Blue Line, Broken Lines

MM Hockey Romance
by Chase Power

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Teammates to Lovers, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Forced Proximity, Touch Starved, Opposites Attract, Secret Relationship, Found Family, Control/Surrender

The blue line kept them apart. Love made them cross it.

Adrian Vale is a defenseman who lives behind the blue line — on the ice and off it. Controlled, composed, and closed off, he’s spent twenty-eight years making sure no one gets close enough to see the man behind the mask. His apartment is gray. His routine is sacred. His heart is locked.

Leo Cruz is a forward who plays like he’s got nothing to lose. Loud, reckless, and incapable of hiding a single feeling, he’s spent two years watching Adrian from across the locker room and pretending the ache in his chest is just professional admiration.

They have one unspoken rule: never cross the blue line. On the ice, they’re teammates. Off the ice, they’re friendly. But they never talk about anything real.

When a late-night plane ride, a dirty hit, and one devastating confession in a training room shatter the rule they’ve been living by, Adrian and Leo are forced to confront what they’ve been pretending isn’t happening — and decide whether the most disciplined man in hockey can learn to let go, and whether the loudest man in the room can learn to be patient enough to wait.

Blue Line, Broken Lines is a ~72,000-word MM hockey romance with a slow burn that ignites, explicit heat that escalates with every chapter, and a guaranteed HEA. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Teammates to lovers with two years of mutual pining
✅ Grumpy/closed-off defenseman × loud/sunshine forward
✅ “I held still for 45 minutes so you wouldn’t wake up” energy
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Found family hockey team with the best Finnish goalie wingman
✅ A hero who learns that control isn’t the same as courage
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, sports-related injury, a panic attack, depictions of emotional neglect and parental abandonment (backstory), and themes of emotional repression and vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Adrian

The tape had to be perfect.

Three wraps around the toe, overlapping by exactly half the width of the strip. Smooth pull down the blade, no air pockets, no wrinkles. Heel lock, two passes. Then the knob — built up thick at the top of the shaft, textured the way I liked it so my glove wouldn’t slip when I needed to poke-check a puck off some forward’s stick at full speed.

I’d been taping sticks the same way since I was fourteen years old. My father taught me. One of the few useful things he gave me before he stopped giving me anything at all.

The Kodiaks’ locker room was quiet at four-thirty in the afternoon. Most guys wouldn’t roll in until five, maybe five-fifteen, pushing it before Coach Roach’s hard cutoff of five-thirty for the pregame meeting. I liked the silence. Liked the hum of the overhead lights and the faint smell of rubber and sweat that never fully left the room no matter how hard the equipment staff scrubbed.

Season opener. Home game. The kind of night that made the air in the arena feel electric, even two hours before puck drop.

Left skate first. Always left.

I was lacing up when the door banged open hard enough to bounce off the wall, and the quiet I’d been holding like a breath shattered into a hundred pieces.

“Gentlemen — and I use that term with enormous generosity — your boy is back.”

Leo Cruz walked into the locker room like he was walking onto a stage, arms spread wide, equipment bag slung over one shoulder, hair dripping wet and curling against his neck.

“Why is your hair wet?” Mika Järvinen asked from two stalls down, not looking up from his phone.

“Showered at home. Didn’t want to waste the team’s hot water.”

“That makes no sense,” Mika said.

“Conservation, Mika. I’m saving the planet.”

“By showering twice?”

“By showering preemptively.” Leo flashed that grin — the wide one, the one that took up his whole face and made his eyes crinkle at the corners.

I kept lacing my skate. Left then right. Same as always. But I watched. I always watched.

He moved like he didn’t know how to be still. Even standing at his stall, pulling gear from his bag, he was swaying slightly, bobbing his head to music that wasn’t playing. His body was always ahead of his brain, already committed to the next action before the current one was finished.

It was why he was such a dangerous forward — he played with a recklessness that looked like instinct because he’d already decided what he was going to do before the puck was on his stick.

Two years of watching will do that.

We ran the new system in the second period and it worked like it had been designed by someone who understood exactly how we moved together. Leo pressured the puck carrier into the corner. I read the pass attempt before it happened. Puck on my stick. Headman to Leo, who was already gone, already two strides ahead of the defender —

Goal.

Leo found me in the pile, grabbed the back of my helmet, and pulled my face close to his cage. “That’s us, baby!” he shouted. “That’s fucking us!”

“Good shift,” I said, because I was a man who used words like a miser used coins. Just enough. Never too many.

We won 4–2. I showered, dressed, and was packing my bag when I felt him before I heard him.

“You coming, Vale?”

He was leaning against the doorframe, jacket unzipped, hair still damp and curling against his temples. He was looking at me with that grin — the one that said I already know the answer but I’m going to ask anyway because I like the way you look when you say no.

“Early skate tomorrow,” I said.

Leo tilted his head. The grin didn’t falter. But something behind his eyes shifted — a dimming, quick and barely there. If I hadn’t spent two years cataloging every micro-expression on his face, I would’ve missed it.

But I didn’t miss it. I missed very little when it came to Leo Cruz, which was precisely the problem.

I drove home to my apartment on the fourteenth floor. Gray walls. Clean counters. No art. One couch, one TV, a bed with sheets I changed every Sunday. The fridge had meal-prepped containers labeled by day.

It was perfect. It was under control. It was the loneliest place on earth, but I didn’t think about that because thinking about it would require acknowledging a need, and I didn’t do that.

My phone buzzed. A text from Leo in the team group chat: a shaky, clearly drunk video of Mika attempting karaoke — something Finnish and unrecognizable — with the caption someone come get your goalie.

I didn’t react. I didn’t reply. But I watched the video twice, not for Mika’s atonal wailing, but for the sound of Leo’s laughter behind the camera — breathless and free and so fucking alive that it made my chest ache in a way I refused to name.

I set the phone down. Went to bed. Stared at the ceiling.

You coming, Vale?

Except the game was over. And I was here. And he was somewhere else, laughing, alive, surrounded by people, and I was alone in the dark with a feeling in my chest that I’d been ignoring for exactly seven hundred and thirty-one days.

That was how long Leo Cruz had been a Kodiak. I hadn’t counted. The number just lived in my head, the way his laugh lived in my chest — uninvited, undeniable, and getting harder to pretend wasn’t there.

The line exists for a reason.

I said it to myself like a prayer. Like if I repeated it enough times, it would keep being true.

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Off-Season — A scene TOO HOT for retailers

Leo and Adrian move in together. Leo buys them a king-size bed — their first shared purchase. And the second the delivery guys leave… the christening begins. Adrian surrenders control completely. Leo takes the lead for the first time. The most intimate, joyful, and explicit chapter in the series — and it’s waiting for you.

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