The Shutout Sweetheart (The Austin Chupacabras #1)

One viral clip. One fake romance. One very real problem.

Junie Bloom runs every inch of the Austin Chupacabras’ social media, alone, with a ring light named Beyonce and a content calendar the assistant coaches have learned to fear.

She books miracles for a living: mic’d-up practices, viral moments, a struggling hockey franchise that needs the internet to fall in love with it before the ice does.

The one player she can never book is the goalie.

Lars "Saint" Lindell is twenty-nine, from Duluth, the single best reason to watch this team and the single hardest interview in the building.

He answers requests with one word: no. Then, on Mic’d Up day, he ends Junie’s ring light with a clearing puck from eighteen inches, and tapes her sprained wrist with a gentleness that four million people watch on repeat before lunch.

The struggling franchise sees exactly what the internet sees.

Management’s instruction is short: don’t deny it.

So now there’s a fake-dating rulebook, a no-real-feelings clause initialed in the margins, and a goalie who keeps amending it, one quiet exception at a time, in handwriting only Junie can read.

Moontower Arena runs on Junie’s spreadsheets, a Zamboni driver named Gus, and a compressor system the size of a school bus fighting the entire state of Texas to a draw so grown men can skate in January.

She loves the stubbornness of it. She just didn’t plan on falling for the stubbornest man in the building.

She built a career convincing strangers to feel something on camera. She never planned on feeling it herself, on schedule, in front of four million people who already think they know how this ends.

Welcome to Moontower Arena, where the ice fights Texas for eight months a year, the mascot suit keeps secrets, one cat runs the building’s morale, and everybody on this roster is one bad day away from falling in love in front of a few thousand witnesses.

She’s a lot. He’s counting on it.