Five players. One season. Five forever loves — and a championship a city has waited fourteen years to win.
The Series
The Cobalt City Crush have never won a championship. Founded in 1987, the franchise has spent a generation collecting near-misses and a city’s worth of stubborn, sold-out Sundays. This season, something changes — and it isn’t the depth chart. One player at a time, the Crush fall hard and fast for the women who refuse to be impressed by them, and one player at a time, the team gets better. By the time the confetti falls, love hasn’t just survived the season. It won it.
In False Start, the franchise quarterback thaws for a baker who doesn’t know who he is. In Play Action, the league’s flashiest receiver fake-dates the crisis publicist hired to contain him — except it was never fake for him. In Home Field, a running back goes home for the first time in eleven years to save the field that made him, and the woman running the campaign to save it. In Cold Snap, a widowed tight end and the teacher who stays eleven minutes late find a family in the middle of December. And in Overtime, the team’s quietest enforcer finally lets himself want his best friend’s sister — five weeks before the biggest game of his life.
Every book is a one-sitting steamy short read told in dual first-person present tense, with a curvy, fully-realized heroine, a devoted athlete who falls first and falls hard, and a guaranteed HEA with no cliffhangers.
Read in order for the cameos, the running jokes, and a coach whose only philosophy is the one this series proves: love wins games.
What’s Included in This Package
The Five Books
Book One — False Start (Daisy Monroe & Beckett “Beck” Cole)
“The city calls him Ice Cole. The baker across from the stadium calls him ‘Tuesday Door Guy’ — and has no idea she’s feeding the most famous man in Cobalt City.”
False Start · Daisy Monroe & Beck Cole
Beckett Cole threw one interception in January and the whole city decided it was who he is. Now it’s a contract year, the cameras won’t quit, and the only room that never asks him about the throw is a bakery he sneaks into at five a.m. through a side door a teenager leaves unlocked. Daisy Monroe has been feeding her mystery raccoon for five months. She’s guessed repo man. She has never once guessed quarterback.
Then the team launches a community series and sends a film crew straight into her kitchen — and the grumpiest man in football turns back into Ice Cole the second the lights come on. Daisy’s rent doubles in January; famous bakeries make rent, so she’ll put QB1 in an apron and make it work, her rules, her show. But the cameras that made her famous have long lenses, and when the season asks Beck to choose between the noise and the one woman who never needed him to be anyone, the man who always takes the safe throw has to air it out.
False Start is grumpy/sunshine instalove at its warmest: a hero who falls first and says it loud, a heroine who learns she was never “a lot,” and a hand-fed cupcake in front of the whole morning rush.
Featured hooks · Grumpy/Sunshine · Instalove · Secret Identity · He Falls First · Forced Proximity · Curvy Heroine
Book Two — Play Action (Margot Ellis & Cash Rivera)
“Six weeks. One contract. No kissing off-camera. There’s just one problem with her containment plan: it was never fake for him.”
Play Action · Margot Ellis & Cash Rivera
Cash Rivera woke up to forty-seven missed calls and a scandal that isn’t even his. The fix? Margot Ellis — a crisis publicist with red-lipstick armor, a kill list, and one unbreakable rule: never date a client. The team’s solution is six weeks of fake dating, all paper: NDA, scheduled appearances, no kissing off-camera. Her clause, her pen. The league’s flashiest receiver agrees to every word and means none of them, because the realest thing he’s done in fourteen years of professional make-believe is fall for the woman hired to make him look stable.
Margot has done a version of this before, and it cost her a firm and the ability to hear her own name without flinching. But the man behind the highlight reel studies film at two a.m. in glasses nobody’s ever seen and courts her like the show with no exits. When an old enemy resurfaces and the whole story threatens to set, Margot does the one thing she swore she’d never do again — and Cash does the one thing he’s never done: tells the truth on live television, with no script.
Play Action is fake dating at its sharpest and funniest, with the series’ fastest banter and a hero who’d torch his own highlight reel for the woman who fixed his collar before she liked him.
Featured hooks · Fake Dating · Instalove · Grumpy Heroine · Hidden-Depths Hero · Forced Proximity · Presser Proposal
Book Three — Home Field (Birdie Lane & Rhett Calloway)
“He left Maple Falls at eighteen and never looked back. It takes a condemned field — and the woman fighting to save it — to bring him home.”
Home Field · Birdie Lane & Rhett Calloway
Everybody in Maple Falls watches the Crush games at the diner. For eleven years, Birdie Lane has watched the hometown boy run on that corner TV while she stayed: running her late grandfather’s hardware store, labeling his jars, being the one who never leaves. Then the county condemns the high-school field, a developer circles, and the campaign to save it runs out of Birdie’s store — with a clipboard, a petition, and a grudge.
Rhett Calloway comes home for a bye week to headline the fundraiser and finds the girl two grades behind him grown into the only person who can make him stay. But Birdie’s rule is simple — everyone she loves leaves, so don’t fall for a man who will — and Rhett’s oldest reflex is to go quiet and leave clean. Between them stands a town with one mouth, a father who watches every game from a corner booth he thinks is a secret, and a divot at the thirty-yard line where a boy once cut away from everything.
Home Field is the series’ beating heart: a homecoming and a father-son reconciliation braided into one love story, told through the things people maintain instead of saying. It ends under Friday-night lights on a field that bears her grandfather’s name.
Featured hooks · Small-Town Homecoming · Instalove · Curvy Heroine · Father-Son Repair · Save-the-Field Campaign · Whole-Town Matchmaking
Book Four — Cold Snap (Noelle Garza & Dane Kowalski)
“A man like Dane doesn’t kiss his employee. He tears up her contract first — then asks her to stay.”
Cold Snap · Noelle Garza & Dane Kowalski
Dane Kowalski has run the same play for four years: football, his daughter, silence. Then his nanny quits nine days before the playoff push, and the art teacher who stays eleven minutes late with his little girl walks into his carefully quiet December. Noelle Garza has been everyone’s second call her whole life — the sister who raised the siblings, the teacher who covers everyone’s class. She takes the December nanny job knowing exactly what it is: beloved, essential, and gone by January.
What she doesn’t know is that the team’s quietest man does everything thoroughly, in advance, twice — and he’s about to end the contract himself, on principle, because he can’t court a woman whose name is on his payroll. As the grief he’s kept on a Sunday-dusted mantel turns from a wall into a gate, and a five-year-old quietly decides the outcome, Noelle has to learn the difference between being swept along and choosing fast on purpose.
Cold Snap is the series’ tenderest book: a widower’s grief honored rather than erased, a heroine picked first for the first time in her life, and a single dad’s love expressed entirely in logistics. It ends on Christmas morning with two proposals in the right order, and an ornament that reads my family.
Featured hooks · Single Dad / Widower · Age Gap · Holiday · Nanny Romance (Ethical) · Kid Plays Matchmaker · Instalove
Book Five — Overtime (Lainey Cole & Maddox “Mad Dog” Pierce) · Series Capstone
“Eight years she waited to be chosen out loud. The whole sport is about to hand him a microphone.”
Overtime · Lainey Cole & Maddox Pierce
Eleven years ago, the Cole family gave a foster kid with a packed duffel bag the only home he’s ever trusted — which is exactly why linebacker Maddox “Mad Dog” Pierce has never once let himself look at Beck’s little sister. Then Lainey Cole walks into the Crush training room as the new playoff physical therapist, transfers his care to a colleague before she ever crosses a line, and makes one thing clear: she’s not asking her brother’s permission, and she’s not asking Maddox’s either.
She’s done being filed under kid sister. He’s spent eight years holding a fixed radius around the one woman he can’t survive losing. Five weeks, one championship run, and one secret with a load limit later, the whole thing surfaces the wrong way — and Maddox learns the cost of confessing the woman he loves instead of choosing her out loud, like a fact. To win her back he’ll have to do the hardest thing a quiet man ever does: say it where the entire league can hear.
Overtime closes the series the only way it could: a brother’s-best-friend slow burn detonated by a pursuer with agency, a championship earned on the field, and a finale that brings all five couples back to the confetti. It ends one year later under Friday-night lights, with a ring engraved a fact and a coach’s last word: love wins games.
Featured hooks · Brother’s Best Friend · She Falls First · Forced Proximity · Foster Hero / Found Family · Secret Relationship · Championship Climax
Series Tropes
Series Details
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What You Get
R4 000,00
1 in stock
