Pucks Property
The team’s ice-cold fixer contracts a fake romance with its most dangerous player—and every clause in the deal is designed to survive the moment it stops being fake.
Hallie Vance, a thirty-two-year-old crisis-management consultant and former figure skater, is hired to save the career of Bishop Graves, a Boston hockey defenseman whose violent temper is about to get him traded.
Her plan is a contract-bound fake relationship complete with negotiated boundaries and consent clauses, meant to soften his ‘butcher’ image without either party surrendering control.
As staged appearances give way to genuine attraction, the two wounded, guarded people confront the trauma driving them and the professional conflict of interest their feelings create.
When a private denial spoken to protect his armor detonates the trust they’ve built, both have to choose honesty over self-protection.
Tropes: fake dating/fake relationship, hockey romance, enemies to lovers, grumpy tortured hero, ice-queen heroine, forced proximity, workplace/client romance, size difference, possessive protective hero, he falls first, consent-forward negotiation, found family (the team), third-act breakup/overheard misunderstanding, marriage and baby epilogue
Story promises: Guaranteed HEA · multiple POV · past tense (what this means)
Content notes: explicit sexual content; professional power imbalance; childhood abuse and parental alcoholism (referenced); disordered-eating pressure (referenced); sports violence and injury; pregnancy (full index)
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