The Winger's Comeback, livre ebook

Coach O'Shea does not offer his hand. He gives Jake an hour before the first skate and looks at him like a dog he is not sure has been fully vaccinated.
In the training room, a woman with her hair yanked into a ponytail so tight it pulls at her temples is already pulling tape off a roll. She turns, opens a manila folder, and reads his own file back to him. Left knee reconstruction, Grade 3 MCL tear, partial meniscectomy, microfracture surgery, and a current timeline for return to full contact of March at the earliest.
*"It's January."*
*"I heal fast."*
Elena Vasquez is the Wolves' physical therapist, and clearance is hers, not the coach's. There is a clause in the paperwork taped to the wall that says so. The surgeon told Jake six months. Jake has given it four.
What she does not know yet is why he cannot wait. His phone buzzes on the bench with a text from Ruby, his twelve-year-old sister, whose guardian he is: when is he picking her up, because the after-school director has already given him two warnings. He would have to leave practice early, which means getting cut, which means no contract.
*"Because I can't afford to stop."*
What Jake does not know is that Elena makes thirty-five thousand dollars a year, that her brother Marco owes five thousand to a man who came to his apartment and left a warning on his face, and that two thousand of it is due Friday. She writes the check for her entire car fund.
And Luke Tremblay, all smirk and stick-and-puck tattoos, has decided there is something to find. *"I'm watching him. And I'm watching you."*
They are both keeping something the other one's job cannot survive, and the whole arrangement holds together only as long as nobody photographs anything.
It ends in overtime at a home opener with standing room only and bodies pressed against the glass, a poster board sign in uneven glitter-glue letters reading *I believe in you, big bro*, and a winger getting up off the ice after a hit he saw coming and could not brace for.
A closed-door hockey romance about a man rushing a surgeon's timeline for a reason he will not say out loud, and the therapist whose entire job is telling him no.