Overview

Anyone can fall in love. Pickle makes it unforgettable.

Thunder Bay’s favorite chaos gremlin, Noah “Pickle” Piatkowski, is no longer the rookie, but he hasn’t lost an ounce of his wild energy. He’s fast, he’s fearless, and he’s still the guy who shows up late to practice because he got his hand stuck in a Pringles can again. Fans adore him. His teammates have stopped asking questions.

When the Storm gathers at The Drop to watch Hog’s partner, Rhett, land a deal on Shark Tank, Pickle’s world begins to tilt.

Enter Adrian Richter, thirty-four, a polished, quietly intense documentary filmmaker sent the day after the show by a streaming network sensing a story —sharp-eyed and no-nonsense. He’s come looking for an authentic slice of small-town hockey life…and instead he finds Pickle, standing in the parking lot of The Drop in Crocs, holding a broken karaoke microphone, and trying to teach Hog’s dog how to howl along to "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

Adrian is thunderstruck. Not just by Pickle’s ridiculousness—but by the heat beneath the chaos. The tenderness tucked behind the jokes. The way Pickle lights up a room without even meaning to.

Pickle, for his part, has no idea what to do when someone hot, grown, and deeply competent looks at him like he’s more than the team’s comic relief. Every instinct tells him to deflect with humor, to hide behind being “the funny one,” to pretend he doesn’t care about the idea that someone might—finally—take him seriously. Letting Adrian see the version of himself he's been protecting? That's terrifying. That's impossible. That's starting to feel inevitable.

When the production company decides Pickle makes better footage as a joke than a person, Adrian faces his own protect the project that was supposed to rebuild his stalled career, or protect the man who's stolen his heart.

An opposites attract small-town hockey romance, with a guaranteed happily ever after.

A storm is coming to Thunder Bay. Turns out, it’s love.

349 pages