The Captain's Mistake : A Second Chance, Runaway Bride Sports Romance, livre ebook

Liam Blackwood has been icing a hamstring in secret for a week. He fills the ice baths at midnight when the training ground is empty. He keeps his warmup runs at seventy percent and lets his touch do the work. On match day he locks himself in the end cubicle, pulls up the leg of his shorts, presses a towel-wrapped ice pack into the muscle and counts. *Ten minutes. Just give me ten minutes.*
The phone in his kit bag has three hairline fractures across the screen because his daughter Chloe dropped it during one of her dizzy spells. He has not replaced the glass. Every spare pound goes to a private clinic in Birmingham, where Chloe's treatment costs six grand a week and his playing contract is the only thing paying for it.
Then the sixty-third minute happens. A West Ham midfielder's studs catch his standing ankle, he goes down hard, and the leg that reaches him first belongs to the wrong doctor.
Not old Rossi in his tweed jacket. The new physio. *Where does it hurt?* *Nowhere.* *You grabbed your right hamstring when you fell.*
Her name is Elena, and the club doctor she replaced, Alan Rossi, is her father. She has hung her own framed certification on the office wall and told the whole squad how it works: you come to me with an injury, I treat it; you hide one, and I find out. She could end Liam's season with a single line in a report.
Instead she agrees to treat him off the books. *No records. No paperwork. No Declan.*
Declan Shaw wants the armband. He has his kids' names tattooed on his forearms, a Yorkshire accent he thickens for the lads, a fresh stack of betting slips in the bin, and a press officer called Karen Mills who owes him a favour from Wolverhampton. When he photographs Liam and Elena with their heads bent together over two coffees, the picture reaches her within the hour.
And underneath all of it is the thing Liam has not said out loud in three years: he was driving the car, his father was in it, and so was Chloe.
A second-chance sports romance set around a lower-table football club, about an injury hidden too long, a doctor who puts her licence on the table, and a man who has to stop paying for everyone alone. Closed-door.