Blades & Burnout

Rule #1 for surviving a D1 tennis scholarship while drowning in nursing school: Don't let anyone behind your armor.

For nineteen-year-old Aria Beckett, that armor is absolute. She operates like a machine-measuring life in anatomy flashcards, baseline drills, and ninety-minute windows of shallow sleep. When her severe insomnia gets loud enough to choke her, she escapes to the campus rink at 2:00 AM. In the dark, she uses her secret childhood figure skating mechanics to glide until her body is too numb to feel the suffocating pressure of her family's legacy.

She has zero space for a disruption. Especially not the six-foot-four alternate captain who just took over her kitchen.

Reid Dawson is a stone-faced defenseman built to break people on the blue line. But behind his cold public mask, Reid's mind is a cage of performance dissociation. His heavy footwork is locking up behind the net-a flaw that will cost him the NHL draft if his demanding head coach, who happens to be Aria's fiercely protective father, finds out.

When a housing crisis forces Reid to sublet her brother's room, Aria draws a literal tape line down the middle of the floor. She doesn't want his fame, his sport, or his presence. She just wants to survive her boards.

But Reid is entirely, unhingedly undone by her.

Watching Aria run herself into the concrete triggers an absolute boy-obsessed dedication. He doesn't want a deal; he wants to be a shield. Reid forces his way into her brutal routine under a one-sided contract: he will handle her meals, manage her tracking trails, and stand between her and her panic spirals, just for the right to stand on her midnight ice and watch her mechanics.

He knows loving the coach's daughter is a career-ending liability. But when the lines between mechanical survival and a forbidden, addictive attachment blur, the friction might just fracture them both.

Rating: Mature (18+)

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