Wicked Hockey Faceoff

Kiyomi Blake needs an elite Olympic biomechanics fellowship, which leaves no margin for slipping grades or for St. Jude University’s most feared hockey enforcer.

Senior captain Mauricio Leal, projected sixth overall in the draft, carries his family’s survival on scarred shoulders and meets every shift with cold, punishing force.

Sixty mandated hours of dawn rehabilitation in a locked basement put the intern and the defenseman in each other’s space until hostility sparks into heat, hidden contact under the bleachers, and commands she cannot ignore.

He wants more than the data she is supposed to collect, and giving in could wreck her degree and his professional contract.

Her future hangs on walking away, yet his possessive claim has already made that feel impossible.