Penalty Box Confessions

📖 Free with Kindle Unlimited

The PR team called it a bromance. The medical room knew better.

Roman Gallagher is thirty-two, six foot three, and built like a weapon with a conscience. Fifteen years in the NHL. Two rebuilt knees. Hands that have broken every bone they contain and a face that hasn’t smiled on camera since 2019. They call him The Wall — not because he blocks shots, but because nothing gets through. Not grief. Not joy. Not the memory of a father who drank himself to death and left Roman with a playbook for surviving and no instructions for living. He tapes his hands the same way every game. He eats the same meal. He controls everything because the alternative is feeling everything, and feeling everything is what killed his dad.

Kyler Thorne is twenty-four, tattooed, tongue-pierced, and constitutionally incapable of shutting up. Third trade in four years. The hockey world knows him as a fighter with a garbage attitude and a highlight reel of broken noses. What they don’t know: he aged out of foster care at eighteen, learned to skate because a Dorchester youth coach found him fighting behind a rink and handed him a stick instead of a lecture, and every dollar he’s earned in the NHL goes into an account he’ll never touch because spending it means trusting it’ll be replaced, and trusting is the thing he’s worst at. He’s loud because silence means no one’s listening. He fights because it’s the only language that’s never let him down.

They’re on the same line. They share ice time, a locker room, and the kind of volatile chemistry that makes coaches nervous and PR departments salivate. When the team’s social media coordinator decides their “rivalry” is marketing gold, Roman and Kyler are told to lean into the bromance — podcast appearances, joint interviews, choreographed content that packages their tension as entertainment.

The problem: the tension isn’t performative. It’s a live wire that detonates in a medical room after a game, when Roman pins Kyler to an exam table and puts his hand over his mouth and says this didn’t happen.

It happens again. And again. In equipment closets and hotel rooms and the back of a team bus at 2 AM while their teammates sleep ten feet away. Every encounter escalates — from fury to need, from denial to something that starts to look terrifyingly like devotion. Roman begins leaving his things at Kyler’s apartment. A phone charger. A hoodie. A blue toothbrush. The small, domestic evidence of a man who’s forgotten how to leave.

Then a photograph leaks. The team’s GM issues an ultimatum. And Roman — who has spent thirty-two years protecting himself by controlling everything — decides the only way to protect Kyler is to destroy them both.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

✓ A 32-year-old enforcer who hasn’t cried since his father’s funeral and a 24-year-old brat who makes him sob on a kitchen floor
✓ “This didn’t happen” (narrator: it happened, and it happened again, and it happened on a bus)
✓ A medical room exam table that should be condemned as a crime scene
✓ The blue toothbrush — the smallest, most devastating symbol of commitment in romance fiction
✓ A Russian teammate named Mitty who says “Good” exactly once and it’s the most important word in the book
✓ Hand-over-mouth sex. Equipment closet sex. Shower sex. Bus edge-play with teammates sleeping ten feet away
✓ Praise kink that evolves from dominance into devastation: “Good boy” → “You’re mine” → “I’m yours too”
✓ A GM’s blackmail threat, a leaked photo, and a breakup so devastating the team loses four straight
✓ The grand gesture: a Stanley Cup Finals center ice kiss seen by 340 million people
✓ A Dorchester youth hockey program epilogue that will ruin you
✓ 123,000 words of slow burn that detonates at center ice
✓ Guaranteed HEA