Off the Post
A Sapphic Rivals-to-Lovers Hockey Romance
by Aurora North
📖 Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Secret Relationship, Teammates to Lovers, One Bed, Ice Queen, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Second Chances, Praise Kink
She’s the chaos on the wing. She’s the machine at center ice. Eight years of silence. Three weeks of hiding. One gold medal game that changes everything.
Dani “The Natural” Kowalski plays hockey on instinct—reckless, magnetic, and impossible to look away from. She hasn’t spoken to Grace Chen since a Junior development camp eight years ago, when something happened between them that neither of them has ever talked about. She doesn’t know why Grace disappeared. She only knows it nearly destroyed her.
Grace “The Machine” Chen plays hockey by the numbers—calculating angles, counting passes, controlling every variable she can. She hasn’t thought about Dani Kowalski in eight years. That’s what she tells herself. That’s the lie that gets her through.
When they’re both selected for Team Canada’s Olympic roster and forced to share a line, the chemistry that made them unstoppable at eighteen ignites again—on the ice and off it. Five rules. No feelings. Nobody finds out. But the rules were always a fiction they told themselves to make the falling feel controlled, and the falling was never controlled. Not for one second.
With a viral photo threatening to expose them, a press conference lie tearing them apart, and a gold medal game that requires them to trust each other completely, Grace and Dani will have to decide: is the Machine strong enough to survive love? And is The Natural brave enough to stay?
You’ll love this if you enjoy:
✓ Rivals-to-lovers with eight years of unresolved tension
✓ “Five rules” that break spectacularly one by one
✓ Forced proximity in an Alpine training camp and Olympic Village
✓ The thirty-six-inch bed (it’s cardboard and it creaks)
✓ A center ice kiss on live television
✓ Press conference denial followed by press conference redemption
✓ A goalie who reads romance novels during celebrations
✓ Explicit sapphic heat with deep emotional intimacy
✓ A compass tattoo that always points north
✓ Guaranteed HEA with an apartment, a lamp, and a queen-size bed
⚠️ Content Warning
This book contains explicit FF sexual content including multiple detailed intimate scenes, power dynamics, praise kink, and intense emotional vulnerability during intimacy. Themes include anxiety and panic attacks, parental emotional abuse, press-related outing pressure, coming out on live television, and the aftermath of eight years of silence. Features a mother who prioritized her daughter’s career over her happiness (partial reconciliation). Both heroines get their HEA.
Reader discretion advised. This book is intended for mature audiences only.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Chapter One: Blood on the Ice
Click to expand Chapter One…
The first time Dani Kowalski saw Grace Chen, Grace was bleeding.
Not dramatically—not the cinematic kind of bleeding that happened in movies, where the heroine touched her lip and looked at her red fingertips with photogenic surprise. This was hockey bleeding. Functional bleeding. The kind where you caught a high stick in warm-ups, pressed your glove to the cut above your eyebrow, skated to the bench, and sat still for ninety seconds while the trainer butterflied it shut.
Grace sat still. Perfectly, unnervingly still.
That was the thing that snagged Dani’s attention—not the blood, not the injury, but the stillness. Every other player Dani had ever seen take a stick to the face reacted. Flinching. Swearing. The involuntary hiss of pain that the body produced whether you wanted it to or not. Grace Chen sat on the bench at the Canadian National Junior Development Camp and let a woman press adhesive strips to her face and didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t make a sound.
…
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
“The 417” — A 3,500+ word scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Three months after the Olympics. Dani’s driving the 417 through Ottawa for the first time. Grace is waiting in their new Toronto apartment with the amber lamp, an empty bed, and plans for every room. What follows is a housewarming neither of them will ever forget. This scene didn’t make it into the book.
More Sapphic Romance
Browse all Aurora North books.
Every Inch of You
A broken athlete. A devoted teacher. The worship that put them both back together.
The “Straight” Brides
She needed money. I needed a wife. We needed each other.
Black Cat, Golden Girl
She posted a roommate ad that said 'no sunshine bullshit.' The sunshine showed up anyway.
The Good Girl
Two counselors. One tiny room. Eighteen inches between their beds and zero distance between their hearts.
Softball Wives
She came to fix my stats. She stayed to wreck my life — in the best way.
Cat Café Confessions
She's my business partner. My best friend. My roommate. And if she calls me "good girl" one more time, I'm going to combust.
The Billionaire’s Good Girl
She hired a housekeeper. She's keeping her.
Dirty Hands, Clean Sheets
Grease-stained hands. Designer heels. The good girl who needs to be told she's enough.
The Better Angle
She saw me before I was ready to be seen.
Breakaway Girl
The hardest girl on the ice. The quietest girl on the bench. The breakaway neither of them saw coming.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this book part of a series?
Off the Post is a complete standalone with a guaranteed HEA. Grace and Dani get their apartment, their lamp, and their queen-size bed. No cliffhangers!
How spicy is this book?
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — This is a 5/5 heat level book with multiple explicit scenes throughout. Features include an equipment room encounter, a thirty-six-inch cardboard bed that barely survives, praise kink, emotional vulnerability during intimacy, and a climactic love scene where the lamp finally stays on. All scenes feature enthusiastic consent.
Is there a happily ever after?
Absolutely! Grace and Dani win gold, come out on center ice, move in together in Toronto, and Dani gets traded to Grace’s PWHL team. The epilogue takes place six months later in their apartment in the Annex with their goalie Sully reading romance novels in the guest room. No cheating, no cliffhangers, just two women who survived eight years of silence and built something unbreakable.
What about the hockey?
The hockey is real. From the Alpine training camp to the Olympic gold medal game with a full overtime sequence, the on-ice action is detailed and authentic. The winning goal—a cross-crease pass designed on the bench sixty seconds before execution—is the kind of play that only works when two people know each other completely. On the ice and off it.
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