Coach’s Prize

Free with Kindle Unlimited

He hired a coach. He got a reason to stay.

Riley Voss is twenty-six, burned out, freshly dumped, and one blood pressure reading away from a medical intervention. When he moves to a small lakeside town on a whim and hires a running coach to put himself back together, he’s expecting interval training and motivational speeches. He’s not expecting Travis Kane — six-two, salt-and-pepper, hands like a map and a voice like gravel over honey. He’s definitely not expecting the way “good boy” sounds in that voice, or what it does to his entire nervous system.

Travis Kane is forty, divorced, and two years deep into a life built entirely around coaching other people’s potential because examining his own feels like a death sentence. His ex-wife said he was too steady, too quiet, too small. He’s made peace with that. Then a man with a dented water bottle and an inside-out shirt walks into his garage gym and looks at him like he hung the moon, and everything Travis thought he’d made peace with catches fire.

What starts as form corrections and five-AM track sessions becomes something neither of them can outrun. The praise that pushes Riley past his limits on the trail starts pushing past other limits — in the truck cab, the home gym, a dock under the stars. And the steady, quiet love Travis thought nobody wanted turns out to be exactly what one desperate, praise-starved man has been running toward his whole life.

But when a job offer from Chicago threatens to pull Riley back to the life he escaped, both men must confront the question they’ve been avoiding: Is Riley staying because he chose to, or because he’s afraid to leave? And can Travis — a man who spent forty years holding the door open for people — finally learn to close it and say stay?

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

✓ Age gap (40/26) with a gruff, steady, silver-fox coach
✓ Praise kink that escalates from track to bedroom to love language
✓ Coach/client with real power dynamics and ethical reckoning
✓ Small-town found family (the diner owner ships it before they do)
✓ A man who says “good boy” and means it with his whole body
✓ Hurt/comfort that goes both directions
✓ A half-marathon, a full marathon, and a full emotional breakdown (in a good way)
✓ Heat that escalates from slow burn to five-alarm inferno
✓ A dog named Tempo who throws up on everyone’s shoes
✓ A guaranteed HEA earned one mile at a time