Breakaway Girl

Sapphic Hockey Romance
by Aurora North

Available at All Major Retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Teammates to Lovers, Hard-Girl x Soft-Girl, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn, Only Soft For You, Praise Kink

The hardest girl on the ice. The quietest girl on the bench. The breakaway neither of them saw coming.

Cass “Chaos” Reed is the loudest, hardest-hitting forward on the Chicago Wind — all snarl, all edge, all performance. She leads the league in penalty minutes and assists. Every ex has told her she’s too much. She’s starting to believe them.

Maya Bell is the quiet backup forward who never complains about riding the bench. She arrives an hour before practice, studies film like a coach, and notices everything nobody else does — including the fact that Cass Reed is leaving points on the table because of habits she doesn’t know she has.

When anonymous sticky notes start appearing in Cass’s locker — technical adjustments that transform her game overnight — she tracks down the source: the invisible girl at the end of the bench. The one who’s been watching her for two years. The one who sees through every performance Cass has ever built.

What starts as hockey tips becomes bus-ride conversations. Late-night texts. A kiss on a frozen bench in Detroit. And a connection so electric it rewires everything — their games, their careers, and their understanding of what it means to be seen by someone who refuses to look away.

But they’re teammates. The internet is watching. And when a leaked photo threatens to turn their love story into a headline, they’ll have to decide: hide to survive, or go public and risk everything — the ice, the team, and each other.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Hard-girl x soft-girl sapphic hockey romance
✅ Teammates to lovers with forced proximity
✅ “Only soft for you” and “she fell first but she fell harder” energy
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A heroine who rebuilds her lover’s game from the bench with sticky notes
✅ Found family hockey team with the best supporting cast
✅ Center-ice kiss during a playoff game
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, sports-related injury, and depictions of anxiety and self-doubt. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Too Much

The hit was clean.

That was the thing nobody was going to talk about tomorrow, because the ref’s arm was already up before Cass even finished following through, and the crowd was already half out of their seats, and the girl from Minnesota was already sliding into the boards with her stick clattering across the ice like a drumroll nobody asked for.

Clean. Shoulder to shoulder. Textbook.

But Cass Reed didn’t get the benefit of the doubt. Not anymore. Not since the third game of the season when she’d dropped gloves with a defenseman twice her size and the league had slapped her with a two-game suspension and a reputation she’d never shake. Aggressive. Reckless. Volatile.

The ref’s whistle cut through the arena noise like a blade on fresh ice.

“Two minutes, boarding!”

“Boarding?” Cass yanked her helmet off and got in the ref’s face, which she knew was a bad idea even as she was doing it, which was basically the thesis statement of her entire life. “That was shoulder to shoulder! Are you blind or just lazy?”

“Reed. Box. Now.”

She went. She always went.

Cass dropped onto the bench in the penalty box and pressed her stick across her knees, jaw tight, heart slamming. The penalty box attendant — a kid, maybe nineteen, with a Wind lanyard and wide eyes — scooted an inch further away from her.

“I’m not going to bite you,” Cass said.

The kid didn’t look convinced.

On the ice, Jordan Park won the faceoff clean, and the kill unit settled into their diamond. Lex Navarro kicked out two shots from the slot without flinching, her pads snapping shut like a trap. Cass exhaled through her teeth.

The penalty expired. She hit the ice at a full sprint, caught a stretch pass from Jordan at the red line, faked the wrist shot — and then pulled the puck to her backhand at the last second, slipping it through the five-hole so cleanly that the goalie didn’t even move.

The horn blared. The arena erupted.

Cass threw her arms up and screamed something that was definitely going to get bleeped on the broadcast. This was the only place in the world where being too much was exactly enough.

The locker room after a win was always loud, but especially tonight because they’d just clinched a top-four spot in the division and because Lex was physically incapable of being in a room without making it about her.

“Ladies!” Lex stood on the bench in her chest protector, raising a water bottle like a champagne flute. “I would like to thank my defense for occasionally showing up, my offense for remembering that goals are, in fact, the point, and most importantly, myself, for being an absolute wall tonight.”

“You let in a goal,” Britt Sorensen said flatly from across the room.

“A good goal. A respectful goal. That goal had to work for it. I’m not a charity.”

Cass laughed and stripped off her gloves. She was pulling tape off her socks when she looked up and caught Maya Bell across the room.

Fourth line. Left wing. Five-foot-four in skates. Brown skin and neat braids tucked under her helmet. Quiet as a ghost and twice as easy to overlook.

Maya was already half-changed, sitting in her stall in compression shorts and a sports bra, unwinding her braids one by one with careful fingers. Her eyes were down. She wasn’t part of the celebration — not because she’d been excluded, exactly, but because she occupied the same space as the equipment bags and the spare sticks. Present. Accounted for. Not essential.

Their eyes met.

It was maybe a second. Maya’s gaze lifted, dark and steady, and found Cass staring. For one beat there was something there — not a spark, not a jolt, nothing that dramatic. Just the quiet, startling clarity of being noticed. Of looking at someone and knowing they were looking back.

Cass looked away first.

She didn’t know why.

By the time she was showered and changed, the locker room was mostly empty. She pushed through the doors into the parking lot and the November air hit her face, sharp and clean.

Maya Bell was standing by a silver Civic at the far end of the lot, alone, breath fogging in the cold, typing on her phone. Her coat was too thin for the weather — one of those cropped puffer jackets that looked cute and did absolutely nothing.

Cass slowed. She didn’t know what she was going to say. Something about the play Maya had made in the third period — a no-look pass from the high slot that nobody else had noticed. Hey, that was a sick play. Something casual.

But her feet didn’t move. She just stood there, watching Maya type on her phone with frozen fingers, and for reasons she couldn’t articulate, she said nothing.

Maya looked up, as if she’d felt eyes on her. Across the parking lot, their gazes met again — same quiet jolt of oh, you’re there — and Maya gave her a small nod. Not a smile. Not a wave. Just an acknowledgment. I see you.

Cass nodded back.

Then Maya got in her car and drove away, and Cass stood in the parking lot for another thirty seconds, cold biting through her hoodie, wondering why the smallest gesture from the quietest girl on the team had just made her feel more seen than a sold-out arena screaming her name.

She shook it off. Got in her truck. Turned the heat up.

Whatever.

It was nothing.

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The Dock — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Cass and Maya’s first morning at the cabin in Minnesota. The dock. The lake. The flannel. No neighbors for a mile. No holding back. The filthiest, most tender, most emotionally devastating bonus chapter in the series.

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