Hard Launch, Soft Landing
An MM Sports Romance by Chase Power
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bi Awakening, Fake Dating, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Size Difference, Touch Starved, One Bed, Celebrity Romance
The quarterback needs a girlfriend for the cameras. His PR consultant has a better plan. Unfortunately, neither of them expected the plan to involve falling in love with each other.
Noah Bennett is the face of the Chicago Comets. Franchise quarterback. Brand-safe hero. The kind of man sponsors build campaigns around and mothers want their daughters to marry.
Then a photo leaks — Noah leaving a private club at three a.m. with another man’s hand on his waist — and his carefully constructed life starts cracking at the seams.
His agent wants a fake girlfriend. His team wants damage control. And crisis consultant Cameron Shah wants the truth.
Cam doesn’t manufacture cover stories for closeted athletes. He doesn’t sell anyone’s privacy for a news cycle. And he definitely doesn’t spend six weeks glued to a quarterback’s side unless the man is ready to be honest.
Noah tells Cam one thing: He’s never wanted a man before.
Cam knows that’s not quite true.
Six weeks of shared hotel suites, late-night strategy sessions, and a public that’s already decided they’re together. The professional boundary was supposed to hold. The fake-dating angle was supposed to stay fake. Noah’s hands on him were supposed to stay professional.
They didn’t.
You Will Love This If You Like:
✔️ NFL quarterback x sharp-tongued PR consultant
✔️ Bi awakening with a praise-kink discovery that will wreck you
✔️ Forced proximity and one hotel suite in New Orleans
✔️ Fake dating that becomes devastatingly real
✔️ Competence kink — watching him work IS the foreplay
✔️ Touch-starved athlete who learns to ask for what he wants
✔️ Explosive high heat with a guaranteed HEA
Content Warning: Hard Launch, Soft Landing is a high-heat MM romance intended for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit, graphic sexual content between two adult men, themes of bi awakening and coming out, sports-media scrutiny and public-image pressure, and a professional antagonist who weaponizes homophobia for profit. All intimacy is enthusiastically consensual. Guaranteed HEA.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
A leaked photo. A franchise quarterback. And the worst moment of his life — thirteen minutes before kickoff. Start reading now.
Chapter One: Noah
The photo hit at 11:47 a.m. on a Sunday, which meant I found out about the worst moment of my life thirteen minutes before I was supposed to jog onto Soldier Field and throw a football in front of sixty-two thousand people.
Malik showed me. Not on purpose — he was scrolling through his timeline on the bench beside me, half-dressed, one cleat on, and he stopped mid-laugh at something Darius had texted him. His thumb hovered. His eyes cut sideways.
“Don’t look at your phone,” he said.
So I looked at my phone.
The image was grainy, shot from across a parking lot or maybe a rooftop, the kind of telephoto blur that turns every shadow into a suggestion. Me, stepping out of a side door at Velo — a private members’ club on the Near North Side that I’d been going to for two years specifically because no one there gave a damn about football. Navy jacket, no tie, my hands in my pockets. Leaving at — the timestamp said 3:14 a.m.
And behind me, slightly out of focus, a man’s hand. Fingertips on my lower back. Casual. Brief. The kind of touch that means I’ll see you again or watch the step or nothing at all, depending on how badly you wanted it to mean something.
The internet wanted it to mean everything.
I scrolled through the first wave in maybe ninety seconds. That was enough. Comets QB’s late-night mystery man. Source says Bennett was “visibly comfortable” at private club known for discretion. Is America’s golden boy hiding a secret?
My locker was cold metal against my spine. I sat there with my phone in my hand and my heartbeat so loud I could feel it in my teeth, and I did what I’ve done since I was fourteen years old and my father told me that the team always comes first.
I put the phone facedown. I pulled on my other cleat. I went to work.
The thing about compartmentalization is that everyone thinks it’s a skill. Coaches praise it. Sports psychologists write books about it. Elite performers separate the noise from the signal. They play the game in front of them.
What nobody tells you is that the thing you lock away doesn’t actually go anywhere. It sits in the room you shoved it into, and it waits, and when you’re standing in a shotgun formation on third-and-seven with the play clock bleeding down, it kicks through the door and says hey, remember me?
I threw two interceptions in the first half.
We won. Barely. Our defense played out of their minds and we scraped a twenty-to-seventeen victory on a field goal with eight seconds left that had absolutely nothing to do with me. The locker room was relieved but subdued — the kind of energy that comes with a win everyone knows you didn’t deserve.
I sat at my locker, peeled off my jersey, and stared at my hands. They were steady. They’re always steady. Quarterbacks have steady hands and calm faces and carefully prepared answers. That’s the deal.
My phone had two hundred and fourteen notifications.
I didn’t look at a single one.
Vincent found me in the tunnel. He was leaning against the concrete wall with his coat folded over his arm and his phone already angled toward me like a weapon.
“We fix this tonight,” he said. “I’ve already got three options for the girlfriend angle.”
He had a folder. An actual physical folder. Inside were three photographs and three names. A model. An actress. An influencer whose management team had already reached out to say she’d be “open to discussing a mutually beneficial public relationship.”
Mutually beneficial.
I looked at the photos under the fluorescent lights and felt something I couldn’t name. Not anger. Not fear. Something deeper and quieter, like the moment in a game when you realize you’ve run the wrong play and the defense has already adjusted and the hit is coming and there’s nothing you can do but take it.
“No one gets hurt,” Vincent said. “It’s a business arrangement. Happens all the time.”
I should have said no right there. That’s what a brave man would have done.
I nodded. Because that’s what I do. Because I have been nodding since I was fourteen years old, and the muscles in my neck barely know any other direction.
I drove home through the dark, and I thought about the things I always thought about when I was alone, which were the things I never allowed myself to think about in public.
I couldn’t even tell you what I was afraid of. That was the part that really scared me.
The crisis consultant who refuses to build a closet. The quarterback who’s done pretending. Keep reading — Hard Launch, Soft Landing is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Read Sock Drawer — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon. Set one year after the book. Noah discovers what happens when Cam wears purple socks to bed and absolutely nothing else. Praise kink at maximum volume. Piano bench not used for music.
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