that made him, and done being any man’s secret. He knows Marek wants him. He just needs to know if Marek will ever choose him in daylight, instead of leaving before the coffee’s made.

You can keep a man in a box when you only see him after dark. You can’t keep him there when you have to mark him for ninety minutes in front of thousands of people.

Knockout is the second book in the Open Play soccer series about a guarded man, another who refuses to be a secret, and the soccer tournament that puts them on opposite sides of the same white line. A second chance romance with rivals on the pitch, a found family of teammates who notice everything, and a secret relationship running out of places to hide and a swoony HEA.

Tropes: second chance • rivals to lovers • secret relationship • forced proximity • closeted/out • grumpy-sunshine • slow burn • found family