The Center's Wager : A Public Humiliation, Betrayal Sports Romance, livre ebook

Leo Madsen has a way of surviving press conferences. You pick a spot on the back wall, just above the camera lights, and you pretend the questions are coming from there. Tonight the spot is a water stain the shape of Idaho, and the woman in the third row is not asking about hockey. *"Your penalty minutes are up thirty percent from last season. Your shooting percentage is down."* Leo walks off the stage before he says something that ends up on SportsCenter.
His agent's solution arrives with a tablet. Briar O'Donnell is handed a contract by the Thunder's PR chief that reads three months, confidential, one client. Not the roster. Just Leo Madsen, the team's top scorer for three seasons, with an expiring deal and a growing reputation as a problem.
Leo makes his position plain at their first meeting. *"I'm here because my agent made me. Three months. That's what I agreed to. After that, you're gone."*
So she sits behind the glass at practice with a notebook while his teammates enjoy themselves. Kurt Vickers calls her his shadow, then his girlfriend, then the little PR girl, and watches Leo's skate blade catch every time. Then she is on the road trip. Then there are photographs, and a version of events that Leo stands up in front of his own locker room and defends: they have been seeing each other quietly, the photos are real, the relationship is real, this is not a stunt. Three lies and a half-truth wrapped in a bow.
What Briar gets underneath the arrangement is the part nobody has been paid to package. A framed photograph on his nightstand inscribed *For the boy who will carry my heart.* A mother who drove hours to sit in cold bleachers with a thermos and never complained, who died three weeks after his sister won nationals. A sister who stopped skating the next season because she said she couldn't hear the music anymore, and who Leo has been watching move through the world ever since.
Then PuckDrop publishes, quoting a team insider: *Thunder's Love Story Exposed: Paid Actress Behind Leo Madsen's Redemption Campaign.* Leo counts the people who knew about the hotel and comes up with five, and he says the cruelest available thing to the one standing in his living room refusing to leave.
With a trade offer on the table and a season still alive, what he decides is whether he can stop performing long enough to keep her.
This is a contemporary sports romance built on a fake arrangement, a leaked story, and a man who has been managing his own face since he was sixteen. The heat is closed-door.