Overview

He reads every shot before it happens. He hasn't performed in front of an audience in two years. They've been on opposite sides of the glass for weeks. Tonight, the glass comes down.

Marcus "Mars" Santos is the Atlanta Reapers' starting goalie, and his life is a system. He arrives at a suburban rink before dawn, talks to his goalposts because the posts never ask him to be anything other than what he is, and has spent three seasons building an existence so precisely organized that his own mother says his apartment looks like nobody lives there.

Then a figure skater steps onto his ice.

Theo Kimura was supposed to be the next great American men's figure skater. Then he fell at Nationals—not a normal fall, but the kind that rewires your nervous system and turns every audience into a threat. Two years later, he can only skate when no one is watching. The 5 AM sessions in Decatur are his lifeline. The empty rink is the only place his body still trusts.

Except the rink isn't empty. There's a goalie on the other side of the glass. And his attention doesn't trigger the panic. His attention is the only thing that makes the quads come back.

Mars watches Theo and hears the difference between a clean landing and a flawed one by the frequency of the blade. Theo skates for Mars and discovers that being seen by the right person isn't a performance. It's flying.

But recovery doesn't happen behind glass forever. Theo's coach is pushing toward competition. Mars's teammates are starting to notice the smile he can't suppress. And the 5 AM world they built together has to survive daylight, locker rooms, a competition arena full of strangers, and the question neither of them can avoid: can a man who reads everything learn to stop solving the person he loves?

The ice doesn't care who you love. But the glass between them has to break before either of them can find out what's on the other side.

Between the Lines is a goalie/figure skater MM romance with cold coffee, 5 AM ice, a cat named Axel, bossa nova on vinyl, a Brazilian mother who is always right, and an HEA that proves the best things happen in the space between the notes. Book 4 in the Power Play series. Can be read as a standalone. Dual first-person POV. No cliffhanger.

Tropes: goalie/figure skater, opposites attract, slow burn, performance anxiety/healing, touch starved, only soft for you, found family

170 pages