Sugar Skates and Second Chances by Jace Wilder

Sugar, Skates & Second Chances

MM Hockey Romance • by Jace Wilder

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.

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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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