Enemies in the Penalty Box
MM Hockey Romance · Rivals to Lovers · Praise Kink
by Chase Power
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Rivals to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Secret Relationship, Closeted Athlete, Hurt/Comfort, Coming Out, Found Family, Only Soft For You
Two rival captains. One penalty box. A love that refuses to stay in the dark.
Ethan Cole is hockey’s golden boy. Youngest captain in Boston Titans history, four-time All-Star, the face every sponsor wants. His composure is flawless, his brand is bulletproof, and underneath it all, he’s drowning in anxiety and a praise addiction his father’s conditional love built into his bones. He replays commentator clips alone in his apartment to feel like he’s enough. He is never, ever enough.
Rory Kincaid is hockey’s villain. Captain of the Detroit Iron, the league’s most penalized forward, the enforcer everybody loves to hate. He hits like a freight train and gives press conferences in three-word sentences. What nobody sees: the man who reads philosophy, cooks French food, fosters a one-eyed pit bull named Biscuit, and hasn’t been told he’s good by someone who matters since he was sixteen years old.
When a league PR campaign forces them into a fake sportsmanship initiative — joint photo shoots, shared interviews, a week of cameras following their every move — the hatred that defined their rivalry begins to crack. Because Rory sees through Ethan’s performance. And Ethan sees through Rory’s armor. And the penalty box where they started screaming at each other becomes the space where they start telling each other the truth.
One true thing at a time. One touch at a time. One night at a time — in hotel rooms and hallways and supply closets and the connecting door between their lives that neither of them is brave enough to open. Until the world starts watching. Until a journalist starts digging. Until Ethan has to choose between the brand that keeps him safe and the man who makes him real.
Because loving Rory Kincaid will never be the safe choice. And Ethan Cole has never, not once in his life, chosen anything but safe.
Until now.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Rival hockey captains with off-the-charts sexual tension
✅ Enemies to lovers with a fake-friendship PR campaign
✅ Praise kink that heals wounds (and destroys composure)
✅ “Golden boy × villain” with secret relationship angst
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Coming out arc with real stakes and real support
✅ A one-eyed pit bull named Biscuit who steals every scene
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink, body worship, and penetrative sex), strong language, sports-related violence, depictions of anxiety and depression, parental emotional neglect, homophobia from specific characters, and self-destructive behavior. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
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Chapter One: Blood on the Glass
The tape had to be perfect.
Ethan Cole wound the white cloth around his stick blade in slow, overlapping strips — bottom to top, heel to toe, exactly the way he’d done it since he was fourteen years old and his father had stood behind him in their garage in Stamford saying again until the edges were seamless. Three wraps at the toe. Two at the heel. Pull it tight. Smooth. No bubbles. No wrinkles. Nothing that could introduce a variable.
He finished the tape job. Ran his thumb along the blade. Perfect.
Tonight was Detroit. Tonight was Kincaid.
His stomach clenched, and he breathed through it the way Dr. Laine had taught him — four counts in, hold for four, out for six. The anxiety wasn’t about the game. He could handle the game. The game was the one place where his body knew what to do without his brain needing to approve every decision.
The arena was a living thing on rivalry nights. Eighteen thousand bodies packed into seats, and the sound they produced wasn’t just noise — it was pressure. A physical wave that hit you the moment you stepped through the tunnel and onto the ice.
Across the red line, the Detroit Iron did the same in their road blacks. Ethan didn’t look for Kincaid. He didn’t have to. He could feel him the way you could feel a storm system moving in — a shift in the barometric pressure of the ice, a gravitational pull that rearranged the space around it.
Kincaid found him in the second period. The hit came on a neutral-zone carry. Kincaid timed it perfectly — a fraction of a second after the pass, and he came through Ethan’s chest like a freight train derailing into a compact car. Ethan’s feet left the ice. His helmet cracked against the glass.
He was on his feet before his equilibrium fully returned. Kincaid was right there — hadn’t skated away, just stood three feet from the carnage like a man admiring his work. That fucking smirk. Those dark, knowing eyes.
“Stay in your lane, pretty boy.” Kincaid’s voice was low, rough, barely audible over the crowd.
“Stay off the ice before someone with actual skill embarrasses you.”
Matching minors. Penalty box. Side by side through the glass partition.
Two minutes. He could survive two minutes.
“Nice goal earlier, by the way. Bar down. Pretty.” Kincaid’s voice was low enough that only Ethan could hear through the partition gap. There was nothing sarcastic in his tone. No setup for a follow-up insult. Just… an observation.
“I don’t need your commentary on my game,” Ethan said.
“No. You don’t.” Kincaid finally looked at him. Those dark eyes held something that wasn’t the smirk, wasn’t the villain — something fleeting and sharp and gone before Ethan could name it. “You’ve got twenty thousand people to do that for you.”
He sat through the post-game press conference. “Some guys play hockey,” he said, and he smiled that smile. “Some guys play roller derby. I’ll let the highlights speak for themselves.”
The room laughed. The reporters typed. The quote would be everywhere by morning.
Back in his apartment, Ethan pulled up the broadcast clip. “What a competitor. What a leader. Ethan Cole continues to prove he is the standard for captains in this league—”
He played it again. His shoulders dropped. His breathing evened out. He hated that he needed it.
His phone buzzed. Text from Dad.
You let him hit you. Can’t happen. —Dad
Not “great goal.” Not “hell of a game.” Just the failure.
Ethan set the phone face-down on the counter. Crawled into bed. Closed his eyes and tried not to think about the penalty box. Tried not to think about the fact that a man he despised had given him three seconds of genuine praise and it had hit harder than twenty thousand people chanting his name.
Pretty.
The word floated through the dark behind his eyelids, unmoored from context, landing somewhere it shouldn’t.
Sleep didn’t come for a long time.
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The Connecting Door — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
The morning after the first time. An empty apartment next door. A connecting door that changes everything. Coffee in the shower, scar-mapping in the sunlight, and a role reversal that rewrites every rule they thought they knew.
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