Sugar Skates and Second Chances by Jace Wilder

Sugar, Skates & Second Chances

MM Hockey Romance • by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Age Gap, Sugar Daddy, Praise Kink, Control/Surrender, Forced Proximity, Hurt/Comfort, Touch Starved, Second Chances, Grumpy x Brash, Redemption

The contract was supposed to be business. The safe word was supposed to be a formality. Neither of them read the fine print on falling in love.

Cole Mercer is the New York Reapers’ golden boy — or he was, until a viral bar fight, a tanking stat line, and a mountain of secret debt turned him into the league’s most expensive liability. At twenty-eight, he’s broke, benched, and one bad headline away from losing everything. Including the closet he’s been hiding in since juniors.

Alexander Volk is the billionaire who owns 40% of the team and 100% of every room he walks into. Cold. Calculating. The kind of man who fires people over lunch and still finishes his steak. When Cole’s scandal threatens to cost the franchise millions, Alex makes a private offer: a monthly stipend, a luxury condo, a strict rehabilitation program — and private availability at Alex’s discretion.

Cole signs because he’s desperate. Alex offers because he’s strategic. Neither of them expects the kneeling to feel like coming home, or the praise to crack open something neither of them knew was broken, or the contract’s carefully negotiated boundaries to dissolve the first time Alex says good boy and means it.

But when a rival board member weaponizes their arrangement to force Alex out of the franchise, the contract that was supposed to protect them both becomes the thing that could destroy everything — their careers, their reputations, and the love neither of them was brave enough to name.

Sugar, Skates & Second Chances is a 75,000-word MM hockey romance with an age-gap power dynamic, scorching heat, a billionaire who learns that control isn’t the same as love, and a hockey player who discovers he’s worth more than his stats. Standalone. HEA guaranteed. No cliffhanger.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Sugar daddy/kept arrangement with real emotional stakes
✅ Big submissive x lean dominant (the size contrast is the point)
✅ “Good boy” as a love language (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Billionaire who’s terrified of vulnerability + athlete who’s terrified of being disposable
✅ Found family hockey team with the best chirps
✅ A contract that becomes a love letter
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including D/s dynamics, praise kink, edging, restraint, and consensual power exchange), strong language, depictions of alcohol misuse and recovery, sports-related injury, financial abuse, blackmail, and references to homophobic harassment. Aftercare is always on-page. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Rock Bottom Has a Dress Code

The blood on my knuckles had dried to a dark crust by the time the Uber turned onto my street.

Two seventeen in the morning. Phone buzzing in my pocket like a dying insect—notifications stacking up so fast the screen never went dark. I didn’t look at it. Didn’t need to. I already knew what was happening because the driver kept glancing at me in the rearview, and not in the way people usually looked at me.

Usually it was recognition. Hey, aren’t you—yeah, man, big fan, can I get a picture? The kind of attention I’d trained myself to smile through even when I was three drinks deep and wanted to disappear.

This was different. This was the look people gave you when they’d just watched something ugly on their phone and the ugly thing was sitting in their back seat.

“Rough night?” the driver asked.

“Something like that.”

He let it go. Smart guy. Four and a half stars from me, easy.

I pressed my forehead against the window and watched Manhattan slide past—all those lit-up buildings full of people who weren’t currently going viral for the worst thirty seconds of their lives. The glass was cool against my skin and I focused on that, the small mercy of cold, because if I thought about anything else I was going to put my fist through the seat in front of me and I’d already hit my quota on punching things tonight.

Here’s what the video showed: Cole Mercer, right winger for the New York Reapers, six-foot-two and two-fifteen of professional hockey player, throwing a punch at a guy half his size in the bathroom hallway of a Hell’s Kitchen bar. The guy’s head snapping back. His drink hitting the floor. Me standing over him with my fist cocked for a second shot before someone grabbed my arm.

Here’s what the video didn’t show: the four minutes before that. The guy following me out of the main bar when I’d gone to take a piss. The hand on my ass—not a brush, a full grab, fingers digging in. Me turning around, saying don’t fucking touch me, and the guy smiling with all his teeth and saying, loud enough for the two people in the hallway to hear, I knew you were a fag. Everybody knows. You want it, don’t lie.

The video started recording about three seconds after my fist connected with his mouth.

So no. The internet did not have context. The internet had a star hockey player attacking a civilian, and that was enough.

I’d been in the Uber for twelve minutes and the video already had forty thousand views. By morning it would be six figures, easy. By noon, every sports desk in the country would be running it with some variation of the same headline: Reapers Star Melts Down Again.

Again. Because this wasn’t my first time being the story instead of the player. A DUI two years ago—blew a .09, barely over, charges pled down to reckless driving. A shouting match with a ref that went viral on a slow news day. A string of “anonymous sources” from inside the organization saying I was a locker room problem, hard to coach, showed up to morning skate looking like I’d slept in my truck.

Most of that was true. I had slept in my truck. More than once. My apartment depressed me—too big for one person, too expensive for my bank account, decorated by a service Marcus hired that made it look like a hotel lobby for rich sociopaths. I’d rather sleep in the parking lot at Chelsea Piers than go home to twelve hundred square feet of proof that I had money but no life.

Had money. Past tense. That was the other thing.

The Uber stopped. I tipped thirty percent because guilt was the only currency I had plenty of, and I walked into my building with my hat pulled low and my bleeding hand shoved in my jacket pocket. The doorman said good evening without looking up from his phone. Small mercies.

Upstairs, I locked the door, dropped my jacket on the floor, and stood in my kitchen in the dark. Opened the freezer. Closed it. There was vodka in there—good stuff, the kind you’re supposed to sip but I’d always chugged like Gatorade. One pull would take the edge off. Two would make me stop thinking. Three would put me on the floor, and the floor sounded pretty good right now.

I shut the freezer and ran my hand under cold water instead, watching the blood dissolve pink into the drain. Two of my knuckles were split. The middle one might’ve been cracked—it was swelling up fat and hot, the kind of thing the team trainers would side-eye in the morning.

If there was a morning. If I still had a team by then.

My phone buzzed again. I dried my hand on my jeans and pulled it out.

Forty-three missed calls. A hundred and something texts. Marcus had called eleven times. My mom had called twice, which meant she’d seen it, which meant I was going to throw up.

I scrolled past the noise looking for—I didn’t know what. Something that wasn’t panic or anger or PR strategy. Something human.

There. A text from a number I hadn’t saved but recognized. Last week’s hookup. Jake? Josh? No—Jordan. Nice guy. Graphic designer. Met on an app, fucked in his Williamsburg studio, left before he woke up.

Hey, saw the video. Are you okay? I’m here if you need to talk.

I deleted it without responding. That’s what I did. That’s what I always did. Someone reached out and I cut the line before they could reel me in, because the only thing worse than being alone was letting someone close enough to see how empty it was behind the smile.

I turned my phone face-down on the counter and went to bed with my hand throbbing and my chest tight and my brain running the video on loop—not the punch, not the aftermath, but the moment right before. His hand on my body. His voice saying the word like it was a weapon, like it was the truest thing about me and also the worst.

The fucked-up part? He wasn’t wrong. About what I was. Just wrong about what it meant.

I didn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and waited for the world to end.

It didn’t end. It just got smaller.

Nine AM. Reapers headquarters. I walked through the facility I’d called home for a decade with the distinct feeling that I was attending my own funeral.

Everything was the same and nothing was. The lobby with its giant team logo on the floor—I’d stepped on that logo a thousand times feeling like it belonged to me. Today my shoes felt like they were leaving marks. The hallway past the weight room, where I could hear the morning crew clanking through their sets, music thumping, someone laughing. Normal sounds. My sounds. Except no one had invited me to lift today.

The equipment manager, Teddy—sixty years old, been with the team since before I was born—was walking toward me with a stack of practice jerseys. He saw me and his face did a thing. Not disgust. Worse. Pity.

“Morning, Teddy.”

“Morning, kid. Hang in there, yeah?”

Hang in there. The universal greeting for people who were already falling and everyone could see it.

I found my game face. Squared my shoulders, loosened my jaw, became the version of Cole Mercer that did post-game pressers and charity events and cereal commercials. The charming one. The easy one.

The one that had never existed outside a camera frame.

The conference room on the executive level was all glass walls and a table long enough to land a plane on. Four people were already seated when I walked in: Karen Moy, head of PR, who looked at me like I was a grease stain on a white couch. Steve Pullman, assistant GM, who wouldn’t make eye contact. Rachel Torres, team counsel, with a legal pad full of notes I couldn’t read from across the table. And Marcus, my agent, who was already talking before I sat down.

“Before anyone says anything, I want to state for the record that Cole has been cooperative and available since last night and we are fully prepared to—”

“Marcus.” Karen’s voice could freeze a lake. “Sit down.”

He sat.

I dropped into the chair at the end of the table, the one that felt like it had been left empty on purpose so everyone could look at me at once. My hand was wrapped in a bandage I’d done myself—badly, tape uneven, a little blood seeping through. I put it under the table.

Karen didn’t waste time. She pulled up a screen on the wall behind her and there it was: my face, mid-swing, captured in that perfect frame the internet had already turned into a meme. Someone had captioned it When the vibes are off. Hilarious.

“The video has 1.2 million views as of eight this morning,” Karen said. “It’s trending on three platforms. ESPN ran it on the morning loop. TMZ is calling.”

“TMZ calls about everything,” Marcus said.

“TMZ is calling because they have a source who says this isn’t the first altercation.” Karen looked at me. “Is it?”

“It was the first one I didn’t start,” I said.

Silence. The wrong answer. What I should have said was I’m sorry, I understand the severity, I take full responsibility. The media-trained response, the one I’d been drilled on since I was nineteen and newly drafted and too dumb to know that the team owned my mouth as much as my ice time.

Rachel the lawyer opened a folder. “Cole, your current endorsement portfolio includes deals with—”

“Had,” Marcus corrected. “Past tense on two of them already. Nike subsidiary pulled their offer this morning. The protein bar company is ‘reassessing.’”

Rachel nodded like this confirmed something she’d already calculated. “And there’s the matter of the league’s personal conduct policy. Given the existing DUI on your record, this incident triggers a mandatory review. Best case, it’s a fine and a suspension. Worst case—”

“Buyout,” Steve Pullman said, speaking for the first time. He still wasn’t looking at me. “If the league recommends termination, we’d be looking at a contract buyout. Which, given the remaining term and your cap hit…” He trailed off, but the number hung in the air like a bad smell.

Sixty-two million dollars over four years. The contract I’d signed two seasons ago, the one Marcus had called “generational.” The one that was supposed to set me up for life but had somehow evaporated into car payments and bad investments and the monthly transfers to my mom’s account in Cold Lake, Alberta, where she’d finally bought a house that didn’t have mice.

If they bought me out, I’d owe more than I had. Not kind of, not figuratively. I’d be in the red. Twenty-eight years old with a crooked nose and no degree and a highlight reel that was starting to look like a blooper reel.

“We’re not there yet,” Marcus said quickly. “We’re nowhere near there. This was a bar altercation with an aggressive civilian, self-defense, and if we need to, we go to the tape—”

“The tape shows Cole throwing a punch,” Karen said. “Whatever happened before the tape started recording is hearsay.”

She was right. And the reason she was right was the reason I couldn’t explain—because explaining meant saying he grabbed me, he called me a fag, he clocked me as queer and used it as a weapon, and saying that out loud in this room, in this building, in this league, would make the punch look like nothing compared to the explosion that followed.

I wasn’t closeted the way people think of closeted. I wasn’t hiding. I just wasn’t announcing. The guys I slept with knew the deal—quick, discreet, no social media, no staying the night. A couple of teammates suspected, probably. Hutch knew for sure, had known since our rookie year when he’d found me kissing a bartender behind a restaurant in Montreal and had simply said, You good? Cool. Don’t tell my wife I was smoking, and never brought it up again.

But “some guys probably know” and “publicly out NHL player” were different universes. The league had gotten better. A little. Slowly. In the way that institutions get better—press releases and pride tape and exactly zero active players on the record saying I like men.

I wasn’t going to be the first. Not like this. Not as a cautionary tale.

So I sat in the conference room and let them talk about me like I was a stock that had tanked, and I kept the one thing that might’ve saved me locked behind my teeth.

The meeting lasted forty minutes. The outcome: mandatory leave pending league review. No practice, no team facilities, no media appearances. A formal statement would be issued. I’d be “pursuing personal growth” and “committed to the organization’s values.” Corporate poetry for we’re parking him until the heat dies down.

Marcus walked me out. In the hallway, he was already on his phone, already working angles, already thinking three moves ahead because that’s what agents did—they played chess with your life while you sat on the board wondering which piece you were.

“I’ll get ahead of the endorsements,” he said. “The protein bar thing might be salvageable if we—”

“Marcus.”

“—move fast on a statement, something personal, maybe a charity angle—”

“Marcus.”

He stopped. Looked at me. For a second I saw something human in his eyes, something that remembered I was a person and not a portfolio.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

He nodded, and the human thing disappeared. “Good. Because there’s one more thing. Alexander Volk wants to see you.”

The name rang a bell—distant, boardroom-level, the kind of name you heard in conversations that happened above your pay grade. “The owner?”

“Stakeholder. Forty percent. But functionally, yeah. He’s the money. He wants a private meeting.”

“About what?”

“Didn’t say. His assistant called mine at seven this morning, which tells you how much sleep the man loses over things like this.” Marcus fixed his tie, a nervous habit. “I’d take the meeting, Cole.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You always have a choice. But you don’t say no to Volk.”

I was about to ask why when I looked up, past Marcus, past the hallway and the glass walls and the banners with my number on them, up to the executive mezzanine that overlooked the main corridor.

A man was standing at the railing.

Tall—not huge, but the kind of tall that came from posture more than inches. Lean, precise build in a charcoal suit that fit like it had been sewn onto his body. Dark hair going silver at the temples, cut short and clean. He was standing with one hand on the railing, perfectly still, the way people stood when they were used to being the most important person in any room and had stopped needing to prove it.

He was watching me.

Not with anger. Not with curiosity. Not with the pity that Teddy had tried to hide or the exasperation Karen hadn’t bothered to. He was watching me the way you watched a stock ticker or a weather forecast—collecting data, calculating probabilities, running numbers behind eyes the color of cold water.

I’d been looked at my whole life. By scouts, by coaches, by cameras, by the men I took home who wanted the body and the jersey and the story but never the person underneath. I knew what being evaluated felt like.

This was different. This guy wasn’t evaluating me. He was appraising me. Like he already knew what I was worth and was trying to decide if the markdown price was low enough to buy.

Our eyes held for three seconds. Long enough to be intentional. He didn’t smile, didn’t nod, didn’t acknowledge me the way normal people acknowledged other people. He just looked. Then he turned and disappeared into the executive suite like a shadow folding back into a wall.

“That’s him,” Marcus said, following my gaze. “That’s Volk.”

Something moved through my chest. Not fear exactly. More like the feeling right before a fight on the ice—that electric instant where your body knows what’s coming before your brain catches up.

“Tonight,” Marcus continued. “Eight o’clock. I’ll text you the address. Wear something decent.” He looked at my bandaged hand. “And get that looked at. You look like you lost a fight with a garbage disposal.”

“I won the fight,” I said. “That’s kind of the problem.”

Marcus almost smiled. Almost. “Eight o’clock, Cole. Don’t be late.”

I went home. I sat in my apartment—in the hotel lobby for rich sociopaths—and I stared at the address Marcus texted me.

Upper East Side. A building I recognized from real estate porn, the kind of place with a lobby that looked like a museum and a doorman who probably had a better credit score than I did. Penthouse level. Of course.

I should’ve been strategizing. Figuring out what to say, what angle to play, whether this meeting was salvation or execution. But I couldn’t think past the image of that man at the railing. The stillness of him. The way his eyes had taken me apart in three seconds flat and I hadn’t even minded.

I showered. Rewrapped my hand with actual medical tape this time. Stood in front of my closet and realized I didn’t own anything that would pass muster in the world that Alexander Volk lived in. I had two suits—one from the draft, too small now, and one Marcus made me buy for a charity gala that I’d worn with sneakers because I thought it was funny. Neither of them was decent.

I put on my least-wrinkled jeans and a navy button-down I’d never ironed. Looked at myself in the bathroom mirror.

Twenty-eight years old. Three hundred career points. Two All-Star games. One DUI. One viral punch. Zero dollars in savings after you subtracted what I owed.

The man in the mirror looked tired. He looked scared. Under the bravado and the jawline and the shoulders that sold jerseys, he looked exactly like what he was: a kid from Cold Lake, Alberta, who’d been handed the world at eighteen and spent a decade fumbling it.

I splashed water on my face. Put on a cap. Walked to the door.

Whatever was behind that penthouse door—firing, lecture, some billionaire power play I was too dumb to see coming—it didn’t matter. Because I was out of options, out of money, and almost out of time, and Alexander Volk was the only person in my orbit who hadn’t already written me off.

That, or he was about to.

Only one way to find out.

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The Reservation — The Per Se dinner date that almost didn’t happen — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Cole in a midnight-blue suit. Alex with a three-week-old reservation and silk ties in his closet. Nine courses of tension, one elevator kiss, and a night that rewrites every rule they’ve ever made. Restaurant foreplay, restraint, and the filthiest praise kink scene in the series.

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