Tape and Teeth: Full Spoiler Guide

Lena Moreau reduces Aleksandr Volkov’s dislocated finger in an emptied locker room and splints it in his own private over-under tape pattern from memory — proving she has been watching him as closely as he has been watching her. The same week the owner summons her to praise a conservative chart that kept an injury off league paper, and closes by naming her son and his love of the Zamboni. Tape and Teeth is Lady Heartswell’s cold hockey romance: an enforcer hero, a single-mother physical therapist, a secret pregnancy, and an owner who “arranges the furniture” so the threat is the only logical thought a frightened person can have.

What it is

Lena is the Vanguard’s PT, with a surgically repaired knee and a five-year-old, Theo, who counts goalie pads to keep the world from sliding. Volkov — “Volk,” #44 — was raised in a barn outside Magnitogorsk by a father who valued only the version of him that won fights. Halloran Pryce has owned the club thirty-one years and thinks in inventory: he acquires Theo’s father, Drew Kalney, by trade to flatten Lena, and keeps a buried disciplinary file on Volkov to keep the enforcer obedient. The book’s controlling metaphor is a load-bearing wall.

Who will love it

Readers of hockey romance who want it colder and more adult — dense medical vocabulary, a whistleblower plot, and a heroine whose competence is the point; readers who want the secret-baby trope handled as a leverage problem rather than a misunderstanding; and readers who want the possessive-alphahole beats staged specifically so the heroine can reject them.

Tropes

• Enforcer hero; single mother; secret baby; the ex returns (traded in)
• Staff/athlete forbidden workplace romance; body-reading as intimacy; claiming bite
• Owner villain; whistleblower; touch-her-and-die interrogated and rejected
• Second chance at trust; found family

Heat

Site heat level: Explicit. On the page: explicit, three scenes from chapter 5. “You’re not touching me. I’m letting you. There’s a difference.” The first bite is taken unasked; she later requires him to do it again and ask first, and he does.

Content notes

On-ice fighting, broken hands and blood; concussion and institutional pressure to clear an injured athlete; childhood physical abuse (a stopwatch and a barn floor); workplace retaliation; a child threatened through family-court process; surveillance and a weaponised birth certificate; an off-page career threat by the love interest; explicit sex.

Full plot, with spoilers

After a late night in the training room the two break eight months of pretending on the treatment table — ended by a text from “D”: “Heard you’re back in Boston. We should talk before I sign. About Theo.” In a Brookline clinic bathroom Lena takes a pregnancy test and rules Drew out by dates: the father is Volkov. She builds three rules — tell him nothing, tell Renata nothing, tell no one — because if Pryce learns, she becomes a lever with two handles. Volkov overhears Kalney say “Theo” and “five,” concludes Pryce traded for the boy’s father as leverage, and decides Lena can never know: the narration names it as the exact thing Pryce is doing, moving pieces around her without her hand on the board. Renata warns that a directive is coming — sign off on Kalney’s degrading labrum and document #44 as career-terminal so ownership can move him as medicine.

Standing twelve feet away with her phone recording ambient sound for treatment notes, Lena captures Pryce instructing the team physician to amend a concussion chart: “Make the chart say what the building needs.” She emails it to the Players’ Association medical-safety liaison at 6:14 a.m. and tells no one. The inquiry lands; an independent monitor is installed with override authority; Pryce shifts from her job to her son — a guardian ad litem in her apartment asking a boy about the man with the swollen hand — and leaves an open drawer: “ask your friend in forty-four what happened in Hamilton in 2019.” Volkov finds a lab printout with a circled gestational estimate and understands the child is his — and that he has become the handle. Then Lena learns he threatened to end Kalney’s career in a parking lot and waived his no-trade clause and inserted her contract into the trade routing chain to make her “untouchable.” “Leaving and owning are the same wound.” She ends it.

The ending (spoiler)

Volkov sits alone in her dark rehab room and arrives at the only protection he has never given anyone: room. He leaves a cold pack crooked in a drawer on purpose and does nothing. Lena spends one day at her kitchen table sending the monitor the full chronology, the staffing memos, the trade timeline aligned to the dates she declined to falsify a clearance, and the voicemail in which Pryce names her child; she takes his call and tells him she hasn’t won, only made it expensive. Coyle resigns. Volkov self-reports the buried fight — a broken orbital and a wired hush payment — to the monitor, refuses a trade at a press scrum by bluffing a no-move clause, and protects two teammates on the ice with position and a bear hug, no blood on the tape. Her note in his stall: “Clean tape. Good.” At 1 a.m. he offers her his contract out-clause to hold — “I cannot become leverage if you are already holding the leash” — and she refuses the leash entirely, sets three terms (no decisions made on her behalf; she gets the part of him he thinks is worthless; Theo is never used), and he tears the out-clause into eighths into the biohazard bin. The monitor and the captain strip Pryce of day-to-day authority; his 5:50 a.m. disciplinary trade of Volkov is declined. Months later, on uncut ice at six in the morning, Lena sits with their eight-week-old against her chest while Volkov redoes his wrist tape with the third pass loosened because she told him his shoulder was tight. She counts the exits — four — and doesn’t need one.

Where it sits

Standalone. For the pen’s MMF hockey line, start with Man Advantage 2.

Reader Questions

Book page: Tape and Teeth. Author guide: Lady Heartswell. Browse the full catalogue at Centuria Books.