The Goal That Got Me

Sapphic Hockey Romance
by Aurora North

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Teammates to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Opposites Attract, Only Soft For You, Touch Her and Die, Slow Burn, Praise Kink, Touch Starved

The softest girl on the bench. The hardest girl on the ice. The goal neither of them saw coming.

Eve Bell is the quiet backup forward who’s used to being invisible. She sits on the bench, takes perfect game notes nobody reads, and watches her team win without her. She’s grateful to be here. She’s also slowly disappearing.

Riley Smith is the loud, reckless, impossibly magnetic starter who plays hockey like she’s arguing with the ice. She’s built a career on being “too much” — too intense, too physical, too loud. It’s a performance. Underneath it, she’s terrified of being seen.

When a dead car battery, a shared hotel room, and one devastating kiss in a hallway bring them together, Eve realizes the hardest-looking girl on the ice is the one who makes her feel safest — and Riley realizes the softest-looking girl on the bench is the one who finally sees her.

But they’re teammates. The internet is watching. The playoff race is tightening. And when a roster shakeup threatens to end Eve’s career before it starts, they’ll have to decide: play it safe, or fight for everything — the ice, the team, and each other.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Soft-girl x tough-girl sapphic romance
✅ Teammates to lovers with forced proximity
✅ “Only soft for you” and “touch her and die” energy
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Found family hockey team with the best supporting cast
✅ A heroine who earns her place and a love interest who learns to stay
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, sports-related injury, and depictions of anxiety and self-doubt. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Bench Warmer

The Boston Bolts were winning 3–1, and I was doing what I did best.

Sitting.

I pressed my shoulder blades against the back of the bench and watched the play unfold through the glass — the sharp scrape of skates, the crack of a stick on the puck, the roar of eight thousand people who’d paid good money to watch a game I wasn’t playing in.

Not that anyone was counting.

I was counting. I was always counting. Twelve games into the season, and I’d dressed for nine of them. Started one. Played meaningful minutes in maybe four. The rest of the time, I was exactly where I was right now — ass on the bench, helmet on, gloves ready, watching someone else live the life I wanted.

If you’d asked Coach Tanaka, she would’ve said I was a valuable depth piece. A smart player with good hockey sense and a high compete level. Which was coachspeak for: She tries really hard and we feel sort of bad about it.

If you’d asked my teammates, they would’ve said I was sweet. Quiet. Always the first to hand someone a water bottle, always the last to leave the locker room. Eve Bell — the team’s golden retriever in a helmet.

If you’d asked me, I would’ve said—

Well. Nobody asked me.

On the ice, the play shifted. Montreal dumped the puck into our zone and the Bolts’ defense went to work, sweeping it behind the net, transitioning fast. I tracked the puck out of instinct, reading the lanes, the passing options, the gap between Montreal’s forecheckers that no one else seemed to see.

And then she happened.

Riley Smith blew through the neutral zone like she’d been personally wronged by physics. She was all long limbs and coiled muscle, her dark hair plastered to her forehead under her helmet, her stick low and hungry. She took the stretch pass in stride, deked Montreal’s defenseman so hard the woman actually stumbled, and ripped a wrist shot high glove that hit the back of the net like a gunshot.

The arena exploded.

She was magnetic. Violent and beautiful and completely, recklessly herself. She played hockey like she was arguing with the ice, like every shift was a personal vendetta against mediocrity.

I hated how much I loved watching her.

No — that was a lie. I didn’t hate it at all.

The locker room after a win was a specific kind of chaos. Music blasted from someone’s speaker. Equipment bags hit the floor. The air smelled like sweat and rubber.

I sat in my stall and started unlacing my skates, methodical, quiet. Same routine every time. Left skate first.

And at the center of it all, Riley.

She was standing in front of her stall, still half in her gear, doing a play-by-play of her own goal with increasing embellishment.

“—so I look at this defenseman, right, and she’s giving me nothing—”

“You went around her,” Jordan Hayes said flatly.

“Same thing.”

“Literally the opposite thing.”

I snorted before I could stop myself. Riley’s head turned. She caught my eye across the room. Her gaze landed on me, held for a half-second longer than it should have. Then the grin came. Wide, cocky, aimed directly at me like a weapon.

“Like what you see, Bell?”

My heart did something stupid. I overrode it.

“I see someone who’s been out of her pads for ten minutes and hasn’t showered. So. No.”

The room went oooh. Dani cackled. Riley clutched her chest. “She’s a savage. Look at that face — you think she’s all sweet and innocent, and then she goes for the jugular.”

The moment passed. Riley went back to being Riley — loud, electric, the sun that everyone else orbited. I went back to being me. Quiet. Unlacing my skates. Wondering if anyone would notice if I left.

I knew the answer. They wouldn’t.

The cold hit me the second I pushed through the exit. Late October in Boston. The parking lot was half-empty, lit by sodium lamps that turned everything amber.

I walked to my car — a 2011 Toyota Corolla with 180,000 miles, a mysterious rattle in the dashboard, and a bumper sticker that said HOCKEY MOM. Threw my bag in the trunk. Sat in the driver’s seat. Turned the key.

Nothing.

I turned it again. A feeble click, a wheeze, then silence.

“No,” I said to the dashboard. “No, no, no. Not tonight.”

A honk nearly scared me out of my skin.

A black Jeep Wrangler had pulled up next to my Corolla. The driver’s window rolled down.

Riley Smith leaned out, one arm draped over the steering wheel, her leather jacket on, her hair still damp from the shower. She looked like an ad for something expensive and slightly dangerous.

“Car trouble, Bell?”

“No. I’m just sitting here. In the dark. In a parking lot. For fun.”

Her mouth twitched. “Get in.”

“I’m fine. I’ll call—”

“It’s twenty-eight degrees and your car sounds like it just flatlined. Get in, Bell. I’m not letting you freeze to death in a Corolla.”

My pride held for exactly four seconds.

The inside of Riley’s Jeep was chaos. Energy drink cans in the cupholder, a gym bag in the backseat. It smelled like her — cologne, something woody and sharp, and spearmint gum.

She pulled out of the parking lot without asking for directions.

“How’d you end up here?” she asked. “Like, on the Bolts.”

I told her. The D-III school, the open tryout, the call-up she almost didn’t answer because she thought it was a mistake.

Riley was quiet for a moment. Then: “It wasn’t a mistake.”

She said it like it was simple. Like it was obvious. Like she was stating a fact she’d known for a long time.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

She pulled up to my building. “Fix your car, Bell. I’m not running a taxi service.” But she waited until I was inside before she drove away.

Something turned over in my chest — small, warm, completely unreasonable.

I lay in bed in the dark and replayed the car ride on a loop. Her voice. Her cologne. The way she said it wasn’t a mistake like it cost her something to say.

My phone buzzed. Team group chat. Riley had posted a clip with the caption: Someone tell Bell to stop staring at me from the bench, it’s distracting 😂😂😂

I stared at the message for way too long.

Then I typed: Hard not to stare when someone’s hogging all the ice time.

Riley: jealousy is an ugly color on you Bell

Eve: So is that jacket but you still wear it every day

Riley: WOW

Riley: ok that one was good

Riley: go to sleep bench warmer

Eve: Fix my car and I’ll think about it

Riley: I’ll pick you up for practice

Riley: 7:15. Don’t be late.

I set my phone down. Pressed my face into the pillow.

I was not going to make this into a thing. I was not going to lie here in the dark and think about the way Riley Smith’s Jeep smelled like cologne and spearmint gum.

I was going to go to sleep.

I did not go to sleep for a very long time.

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Eve and Riley move into their first apartment together. Dani brings a label maker. Jordan builds furniture. And the second everyone leaves… the christening begins. Counter sex, silk scarves, and the filthiest, funniest, most joyful chapter in the series.

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