Goalie Brad Spencer is flying high after his team clinches the Cup and names him their MVP. Like his teammates, he’s ready to celebrate—ideally with someone in his bed. When he slips off to a gay bar, he meets someone who’s gorgeous, willing, and… absolutely the last man he should be touching.
Head coach Anthony Caruso just wants to have a few drinks and get laid to soothe the sting of his team losing the Cup. Then that ridiculously sexy player from the opposing team strolls into the club. The chemistry is instantaneous, and a mountain of PHL regulations can’t keep them apart. After all, it’s just a hookup.
And then another hookup. And then a summer getaway that’s just enough time and privacy for them to get in way over their heads. When the hockey season starts up again, they walk away… but they can’t stay away.
Anthony and Brad value their careers way too much to be this reckless, but they’ve both been alone for way too long to ignore these feelings.
Sooner or later, though, something has to give, and one of them is going to have to choose between the man he loves and the sport he lives for.
Comment: This is the third installment in the Pucks and Rainbows trilogy by LA Witt. I have read the first last month but skipped the second book because it would feature a romance between three guys. Nothing against it but it's not a relationship dynamic I'm interested in, so I've jumped to this third story instead.
In this story we meet Brad Spencer and Anthony Caruso, goalkeeper and coach of two opposed teams which have just played each other and Brad's team won the cup. As a celebration, Brad checks out a gay bar where he hopes to find someone to spend the night with and who else would be there but Caruso, the only openly gay coach in the league. They hit it off and decide to spend the night... then Bard invites Anthony to spend a week with him, and they they mutually agree to spend the whole summer together... but reality and their jobs won't allow them to be a couple. How will they cope or will they need to stop seeing each other?
I liked the previous book in this trilogy but didn't love it. In fact, I liked the cover more than the story (this book's is also gorgeous) but the blurb of this book seemed to captivate me and I hoped this would be a good story, better than the previous one.
Although this one and the first - and the second, which I haven't read - all feature characters in the same universe, hockey players, I mean, the plots are independent and the characters are only referenced, and from what I understood, it's not important if one reads in order or not. Still, it was nice to have the main character of the first book named here once or twice and I could know who he was.
Brad and Anthony are two people who should not match, and not only due to their roles in their respective teams. I can see how a relationship between a player and a coach of an opposed team would be too hard to maintain, especially if this is at a professional level, one only needs to think about real life and the repercussions of it and how it would affect several things. Still, to me, the forbidden aspect was never a thing because these two are falling in love and as with so many other sports novels out there featuring rivals who fall in love, this is the fun part to see developed.
I think it was also a good idea to have the guys in teams that don't play each other often, only at decisive moments, because it certainly made the opposition seem less important if real feelings are involved. Of course, this means the relationship struggles with long distance and if this wasn't a romance, the odds of they holding on to it in a steady way would seem very weak. I liked it how the author played things out and the "solution" in the end was rather predictable. I still preferred it to something unrealistic, so..
Brad and Anthony have very different personalities but I think the way the author established that they were falling in love and what was special about the other in this situation, with this sequence of events seemed intriguing and I wanted to see them being happy and finding a way to make it work. I also liked the way the sport they played and their professional roles being key to how they dealt with the potential discovery of their relationship. Perhaps what was lacking was a more obvious interaction with the secondary characters, namely their teams. This does happen but only close to the end of the book and I think to have these dynamics more would have been important.
I won't analyse how well the sport is portrayed since I don't know any rules about ice hockey, but when it comes to the way this affected Anthony's behavior in leading a team, and in how Brad felt when things weren't as great for him as a player, I think the sport was key enough to make these things seem important and why it influenced their decisions as much as it was made to seem.
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