Yes, Captain

An MM Hockey Romance · by Jace Wilder

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Buy Now 📖

Available at your favorite retailer

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Age Gap, Praise Kink, Captain/Rookie, Forbidden Romance, Forced Proximity, Coming Out, Closeted, D/s Dynamic, Control/Surrender, Secret Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Touch Starved, Slow Burn, Bi Awakening, Found Family, Teammates to Lovers, Hockey Romance

Series: Ice Captains, Book 1

Length: 72,000 words · Full-length standalone

Eighteen years in the league. One word he’d never let himself need. The rookie who said it first.

Marc Donovan has been the captain of this franchise for eight years. At thirty-six, with a Conn Smythe and zero Cups, he knows what a pre-training-camp meeting with the GM means before the coffee is poured. The team drafted Tyler Chen third overall. They drafted Tyler Chen to replace him.

Tyler Chen is twenty-two, out since high school, and nursing a praise kink he keeps behind a very bright grin. He’s been watching Marc Donovan’s tape since he was sixteen. He did not expect the Captain to be beautiful. He did not expect the Captain to be quiet. And he absolutely did not expect to end up flooded out of his apartment and sleeping on the Captain’s couch nine weeks into the season.

What starts as icy professional distance becomes a six-a.m. ghost-shift ritual on a dark rink. Then a hotel room after a hat trick. Then a shower scene neither of them will survive clean. Marc hasn’t been with a man in his life. Tyler knows exactly what Marc needs to hear to come apart — and Marc has never, not once, let anyone say it to him. Until Tyler.

But the front office is leaking. A hit piece drops. Tyler’s estranged father tells him to end it. The trade rumor hits at eight a.m. on a Tuesday. And the only thing standing between the two of them and everything they’ve built in secret is one rainy morning, one long lens, and one impossible decision:

Hide. Or come out in front of every camera in the league.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Praise kink in the dead silence of a four-a.m. hotel room
✅ Age-gap MM hockey with a grumpy closeted Captain and a bratty bi rookie
✅ “Yes, Captain” as the phrase that ruins him
✅ Forced-proximity apartment flood → moves in → never leaves
✅ The rookie who figures out his Captain’s only tell in forty seconds
✅ A coming-out arc that doesn’t destroy the man doing it
✅ Dual POV — alternating Marc (wrecked, controlled) and Tyler (wrecked, mouthy)
✅ A hit so devastating it earns a standing ovation from the opposing bench
✅ D/s dynamic that’s about being seen, not about being hurt
✅ Slow burn that detonates at Chapter Nine (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit MM sexual content (graphic scenes with praise kink, D/s dynamics, power exchange, and age gap), on-page coming out under public/media pressure, references to emotional abuse from an estranged parent, depictions of a closeted athlete navigating professional consequences, and one Hurt/Comfort sequence involving a brief disappearance and reconciliation. HEA guaranteed. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One

Marc

The coffee was already poured when I walked in. That’s how I knew.

Paul Keller had a system. You got a cup if the news was going to go down easy. You got a cup before he saw you — poured and waiting, steam curling off the rim — if the news needed softening first. I stared at the white ceramic mug on the edge of his desk. The team logo faced my chair. The leather wingback behind it creaked when he leaned back.

Here we go.

“Donovan.” Paul didn’t stand. He never stood. He flicked two fingers at the chair across from him. The one with the wobbly leg, I’d learned, over eight years.

I sat.

He shuffled a folder. Pretended to read it. Paul had been general manager of this franchise for eleven years. I’d been here for eight of them. We both knew what folders were for. He wasn’t reading a thing.

“How’s the shoulder?”

“Fine.”

“Trainer says you were in for treatment twice last week.”

“Maintenance.”

He looked up over the rims of his glasses. Mid-fifties, thinning hair he’d given up fighting, soft eyes. Kind eyes. That was the worst part about Paul — he actually did care. It made the bad conversations worse. You couldn’t hate him for them.

“You know why you’re here.”

“No.”

A small smile. “Liar.”

I didn’t answer. I tapped my thumb against my thigh. Once. Twice. Three times. Caught myself. Stopped.

“We drafted Chen.”

“I was aware.”

“Third overall.”

“Also aware.”

Paul folded his hands on top of the folder. Unfolded them. Folded them again. “Marc. I want to be straight with you.”

“Haven’t you always.”

“I’ve always tried.” His mouth thinned. “The board wanted me to call you in two weeks ago. I pushed it. Wanted you to have the summer. But we’re three weeks from camp, and I’m not going to let you find out from a reporter.”

Something cold slid down the back of my throat. I kept my face still. Eighteen years in this league. I knew how to keep my face still.

“Find out what.”

“He’s your successor.”

The office went nothing but hum.

Then Paul started talking — slowly, the way men talk to animals and to children — about development arcs and franchise windows and optics. About how the team believed in me. How he personally believed in me. How none of this was a conversation about whether I was still the captain this season. How we had two years left on my deal and nobody, nobody, was rushing anything.

I let him talk.

I watched the steam curl off the coffee he’d poured for me, and I thought about how many of these conversations I’d sat through in eighteen years. Scouting reports. Trade inquiries. The time they moved me off the top line in Tampa and told me it was a matchup. The time my father called me from the parking lot at Mellon Arena to tell me I’d been soft on a hit, and then never called again. All of them had the same temperature. All of them tasted like this coffee.

“Did you hear me?” Paul said.

“I heard you.”

“And?”

I stood. Buttoned my jacket. Left the coffee where it was.

“Is that all?”

Paul watched me for a long moment. Then he nodded, once. “That’s all.”

I was at the door when he said my name.

“Marc.”

I didn’t turn.

“He’s a good kid. Try not to hate him.”

I pulled the door open. “I don’t hate kids, Paul. I don’t feel anything about them at all.”

And I walked out.

The rink in July has its own silence.

It’s the silence of a cathedral between services. The ice had been sitting untouched for sixteen hours. The work lights were half on — just the low ones above the boards — and the fluorescent buzz was the only sound in the entire building until I put my skate down on the sheet.

I put my skate down on the sheet.

The first stride is always the loudest. Blade cutting clean, spray kicking up, the whole world snapping into focus. By the third stride, your body remembers. By the tenth, you forget you were ever anything else.

I did laps. Counterclockwise, then clockwise, then hard cuts down the middle, then stop-and-starts at each blue line. No puck. No drill. Just movement. My knee felt tight. My shoulder was fine, whatever the trainer had reported. My head was not fine, but it hadn’t been fine in weeks, so that was no new information.

Thirty-six years old.

Eighteen seasons in the league.

Two Olympic appearances. One Conn Smythe. Three All-Star nods.

No Cup.

The thing about legacy is that you don’t choose when it starts, and you definitely don’t choose when it ends. Other people choose. Other people sit in offices with coffee poured ahead of time and shuffle folders and say successor and expect you to smile about it.

I wasn’t going to smile about it.

I wasn’t going to yell about it, either. My father had yelled his whole life. I’d spent thirty-six years making sure I was nothing like him, and I wasn’t about to waste that work on Paul Keller.

I skated. I breathed. This building had been mine at six a.m. for eight years. Equipment staff knew me. Security guards let me in without checking my badge. The Zamboni kid, whose name was Miguel, left a cup of coffee on the bench every morning, black, no sugar, because I’d mentioned once — once, three winters ago — that I liked it that way. The kind of small kindness nobody else in my life had ever bothered with.

The kind of life where a Zamboni driver was the person who knew how I took my coffee.

I skated harder.

The rink was mine for another hour, minimum. Optional skate wasn’t until nine. The kids — the rookies, I corrected, stop calling them kids — wouldn’t start trickling in until eight.

Except.

The service door at the tunnel end popped. The sound carries in an empty arena. I heard the latch, the hinge, the slow press of it opening, and I didn’t look up. Groundskeeper, probably. Or Miguel starting his shift early. Or Reese, who occasionally drove in stupid early when one of his kids had kept him up all night and he wanted to hide.

Footsteps. Skate guards on concrete. Not Reese’s.

I kept skating.

“Captain Donovan.”

I made one more lap before I let myself look.

He was standing at the boards with his gloves under one arm and a stick resting across his shoulders like a yoke. Black Under Armour, gray shorts, white socks pulled up. Helmet off. Hair a mess, like he’d tried to fix it in the car and given up. A grin I already wanted to wipe off his mouth.

Tyler Chen.

I’d seen the tape. I’d watched the combine. I’d sat through every development clip the coaching staff had forced on me last spring, back when there was still a pretense that my opinion mattered on who we selected. I knew the kid’s face. I knew his numbers. I knew his reach, his stride, his soft hands, his bad habit of showing off when he got bored.

What the tape did not tell me was that he was pretty.

It’s a word I don’t use. I don’t think in it. But the tape hadn’t shown it right, and now he was twenty feet away from me in person, and there was no other word for what I was looking at.

Boyish face. Dark eyes, lashes that belonged on somebody else. Mouth too full for his jaw. A hint of a bruise high on his cheekbone — summer league, probably, or a training-camp scrimmage I hadn’t been invited to because none of this was a conversation about whether I was still the captain. He was twenty-two years old, and he had the kind of face that was going to sell a lot of jerseys.

I held him in my peripheral vision for another half-lap before I cut toward the boards.

Came to a stop two feet from him. Threw up a small curl of spray. Didn’t apologize.

“You’re early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Big day.” He tilted his head. The grin didn’t move, but something behind it shifted, testing. “Wanted to meet the Captain before the rest of the boys got here. Seemed rude not to.”

“Rude.”

“My mom raised me right.”

“Did she.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He pulled his right glove off and held his hand out across the boards.

Bare hand. Bare forearm. A scar I couldn’t place along the back of his wrist. Nails trimmed short and neat. A thin band of tape wrapped around the base of his thumb, brown with rosin.

I looked at the hand.

I looked at it for one beat too long.

I don’t know what possessed me. Eighteen years of professional handshakes. Eighteen years of meeting rookies and legends and commissioners and Russian oligarchs who’d bought boxes at the arena, and I had never — not one time — looked at a hand before taking it. A handshake is a reflex. You don’t think about it. You don’t see it.

I saw his hand.

Then I took it.

His grip was warm and dry and firm, and I held it for exactly as long as the handshake required, and I let it go.

“Tyler Chen.”

“I know who you are.”

“Good.”

He didn’t move. He was still leaning on the boards, grin still at half-mast, still studying me. There was something unnervingly patient in how he looked at you. Like he had all day. Like he was waiting for you to give him something you didn’t mean to.

“You always here this early, Captain?”

“Yes.”

“Every day?”

“Yes.”

“Cool.” He nodded slowly. “Cool cool cool. Mind if I —” he gestured at the ice with his stick — “join?”

“Optional skate’s at nine.”

“I’m aware.”

“Then skate at nine.”

The grin cracked a fraction wider. “Or I skate now.”

I should have said no. I should have said this is my ice until nine, son, learn to read a schedule. What I said instead was nothing at all — because my thumb had started tapping against my thigh, one, two, three, and I had caught myself doing it and stopped, and when I looked back up at him, I could see, by the narrowing of his eyes, that he had seen.

Him. The kid. The rookie. My successor. He’d been in the building for forty seconds, and he’d already clocked a tell I’d spent thirty-six years pretending I didn’t have.

My stomach did something it had no business doing.

“Do what you want, Chen.”

I pushed off the boards. I didn’t look back.

I heard the gate swing. Heard his blades hit the ice behind me. Heard him glide out, slow and easy, taking his time to stretch into it.

I did not look back.

I took one lap. Two. Three. Found my rhythm again. Forced my shoulders down.

He fell in roughly forty feet behind me, and he stayed there. Didn’t try to catch up. Didn’t try to talk. Didn’t try to show off. He skated a lap, and another lap, and another lap, and by the fifth one I could tell — without turning my head, just by the sound of his edges — that he had matched his tempo to mine exactly.

Every stride. Every breath. Every long, lazy glide around the curve.

It was the most annoying thing anybody had ever done to me.

We skated like that for thirty-five minutes. In silence. Two men, one ice, forty feet of distance.

When the service door popped again at seven forty-five and Reese Kowalski wandered in yawning with a coffee in his hand, I was sweating and furious, and I had not said one word to Tyler Chen since I’d told him to do what he wanted. He had not said one word to me.

Reese saw us both on the ice and stopped walking.

He looked at Tyler.

He looked at me.

He looked at Tyler again.

Then he turned around and walked back out of the arena without putting a foot on the bench — because Reese had known me for eight years, and he understood, the way I had not yet understood, that something was already wrong.

I finished dressing in the captain’s stall, alone, forty minutes later.

The rest of the team had cycled through. Loud voices. Chirping. A stereo somebody had set up in the corner playing something Bishop liked, which was never something the rest of us liked. The kid — Chen — had been swallowed by a group of the younger guys who immediately wanted to meet him, touch his gear, try to make him laugh. He’d laughed at all of it. He was good at being laughed at. I didn’t look, but I could hear, and he was good at it, the way some people are good at a language they were raised in.

I hadn’t been raised in that language.

Now the room was empty. Skates off. Tape off. Towel over my shoulders. I sat on the bench in front of my stall with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped, and I tried to breathe the way the team’s meditation guy had tried to teach me three years ago.

I couldn’t.

What I could do was count.

Twenty-two years old.

Fourteen years younger than me.

He had been eight when I was drafted.

I sat there with my wet hair dripping onto the concrete between my feet, and I thought: twenty-two. Jesus Christ. He still has acne on his jaw.

Then I thought: You are in very bad trouble, Donovan.

I drove home. I didn’t turn on the radio. When I got to my apartment I stood in the kitchen in my street clothes and stared at the coffee maker for a long time without turning it on.

The first day of a season is supposed to feel like something.

This one felt like a door I hadn’t meant to open.

And couldn’t close.

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First Home Game — A scene TOO HOT for Retail

Five months after the epilogue. Opening night of the new season. Tyler’s A sewn onto his chest. Marc’s C still on his. The first game they play together as a publicly-out captain and alternate. The most explicit, praise-heavy, possessive scene of the entire book.

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