Description

📖 Paperback Edition — She left. She came back. She’s not leaving again.

Emily “Em” Dawson has spent twelve years keeping the Birch Lake Community Arena alive by sheer force of will. She runs the programs, coaches the kids, fixes the pipes, and hasn’t taken a day off since she was twenty-one. She’s competent, steady, and fine. Completely fine. She does not need anyone — especially not the woman who left her eleven years ago.

Alex Rivers was a star. A pro hockey forward with a jersey on TV and a highlight reel that could make you cry. Then her knee exploded, her career ended, and she spent fourteen months alone in a Montreal apartment watching her own clips and wondering when she’d stopped feeling anything. So she did the only thing left: she went home. To the rink. To the town. To her.

Em isn’t interested in second chances. She’s been the one who stayed — through her mother’s death, through the budget cuts, through the nights alone with a Zamboni and a building that needed her more than any person ever had. But Alex is different now. Alex shows up at 5:30 a.m. with coffee and donuts. Alex coaches kids and builds shelves and names the ice plant. Alex kneels on a bad knee to fix the boards, and when the ice plant dies at 3 a.m., Alex is there. Every time. Without being asked.

The problem is, Em’s body remembers what her brain is trying to forget. And when forced proximity, late nights, and eleven years of unresolved tension finally combust, “just physical” becomes the most dangerous lie either of them has ever told.

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno • Sapphic Second-Chance Hockey Romance by Aurora North

Tropes: Second Chance • Forced Proximity • Small Town • Found Family • Praise Kink • Slow Burn • Retired Pro Athlete × Rink Manager • HEA

Paperback details: 6 × 9 in • cream paper • matte cover. Includes a link to the exclusive bonus chapter. The ebook edition comes free with your paperback, emailed right after checkout.

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains graphic explicit sexual content (FF scenes including strap-on use), strong language, parental death (past), sports injury, and depictions of grief and emotional abandonment. Intended for readers 18+.

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