Return to Contact

A Forbidden Doctor × Hockey Player Romance
by Tessa Valehart

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MF
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Standalone
Tropes: Doctor × Hockey Player, Forbidden Romance, Professional Boundaries, Injured Athlete Comeback, Older Hero, Age Gap, Competence Kink, He Falls First, Mutual Pining, Praise Kink, Instruction Kink, Ask First, Control Swap, Light Bondage, Scar Worship, Quiet Hero, Workplace Ethics, Grovel Done Right, No Cheating, No Love Triangle

Cleared to play. Not cleared to touch her.

Grant Ellison has twelve seasons, a captain’s C, and eight millimeters of bone holding his shoulder together. He sat out seventy-four games. The only signature standing between him and another season belongs to the woman who rebuilt him.

Dr. Noelle Hart is precise, unsmiling, and the first person who has ever made him want to tell the truth about how much it hurts. She touches him for a living. He has started counting the days between appointments.

Then she offers him a place in her return-to-play study: eight months, twelve visits, every collision measured. He signs before she has finished explaining it. She assumes he wants to know whether he can trust the repair. He does. He also wants another reason to be in a room with her.

What starts with a hand at his jaw in an exam room becomes a confession in a parking lot, a fourteen-day recusal, and a rule: until she has handed every piece of his care to someone else, she is not going to touch him for any reason that cannot go in the chart.

But the woman who makes him take his pain seriously is also the one person he doesn’t want to disappoint. And the numbers he writes in the daily log have started getting smaller.

Return to Contact is a high-heat MF hockey romance with a veteran captain, the surgeon who rebuilt his shoulder, a clean handover of care before the first kiss, a research study under scrutiny, grown-up conversations about risk and want, a lot of on-page spice, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual first-person POV. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A 38-year-old captain who has measured his worth in games played and has to learn another unit
✅ A 31-year-old surgeon who refuses to let attraction blur a clinical decision
✅ Competence kink both ways: he knows his body; she knows what he does to it
✅ Fourteen days of waiting, every decision on paper, and a first kiss that is nobody’s secret
✅ “Tell me what you want.” A man who asks, listens, and lets her set the pace
✅ Scar worship, instructions, praise, light restraint, and power exchanged both ways
✅ A pain log, a coach who asks the wrong questions, and a sports psychologist who asks the right ones
✅ A grovel that is a corrected record and a man who finally stops rounding down
✅ No cheating, no love triangle, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MF scenes, including oral sex, manual sex, instruction and praise play, light bondage, negotiated power exchange in both directions, and sex without condoms after testing and discussion of contraception), strong language, surgery and rehabilitation after a sports injury, an on-page shoulder dislocation, chronic pain and concealment of symptoms, professional ethics and research oversight, an investigation into a disclosed relationship, public scrutiny, and a brief third-act separation. The romantic relationship begins only after the heroine has formally transferred all clinical and research responsibility for the hero. No cheating, no sexual violence, no dub-con. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Grant

The paper on the examination table makes a sound like a man wrapping a sandwich every time I move, so I stop moving.

That is the first decision I make in room four. The second is not to look at the clock. I have been looking at clocks for eight months, and none of them has told me anything useful.

The room smells of disinfectant and the lemon hand cream the receptionist uses. There is a poster of the shoulder joint on the wall, all the useful parts labeled in a font nobody over forty can read without leaning in. I could label most of them myself by now. Glenoid. Labrum. Capsule. The things I used to call my shoulder, back when it was one thing instead of a collection of things that could go wrong separately.

My shirt is folded on the chair. My phone is on top of it, face down, because the group chat has been making jokes since seven and I have not answered any of them.

Tell her we need you, Cap.

Wear something low-cut.

Ask if she can rebuild my credit while she’s in there.

They mean well. Hockey players mean well in a way that can get a man killed.

The door opens at 9:02. Dr. Noelle Hart comes in with a tablet under one arm and my chart in the other, because she reads things on paper even though the hospital has spent what must be a defense budget trying to make her stop.

“Grant.”

“Doctor.”

She closes the door with her heel. Navy trousers, white coat, hair pulled back in a low knot that has already given up one strand at her temple. She is thirty-one. I know because someone sent me a profile when I was deciding who would operate, and I read it seven times before I agreed to let her take apart the joint that pays my mortgage.

She has small, strong hands. I knew that before I knew anything else about her, because the first time she examined me she put one around the back of my shoulder and the other under my elbow and said, Let me have the weight.

I have been thinking about that sentence for eight months.

“How is it this morning?”

“Good.”

She looks at me over the top of the chart. Not angry. Not skeptical, exactly. The look of a woman who has heard good from a hundred athletes and has yet to find it diagnostically helpful.

“Give me a number.”

“One.”

“At rest?”

“At rest.”

“And reaching overhead?”

“Two.”

“And after yesterday’s skate?”

I look at the poster. She waits.

“Three,” I say.

“There we are.” She writes it down. “How long did it stay at three?”

“An hour.”

“Grant.”

“Two.”

She makes another note. “We can work with two hours. We can’t work with an hour that becomes two after I ask your name.”

That is the thing about her. She never raises her voice. She doesn’t need to. She puts a sentence down between us, exactly level, and I have to look at it.

“I iced it.”

“I assumed you did. You’re very good at the parts that involve doing something. It’s the parts that involve telling me something we’re still practicing.”

I could argue. I have spent twelve seasons being paid to argue with men twice her size. I do not argue with Noelle Hart about my shoulder.

She sets the chart on the counter and sanitizes her hands. I watch her rub them together, fingers interlaced, thumbs separately. The same order every time. Then she warms them for a second against her coat.

She does that because I flinched at cold hands in February. Once. I didn’t say anything. She noticed, and she has warmed them every time since.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

She steps between my knees because the table is high and I am six foot three and that is where she can reach what she needs to reach. It is a clinical arrangement. I have been telling myself that for eight months too.

Her left hand settles on the back of my shoulder. Her right finds the scar.

It runs along the front, pale now, a short curved line that looks too small for what happened under it. In January my shoulder came out against the boards in a way that took a piece of bone with it. The team physician called it a recurrent instability event. The replay looked like a man trying to put his arm through his own back.

Noelle rebuilt the socket with a piece of my coracoid and two screws. Eight millimeters of bone. She showed me on the scan. I had spent my entire career thinking of myself as durable, and it turned out durability could be measured with a ruler you kept in a pencil case.

“Any tenderness here?”

She presses along the line. Her fingertips are warm. I can smell something clean in her hair, not perfume, just shampoo, close enough that I have to keep my eyes on the wall above her head.

“No.”

“Here?”

“A little.”

“Good. Thank you for saying so.”

I am thirty-eight years old. I have captained a professional hockey team. I have played with a broken finger, a cracked rib, and once with a fever that should have put me in a hospital. A woman saying good because I admitted something hurt should not do what it does to me.

It does it anyway.

She takes my elbow and lifts my arm. Slowly, watching my face instead of the joint. At shoulder height she stops.

“Let me move it.”

“You are moving it.”

“I’m moving it against you. Those are different exercises.” Her thumb rests on the inside of my elbow. “Let me have the weight, Grant.”

There it is.

I let go. Not of the arm. Of the part of me that keeps trying to hold it in place because holding things in place is how I have survived every season since I was twenty-six.

Her hands take it. The joint moves. Nothing tears. Nothing slips. I breathe out, and she sees that too.

“Better.”

She tests external rotation, then internal, then the strength I’ve spent half a year building back one humiliating resistance band at a time. She tells me to push. I push. She tells me to stop. I stop. She writes down numbers I want to read over her shoulder and don’t, because I have learned that she will show me when she’s ready.

“Ninety-four percent,” she says at last.

“Of the other side?”

“Of the other side. Which is itself stronger than your pre-op baseline, because apparently you cannot be given a rehabilitation program without turning it into a competition.”

“It’s a useful flaw.”

“Sometimes.”

She says it gently, which is worse than if she didn’t.

Then she puts one hand under my jaw.

I go completely still.

It is a normal part of an examination. She needs my head turned away to check the line of the upper trapezius, and she has done it before. But the pad of her thumb is just below my ear, and her fingers rest along the underside of my jaw, and for one second I cannot remember a single useful thing about being a grown man.

“Turn for me.”

I turn.

“Any pulling?”

“No.”

Her hand stays there while she looks. I can feel every point of contact. The thumb. The fingers. The heel of her palm near my throat. My pulse is beating directly into it, and there is no way she doesn’t know.

For a moment she doesn’t move either.

Then her hand is gone, and she is on the other side of the room, writing in the chart with a little more attention than the chart probably needs.

I look down at my knees and tell my body to remember where it is.

“I am clearing you for contact practice,” she says.

The words hit so hard I don’t answer.

Seventy-four games. I watched seventy-four games in a suit, in the press box, in the training room, on my own couch at home with the sound turned down because I couldn’t bear the commentators saying my name in the past tense. Seventy-four games of being useful in ways nobody puts on a contract.

“Grant.”

“I heard you.”

“I need to know you heard the next part too.” She sits on the stool and rolls it close enough that we’re at eye level. “Contact practice. Not unrestricted competition. Not an invitation to prove anything. We progress the load. We keep the daily log. If pain goes above four or stays elevated into the next morning, you tell me before you tell the coach.”

“He’ll love that.”

“His approval is not a clinical endpoint.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. She almost smiles, and that almost is a thing I’ve started collecting without permission.

“I mean it,” she says. “You have a strong repair. You have done the work. What you do not have is a shoulder that can tell the difference between courage and denial.”

“Neither can half the league.”

“Then we’ll start with you.”

She slides the clearance across the counter. Her signature is small and exact. Noelle Hart, MD. The letters I’ve been waiting for since February.

I pick the paper up with my good hand, then realize I don’t have a good hand and a bad hand anymore, and have to put it down for a second.

She gives me that second. She has always been good at giving me the exact amount of silence I need, not enough to hide in, just enough to stand up inside.

“There’s something else,” she says when I’m ready.

“That sounded expensive.”

“It’s a study. It costs you time, not money.”

She turns the tablet around. A clean white screen, the hospital logo, a title long enough to be a warning.

Prospective Assessment of Return-to-Contact Outcomes Following Surgical Stabilization in Elite Collision Athletes.

“Catchy.”

“We let the ethics board name things. It discourages frivolity.”

I look at her. She looks back, completely straight-faced, and there it is again, the almost-smile.

“Eight months,” she says. “Twelve visits. Strength testing, range of motion, patient-reported outcomes, and an instrumented shoulder pad during practice and games. We measure the load you actually take, not the load you remember taking when someone asks you afterward.”

“You think we lie?”

“I think memory is very generous to people who want to keep playing.”

She explains the consent form. She explains that I can withdraw any time. She explains that joining or refusing has no effect on my care, my clearance, or what she tells the team. She says all of it slowly, as though she expects me to listen.

I do listen. I just also listen to the other thing underneath it.

Twelve visits.

Eight more months in rooms like this one. Eight more months of her saying my name in that level voice. Eight more months of being looked at closely by someone who doesn’t need me to be indestructible.

“I’ll do it,” I say.

“You haven’t read the form.”

“I’ll read it.”

“You can take it home.”

“I can read it here.”

Something changes in her face. Not much. She takes the pen she was about to hand me and sets it on the counter instead.

“Then read it here. All of it. I’ll be back in ten minutes, and you can ask me anything.”

She leaves me with the form and the closed door and the poster of all the parts I am trying not to break.

I read every line.

Then I sign.

Outside, the city is doing an ordinary Thursday. Buses. A man arguing with a parking meter. Somebody carrying flowers into the hospital with the careful, frightened grip people use for things that are supposed to help.

I stand beside my truck with the clearance folded in my jacket and call the team.

Coach answers before the first ring finishes.

“Well?”

“Contact practice.”

He makes a noise that is almost a laugh and almost a prayer. Then he is talking about lines and systems and how the room needs me and how long it has been, and I say yes in the right places and look up at the fourth-floor windows.

One of those rooms is hers. I don’t know which. I know that I want to.

That is new enough to frighten me.

“You with me, Ellison?”

“I’m with you.”

“Tomorrow. Full kit. Let’s get you back where you belong.”

He hangs up. I get into the truck. I put the clearance on the passenger seat and sit with both hands on the wheel.

I should be thinking about the ice. About the sound the blade makes on the first hard turn. About the room, the jersey, the C. I have wanted all of that so badly for so long that there were mornings I couldn’t get out of bed without listing it.

Instead I am thinking about her thumb under my ear.

About let me have the weight.

About the fact that I have just volunteered for eight more months of appointments, and I told myself it was because I wanted to know whether I could trust the repair.

I do want to know that.

It just isn’t the only thing I want.

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Road Game — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

October. The first road trip of Grant’s new contract, a knock on room 1412, and Noelle standing in the corridor with one overnight bag. She gives him fourteen minutes of no touching. He has spent a year learning to follow her instructions. Tonight he intends to make her regret being so good at giving them.

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