Inside the Box
Sapphic Hockey Romance
by Aurora North
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Athlete/Official, Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Secret Relationship, Praise Kink, Authority Play, Grumpy/Sunshine, Hurt/Comfort, Touch Her and Die
She keeps sending her to the box. Falling for her is a penalty neither of them can afford.
Maren Vuković is women’s hockey’s favorite villain: a brutally talented defensewoman with a lethal slap shot, a filthy mouth, and more penalty minutes than any player in league history. Iona Price is the rules official who keeps sending her there.
After a nationally televised game misconduct makes their rivalry league legend, a leaked memo reveals something worse than bad blood: someone is rigging the game, and Maren is the target.
Forced into secret collaboration, they uncover a corruption scheme built on manipulated assignments and sponsor pressure. The more time they spend in private video rooms and anonymous hotel corridors, the harder it becomes to pretend that all their arguments are about hockey.
Maren is the league’s most marketable villain — brutal, talented, and unapologetically queer. Iona is the official everyone fears — composed, precise, and hiding a knee injury that ended her own career. Together, they’re a conflict of interest. Apart, they’re both going to lose.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Athlete × official sapphic enemies-to-lovers hockey romance
✅ Secret relationship with real professional stakes
✅ Praise kink, authority play, and control/surrender dynamics
✅ “Touch her and die” teammate energy
✅ Graphic, explicit, emotional sex scenes (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — six full scenes, escalating intensity)
✅ League corruption subplot with real stakes
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: Explicit FF sexual content including praise kink, authority play, and control/surrender dynamics. Strong language, on-ice violence, league corruption themes, and depictions of institutional harm. 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the opening right here.
Chapter 1: Game Misconduct
The hit came from behind, which was how cowards did it.
I saw it before I heard it — the flash of a white Montreal jersey cutting across the neutral zone at an angle that had nothing to do with the puck. Kez was facing the boards, stick down, receiving a pass from Dahlia, and she never saw Bouchard coming.
The sound was wrong. I’ve taken a thousand hits and delivered twice as many, and after a while you learn the acoustics of violence on ice. A clean check has a thud and a scrape — bodies compressing, skate edges biting for balance. What Bouchard did to Kez had a crack in it. The kind of sound that means someone’s head went somewhere it shouldn’t.
Kez went down and didn’t get up right away. The puck slid into the corner and everyone else kept skating because that’s what you do — you keep moving, you let the play develop, you trust the officials to do their jobs.
The whistle didn’t blow.
I watched Bouchard glide back to center ice, flexing her gloves like she’d just finished stretching. No penalty. No stoppage. Seventeen thousand people in the arena and nobody in stripes thought a hit from behind into the boards was worth mentioning.
Kez got up. She always got up — twenty-four years old and still dumb enough to think getting up fast proved she was fine. She skated to the bench with her jaw locked and her eyes unfocused, and our trainer put a hand on her shoulder and she flinched.
My blood went hot and stupid.
I knew better. I’ve been in this league long enough to know that retaliation penalties are how they want me to play — me specifically, Maren Vuković, women’s hockey’s most marketable villain. Give them the story they already wrote.
Dahlia caught my eye from center ice and shook her head. Just slightly. Just enough. Don’t.
I didn’t listen.
The next shift, I put Tremblay into the boards. Not Bouchard — Tremblay, the nearest Montreal forward, who was in a perfectly clean exchange along the half-wall. I hit her high and hard and technically from the side but close enough to the numbers that every camera in the building caught it.
And then Iona Price skated toward me.
She moved across the ice the way some people moved through a courtroom — with the absolute, bone-deep certainty that every person in the building was going to wait until she finished talking. Close-cropped black curls under the helmet. Dark brown skin. Cheekbones that belonged on a magazine cover. And the eyeliner — immaculate, black, precise — that should not have been the first thing I noticed while she was about to throw me out of a playoff game.
“Vuković. Game misconduct. You’re done.”
Her voice cut through the arena noise like a blade through wet ice. No inflection. No drama. Just the ruling.
“Must be nice having a price tag instead of a conscience, Price.”
I left the ice. The clip was on Twitter before I reached the tunnel.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Official’s Uniform — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Iona retrieves her retired official’s uniform from storage. Maren discovers what happens when stripes become foreplay. Rule-play, praise kink, and the filthiest use of a penalty whistle in literary history.
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