Body Check, Bed Check

An MM Hockey Rivals-to-Lovers Romance by Chase Power

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Secret Relationship, Teammates to Lovers, He Falls First, Grumpy/Sunshine, Age Gap, Possessive Hero, Coming Out

A grumpy veteran goalie and his cocky backup share every road trip. The bed-sharing pact was supposed to be casual.

Their secret bed-sharing deal might win the championship. It could cost them the team if discovered.

Liam “Brick” Carter has spent nine seasons as a wall in the crease and a fortress everywhere else. Controlled. Disciplined. Alone. The last time he let someone close, it ended with a trade, a ghost, and a lesson he tattooed on his ribs: people leave.

Jayden “Jace” Flores is everything Liam isn’t — loud, flashy, fearless, and desperate to prove he’s more than a backup. When the coach forces them to room together on road trips, Jayden sees it as an opportunity. Liam sees it as a threat. Neither of them sees it as the beginning of the most intense relationship of their lives.

It starts as stress relief. Mutual tension, mutual need, mutual rules: road trips only, no kissing, no feelings. But the rules don’t survive the first week. The kissing doesn’t wait for the second. And the feelings — the raw, consuming, terrifying feelings — have been there since the night they shared a bed and pretended not to hear each other in the dark.

Now the playoffs are here, the media is circling, and one teammate has already walked in on the truth. Liam has to choose: protect the career he’s built or fight for the man who dismantled every wall he ever constructed.

Jayden isn’t waiting for permission. He’s already all in. The question is whether Liam can stop surviving long enough to start living.

You Will Love This If You Like:

✔️ Veteran goalie vs. cocky backup — forced road roommates
✔️ One-bed tension that combusts into a secret hookup pact
✔️ Grumpy/sunshine with an 8-year age gap
✔️ Possessive, marking, jealousy-fueled explicit scenes
✔️ He falls first and fights it hardest
✔️ “I was surviving. Now I’m living.” emotional arc
✔️ Team acceptance that feels earned, not easy
✔️ 74,000 words of scorching heat with a guaranteed HEA

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Content Warning: Body Check, Bed Check is a high-heat MM romance intended for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit, consensual sexual content between two adult men, closeted identity, possessive behavior, jealousy, marking/biting, an 8-year age gap, on-page panic and anxiety, media speculation, wrist injury, a teammate walking in, and a third-act career separation threat. All intimacy is enthusiastically consensual. Guaranteed HEA.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

A meticulous veteran goalie meets the flashy new backup who’s about to dismantle every wall he’s ever built. Start reading now.

Chapter One: The Call-Up

LIAM

Same stall. Same order. Same silence.

I dropped my bag on the bench, unzipped it without looking, and laid everything out left to right: compression shorts, base layer, socks, jock, pants, skates, chest protector, jersey, gloves, mask. Every item in its place. Every seam facing the same direction.

Some guys thought it was superstition. Rookies used to watch me like I was performing a ritual sacrifice, elbowing each other and whispering about the crazy goalie who couldn’t dress himself without a system. They weren’t wrong about the system. They were wrong about why.

It wasn’t luck. Luck was for guys who hadn’t figured out that the only thing standing between them and total fucking chaos was a series of small, deliberate choices made in the right order, at the right time, every single day.

Control. That’s all it was.

I was lacing my left skate when Coach Sorensen walked in. He had that look — the one that meant he was about to say something the room wasn’t going to universally enjoy.

“Listen up. Got a roster move. Alford’s ACL is done for the season — surgery next week, rehab through summer. We’re calling up Jayden Flores from Bridgeport.”

For me, it meant a new backup.

He walked into practice the next morning like he’d been there his whole life.

I was already on the ice, running my warm-up sequence, when the door from the tunnel banged open and Jayden Flores emerged in full gear, grinning like a kid on the first day of school who’d decided in advance that everyone was going to love him.

He was smaller than I expected. Five-eleven, maybe. Dark eyes, sharp jaw, brown skin, and a streak of bleached blond through his black hair. Small hoop earrings. A half-sleeve of tattoos. He looked like he belonged on a billboard, not a hockey rink.

He scanned the ice, found me, and skated straight over.

“Brick.” He said it with a grin that was fifty percent confidence and fifty percent dare. “Jayden Flores. Huge fan of your work. That save you made against Boston in the third last week? Disgusting. In the best way.”

“Thanks.” I turned back to my warm-up.

Most people would’ve taken the hint. Flores was not most people.

After practice, Coach waved me into his office. Flores was already there, sitting in the chair, one leg bouncing.

“Starting immediately, you’re road roommates.”

I could’ve argued. But Coach’s jaw was set, and I’d been in the league long enough to know which battles were worth fighting.

“Fine.”

“Awesome,” Flores said immediately. “I’m a very respectful roommate. Quiet. Neat. Low maintenance.”

I looked at him.

He grinned. “Okay, maybe not quiet. But I’m working on it.”

“Work faster,” I said, and stood up.

Lying in bed that night, I replayed the moment from practice when Flores had been stretching against the boards. One leg up, arms overhead, back arched, his body a long, lean line of muscle and ink, totally un-self-conscious. He’d thrown his head back, and his throat was a column of brown skin, and his mouth had been open, and I’d watched his mouth for three full seconds before I caught myself.

Three seconds. In a game, three seconds is an eternity. Three seconds of lost focus is the difference between a save and a goal.

This kid is going to be a problem.

I turned off the light. Same bed. Same apartment. Same silence. For the first time in a long time, the silence didn’t feel like peace. It felt like a held breath.

The forced proximity. The tension. The held breath. Keep reading — Body Check, Bed Check is available now.

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