Gloves Off

MM Hockey Romance
by Chase Power

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Grumpy/Sunshine, Age Gap, Forced Proximity, Closeted, Praise Kink, Size Difference, Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Secret Relationship, Coming Out

The enforcer spent fifteen years in the closet. The rookie spent nine years waiting for him. One season to decide who gets to drop the gloves first.

Brant “Brick” Maddox is 34 years old, 6’5″, 250 pounds of the meanest man in professional hockey, and the alternate captain of the Denver Avalanche. He’s been closeted for fifteen years — ever since his first love, a junior hockey teammate, was beaten to death by his own father for the crime of being drafted into the NHL and being in love with Brant. Brant has spent his career eating hits for other people. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t flirt. He doesn’t let anyone in. Until a rookie goalie walks into his locker room.

Zane “Spark” Ellis is 24, the starting goaltender, openly gay since he was sixteen, and the kind of beautiful trouble that makes a grown man rethink his life. Nine years ago, Zane had a poster of Brant Maddox on the back of his closet door. Now he’s sharing a hotel room with him on a five-game road trip. Now he’s blowing kisses at rival benches and getting his honor defended with right hooks. Now he’s seeing a side of the closeted enforcer nobody else on the team has ever seen — and he’s not planning on keeping quiet about it.

When a predatory GM catches them on parking-garage security footage, when a five-game suspension threatens the playoff run, when the ghost of a nineteen-year-old dead boy in Sudbury refuses to stop haunting Brant’s bed — they’re going to have to decide: keep hiding, or drop every glove they’ve got, and fight for the Cup, the team, and each other.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Grumpy closeted enforcer x sunny out rookie
✅ 10-year age gap that earns every sex scene
✅ Praise kink, size difference, locker-room risk
✅ Slow burn that absolutely detonates (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotionally annihilating)
✅ Found family hockey team with a captain who protects his boys
✅ A meddling mother who flies in on a red-eye in clogs and a plastic bag
✅ A Stanley Cup kiss at center ice on national television
✅ HEA guaranteed — wedding included

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⚠️ Content Warning: Explicit MM sex scenes (graphic, multiple, varied settings). Strong language throughout. On-page depiction of a homophobic slur used against a character (punished immediately). Off-page historical depiction of domestic violence and suicide of a secondary character (referenced as backstory — not depicted directly). Grief and trauma processing. Sports injury (concussion). Blackmail, workplace harassment, and media leaking of a relationship. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Drop the Gloves

The first time Brant Maddox saved my life, he did it with a right hook.

We were fourteen seconds into the third period, up 2–0 on Seattle, and I had just made the kind of save that would be on every highlight reel in the country by morning. Volkov’s wrister, low glove side, I’d gone post-to-post and snagged it out of the air like I was catching a frisbee at a barbecue. The Pepsi Center — sorry, the Avs play at Ball Arena now, but the old man in my head still calls it the Pepsi Center — the Ball Arena lost its fucking mind.

And because I am who I am, because this was my first game as the starting goaltender in the National Hockey League, because I had twenty thousand people chanting my name and I’d just robbed the best sniper on the planet, I did a thing.

I blew a kiss at the Kraken bench.

Just one. Pucker, pop, gone. My glove hand flared out like I was scattering rose petals. The crowd roared. The ref — God bless him, he was laughing behind his visor — skated past me and muttered, “Don’t start shit, kid.”

Too late.

Dmitri Volkov, six-foot-six of Siberian granite with a mustache that looked drawn on with a Sharpie, stood up in his bench like I’d personally keyed his truck. His gloves hit the boards before his skates did. And then he leaned over the rail, cupped his mouth, and shouted it loud enough that the front four rows heard him.

“Fuck you, faggot.”

Now.

Here’s the thing about being a twenty-four-year-old openly gay goalie in the NHL. You hear the word. You hear it from drunks in Dallas, you hear it from farm-team grinders who know they’ll never be called up, you hear it from a certain breed of gentleman on Twitter who reply to your highlights with a green-and-white avatar and three exclamation points. You develop a kind of callus. You laugh. You chirp back. You skate to center ice, point at your name on the back of the jersey, and mouth learn to read.

I didn’t get the chance.

Because by the time Volkov’s second syllable left his mouth, Brant Maddox was already airborne.

I didn’t see him jump the boards. I didn’t see him cross the neutral zone. I saw him arrive — one second Volkov was leaning over the rail being a piece of shit, the next second Brant had him by the collar of his jersey, had yanked him clear of the bench like he weighed nothing, and was driving a gloved fist into the center of his face with the kind of torque that made the arena go very briefly, very completely silent.

Then it exploded.

You have never heard twenty thousand people lose their fucking minds until you have heard twenty thousand people lose their fucking minds because Brant “Brick” Maddox, number seventeen, 6’5″ and 250 pounds of the meanest man in professional hockey, has just decided your honor is worth a game misconduct. The horn went off. The linesmen skated in from both sides and — I am not exaggerating — bounced off him like he was a brick wall in a cartoon. He hit Volkov three more times before they got a hand on his arm. Volkov went down on the ice in a heap and stayed there, one skate twitching, blood pooling through the gap between his helmet and his visor.

Brant stood over him, chest heaving, blood on his knuckles that wasn’t his, and for one long stupid second he looked up and found me in the crease.

Gray eyes. Storm-sky gray. He did not smile. He did not nod. He just looked at me, and I felt it go all the way down to the soles of my skates.

Then the refs dragged him off.

The PA announcer said something I didn’t hear. The jumbotron cut to a slow-motion replay, which was rude, and the Ball Arena chanted BRICK. BRICK. BRICK. as he skated off with both middle fingers in the air and his mouthguard dangling from his teeth.

Coach Petrov was screaming. My backup — Dutch, bless him, sweet dumb Dutch who I loved like a brother — tapped me on the pads and said, “You okay, Spark?”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out normal. My voice is a trained instrument. My voice had been answering questions since I was sixteen years old. “Yeah, I’m good. Let’s finish this.”

I was not good.

I was lit up like a pinball machine. I was vibrating at a frequency so high my blocker was humming. There was a man in the penalty box — no, there was a man being escorted down the tunnel, because you don’t go to the box for what he’d just done, you go to the showers and pray the league doesn’t suspend you for eight games — there was a man I had barely spoken to, a man I had idolized since I was fifteen years old watching VHS tapes of the Sudbury Wolves in my grandmother’s basement, and he had just broken another man’s face because somebody called me a slur.

I let in a goal ninety seconds later. Soft one. Five-hole. I would hear about it tomorrow.

We still won. 2–1. My first NHL shutout was dead, but my first NHL win was alive, and I was alive, and somewhere in the bowels of Ball Arena so was Brant Maddox.

The locker room after a win is a religious experience. I don’t care what they tell you about dugouts and end zones, there is nothing on earth like the sound of twenty-three men in various states of undress, high on adrenaline and Advil and the sheer animal joy of having skated faster than somebody else for sixty minutes. Someone had the Avs’ cup-run playlist going. Someone else was pouring champagne into a boot. Captain Reid Hollister — our captain, our dad, six-foot-two of calm Nebraska boy with a wife and a kid and the patience of a saint — was in one corner shaking his head and laughing.

I ripped off my chest protector and bellowed, “WHO’S GOT A SHOT FOR THE ROOKIE?”

“You’re the rookie, dipshit,” Axe yelled back. He was already shirtless. Axel Bergström, our Swedish bullet, openly bi, openly insane. “You don’t get shots. You get a capri sun.”

“I am the STARTING GOALIE—”

“You’re a child.”

“I am the STARTING GOALIE and I—”

“Sit down.”

The room fell off a cliff.

You know how, in an orchestra, there’s the moment the conductor raises his baton and two hundred people shut up at exactly the same time? It was like that. Except the conductor was Brant Maddox, in a black Avalanche hoodie and a towel over his shoulder, with his right hand wrapped in ice and tape, leaning in the locker room doorway like he paid the mortgage on the place.

He wasn’t looking at the room. He was looking at me.

“Sit. Down.”

I sat down.

I sat down on the bench in front of my stall, in full goalie pants and nothing else, with my chest still heaving and my bubble butt parked on damp wood and my mouth hanging open like a trout, because Brant Maddox had just told me to sit and my body had responded before my brain filed a complaint.

Someone — Reid, I think, it was always Reid — made a very quiet ooh sound that got coughed into his fist.

Brant crossed the room. Slowly. He didn’t look at anyone else. The guys parted for him the way water parts for a tanker. When he got to my stall he reached past my shoulder, picked up the bottle of water sitting there, and set it in my lap.

“Drink,” he said.

“I—”

“Drink.”

I drank.

He watched me swallow. His eyes went from the bob of my throat to the line of my collarbone to — briefly, very briefly, I will remember it until the day I die — the wet blond curl plastered to my temple. Then he stepped back.

“You don’t blow kisses in my barn,” he said. “Understood?”

“He started it—”

“I don’t care who started it.” His voice was low. Gravel in a cement mixer. I was going to think about that voice in the shower. I was going to think about that voice for years. “You’re my goalie. You stay in your net and you shut your mouth. You want to chirp, you chirp with your glove. You don’t give them anything they can use against you. Understood?”

I could feel the whole room watching.

I could also feel my dick beginning a slow, optimistic campaign inside my compression shorts, because Brant Maddox had just called me my goalie, and apparently that was a thing that did things to me.

“Understood, Brick.”

He held my eyes for one second longer than was decent.

Then he turned and walked out.

The second the door swung shut the room detonated.

“BRICK’S GOT A NEW PET—”

“Spark, my man, you are married now—”

“—the way he looked at him—”

“—did you see Volkov’s face, Jesus Christ—”

Axe threw a roll of sock tape at my head. “Drink your water, goalie. Daddy said.”

“Fuck off, Axe—”

“He gave you a water bottle.“

“He’s team captain adjacent—”

“He’s the enforcer. He protects the team. He hit Volkov for all of us. Him giving you a water bottle is something else, brother, and we are all going to be talking about it for a very long time.”

“Shut up. Shut up.“

Reid came by my stall five minutes later, after the worst of the chirping had died down, and sat on the bench next to me with a towel around his neck. He smelled like sweat and Old Spice and the specific deodorant all captains seem to wear, which is probably made in a secret factory in Saskatchewan.

“Kid,” he said.

“Captain.”

“That was a hell of a save in the second.”

“Thanks, Cap.”

“Don’t blow kisses anymore.”

“Noted.”

He nodded, very slowly, looking out at the far wall where Brant’s stall sat empty and neat, gear hung with the kind of geometric precision that made you wonder what else he was like to live with.

“He doesn’t do that,” Reid said. Quiet. For me.

“Doesn’t do what?”

“Fight for rookies.”

“…Oh.”

“He’s fought for me twice in eight years. He’s fought for Vanderpool one time, and that was because a guy spit on him.” Reid turned, and his eyes were kind, and that scared me more than if he’d been pissed. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what I saw. Okay?”

“Okay, Cap.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. Stood up. Walked away.

I sat there in my wet goalie pants and a rising sense of existential crisis for another thirty seconds before I grabbed my towel and my shower kit and headed for the showers.

The visitors’ shower was empty. Of course it was. Half the guys were still drinking champagne out of a boot; the other half were doing post-game interviews. The water ran hot and hard and I cranked it all the way up until the tile was steaming, and I stood under the spray with my hands braced on the wall and my forehead against the cool tile, and I tried to will my dick down.

It would not come down.

It had in fact gotten harder, because I had gone through the last forty-five minutes on pure adrenaline and now the adrenaline was leaving and the adrenaline was being replaced by the memory of Brant Maddox in a black hoodie saying my goalie in a voice like a truck rolling over gravel.

Don’t, I thought.

Don’t do this. You do not jerk off in a team shower on your first home opener. You do not jerk off in a team shower thinking about your own enforcer. That is a lawsuit. That is a very specific kind of therapy bill.

My hand was already on my cock.

The water was pounding down on my shoulders. My forehead was against the tile. My cock was hot and thick and — look, I have not had an easy life, I have had to be very honest about very many things to very many people, and in the interest of honesty I will tell you: I have a pretty cock. I know it. I’ve been told it. It’s uncut and it curves up and it gets a deep flushed pink when I’m close, and I like to look at it, and I am a vain little shit about it, and standing there in that shower with the water hammering my back, I wrapped my hand around it and I thought about the exact way Brant Maddox’s jaw had looked with Volkov’s blood on his knuckles.

Stop.

I didn’t stop.

I thought about his mouth. The beard. The gray in the beard, at the corners, where it looked like frost. I thought about his hand — his fucking hand, with the ice and the tape, his hand that had been inside another man’s face an hour ago — settling a water bottle into my lap. Drink.

I thought about if he’d said kneel instead.

I came against the tile in four hard pulses, biting into my own forearm so I wouldn’t make a sound, and my knees went weak and I pitched forward into the wall, and for a second — just one second — I wanted to cry, because what the fuck was I doing, and also because it had felt really, really good.

“Ellis?”

Axe’s voice, from the locker room.

I jerked upright so fast I banged my elbow on the soap dispenser. “YEAH.”

“You good? You’ve been in there like ten minutes.”

“YEAH, I’M GOOD, I WAS—” My voice cracked. I coughed. “Cooling down! Adrenaline! Be right out!”

A beat.

“Okay, weirdo.”

I waited until I heard the door swing shut. Then I leaned my head back against the tile and let the water run down my face, and I closed my eyes, and I thought: You are in so much trouble, Zane Ellis. You are in so much trouble.

Media was brutal.

Twelve microphones, three cameras, a beat reporter from the Denver Post who had decided my relationship with the puck was her pet project for the season. I gave them what they wanted. I was dazzling. I was charming. I was the sparky little rookie with the sparky little smile, and when they asked about Volkov’s chirp I rolled my eyes and said, “I’ve been called worse by my grandmother. God rest her. She had a mouth on her.”

That got a laugh. It always got a laugh.

When they asked about Brant I said, “Our enforcer does his job. I do mine. No further comment.”

The beat reporter — Kayla, blonde, forty, mean in the way I respected — smirked. “Come on, Spark. He went nuclear on Volkov for you.”

“He went nuclear on Volkov because Volkov is a shithead. I was just in the vicinity.”

“You looked a little starry-eyed on the replay.”

“Ma’am, I am always starry-eyed. It’s a medical condition.”

Another laugh. Good. Move on.

By the time I got back to the locker room it was mostly empty. The lights had come down. The music was off. My gear was hanging in my stall where I’d left it, with a piece of hockey tape stuck to the top of my mask. Someone had written on it in Sharpie: DON’T GET CUT, ROOKIE. Axe’s handwriting. I peeled it off and stuck it inside my helmet, because I am a sentimental bastard and I keep everything.

Coach Petrov was standing by my stall.

“Ellis.”

“Coach.”

“Sit.”

I sat.

Coach was sixty-two years old and had played in the KHL and then the NHL and then coached in both, and he had the kind of face that looked like it had been carved out of the side of a mountain and then left outside through several bad winters. He sat down on the bench next to me, which was the most intimate thing he’d done with me since I got called up.

He held out a piece of paper.

“Your roommate assignment for the road trip.”

“I have Dutch—”

“Dutch got sent down this afternoon. You didn’t hear.”

“Oh — shit. Shit, he just—”

“He’ll be back. He’s fine. He needed reps.” Coach tapped the paper. “This is your new roommate. Five-game road trip. You leave tomorrow at six a.m.”

I looked at the paper.

MADDOX, B. #17 — ELLIS, Z. #31

Five games.

Five hotel rooms.

Five nights in rooms with two beds and one bathroom and a man who had looked at me across a locker room an hour ago and told me to drink my fucking water.

“Coach.”

“Ellis.”

“Why.”

He looked at me. His mustache moved in a way that might have been a smile, on another man, on another day. “Because I asked him to. You had a good game, Ellis. You have a great arm and a great brain and an extremely large mouth. I want you paired with someone who will teach you when to close it. Understood?”

“…Understood, Coach.”

“Don’t give me that face.”

“I’m not giving you a face—”

“You are giving me a face. I have raised three daughters. I know every face there is. Wheels up, six a.m. Sleep well, Ellis.”

He stood. He clapped me on the shoulder — the second captain-figure to do so in an hour, and I was going to end up with a bruise — and he walked out.

I sat on the bench in the quiet, empty locker room, staring at a piece of paper with my name on it next to his, and I said, out loud, to nobody: “I am so screwed.”

The parking garage at Ball Arena is four levels underground and always smells like concrete and engine oil and the faint sweet rot of somebody’s spilled Gatorade. I walked out with my bag over my shoulder and my phone in my hand, already scrolling through the nineteen unread texts I’d been ignoring.

Mom: So proud of you baby call when you can

Axe: bro you looked drunk in media

Axe: good drunk tho

Axe: we drink tmrw after flight

Dutch: miss u already king be good to my bed

Unknown number: nice save in the second. you dropped your glove on the rebound.

I stopped walking.

I stared at the unknown number.

I looked up.

Brant Maddox was leaning against the driver’s door of a black Range Rover two spots down from my Jeep, in a gray henley and dark jeans and a Carhartt jacket that should have been illegal on a man his size. He had his phone in his hand. When I looked up, he pocketed it.

“You gave me your number?” I said.

“You gave me yours, rookie. Team directory.”

“You looked me up in the—”

“Coach told me I’m rooming with you for five games. Figured I should be able to reach you if you wander off.”

“I don’t wander off.“

“You strike me as a wanderer.”

He didn’t smile when he said it. He didn’t smile at all. He just looked at me across ten feet of concrete with his arms loose at his sides, and I realized his right hand was freshly wrapped in white tape, clean, tidy. He’d redone it. He’d redone it recently.

“Your hand okay?” I asked.

“It’s fine.”

“You hit him pretty hard.”

“I hit him about right.”

A car alarm chirped three rows over. Somebody in a suit walked past us with a press badge around his neck and did a double-take — Brant Maddox and Zane Ellis standing next to each other in a parking garage at midnight, what a scoop, what a picture — and then kept walking, because what was he going to do, ask us for a quote? We gave quotes upstairs. This was the off-hours. This was the part of the day where the players got to be people, in theory.

Brant tipped his head at my Jeep. “That yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Soft top. In Denver.”

“It’s a lifestyle, Brick.”

“It’s a death wish, rookie.” He pushed off the Range Rover. He walked over. He was even bigger up close than he was across a locker room, and he was extremely big across a locker room, and I had to tip my head back to look at him. He smelled like cedar and clean sweat and faintly, underneath, like the menthol they put on hockey bruises. He stopped about a foot away from me and said, low:

“Don’t ever make me fight for you again.”

My stomach dropped through the floor of the parking garage.

“I didn’t ask you to—”

“I know you didn’t ask. That’s the problem.” He was looking down at me, and his eyes were steady, and I could not read them and I wanted to. “Next time somebody like Volkov wants to get under your skin, you let him. You smile. You skate away. You don’t chirp, you don’t blow a kiss, you don’t give them a weapon. Are you hearing me?”

“…I hear you.”

“Good.” His eyes dropped, for half a second, to my mouth. Then they came back up. “Because next time I’ll do it again. And next time I’ll get eight games instead of two, and I’ll miss your first road trip, and you don’t want that.”

“I don’t?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t.”

The parking garage, I swear to God, had gotten quiet. Not actually quiet — there were still engines, somewhere, and the distant thunk of a security door — but the kind of quiet that happens in your head when somebody leans close enough that you can feel the warmth coming off them. He wasn’t touching me. He was a foot away. He felt like a furnace.

I managed: “Six a.m., huh.”

“Six a.m.”

“Two beds, right?”

His mouth — I saw it, I will swear to this in court — his mouth twitched. It was almost a smile. It did not become a smile.

“Two beds,” he said. “Don’t get cute, rookie.”

“I’m always cute. Medical condition.”

“Six a.m., Ellis. Don’t be late.”

He turned. He walked to his Range Rover. He got in. The engine turned over in that quiet expensive way that expensive engines do, and the headlights came on, and he backed out of the spot and drove up the ramp without looking at me once.

I stood in the parking garage with my bag on my shoulder and my phone in my hand and my entire chest cavity trying to climb out through my throat, and I looked down at my phone, and I thumbed open the text from the unknown number, and I saved it as a contact.

BRICK, I started to type, and then I deleted it, and I typed B. Maddox, and then I deleted it, and I typed Do Not Sleep With This Man, and I stared at it for three seconds, and I hit save.

Then I got in my Jeep.

Then I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.

Then I stood in my kitchen at midnight in my sweats, drinking a glass of water over the sink because he had told me to drink, apparently, and that was a thing now, and I looked at my phone on the counter, and I did not jerk off again, which I was very proud of, and I went to bed.

I lay in the dark with my eyes open.

I set my alarm for 4:45.

I thought about Dutch, sweet dumb Dutch, down in Loveland by now eating Panda Express in an AHL hotel bed, and I thought about the empty bed across from mine at the Marriott in New York tomorrow night, and I thought about the size of the man who was going to be sleeping in it.

I thought: five nights.

I thought: two beds.

I thought: five nights, two beds, and a man who told you to drink your water, Zane. You are a goalie. You stop pucks. You are a professional athlete. You can do this. You can absolutely do this. You are a grown adult man with a starting job and a signing bonus and a direct-deposit arrangement with the NHL Players’ Association. You can share a hotel room with a large Canadian for five nights and not make an ass of yourself.

I thought: I’m so fucked.

I rolled over.

I closed my eyes.

I did not sleep.

Somewhere across the city, in a condo I had not yet been invited to, in a king bed I had not yet been fucked in, in a life I had not yet been offered a key to, Brant “Brick” Maddox was probably already asleep, his right hand iced, his alarm set, his bag packed, his mouth still set in that straight hard line, and I — Zane “Spark” Ellis, twenty-four, starting goaltender for the Denver Avalanche, first-round pick, out and proud, son of a bitch who blew a kiss at Dmitri Volkov and lived — I was going to have to survive five games, five hotels, and five mornings of him coming out of a shower in a towel.

Starting at six a.m.

I opened my eyes in the dark.

“Fuck,” I said, to the ceiling. “Fuck me.”

The ceiling declined to comment.

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