Cold Gold

COLD GOLD

A High-Heat Contemporary Winter-Sports Romance Series

3-Book Series • Open Door (high heat, explicit) • HEA each book

“Three brothers. One man holding the money. And three women who were never supposed to be on the record.”

The Kessler brothers grew up in a garage that smelled of ski wax and second mortgages, raised on one rule: medal, or disappear. Now the federation man who signs their funding has learned what each brother loves — and made it the price of the podium.

A written-off downhiller and the wax genius who left the sport over a lie she didn’t tell. A golden-boy snowboarder whose grin is a load-bearing wall and the figure skater penalised every time the effort shows. A biathlete who controls everything but the wind and the range chief whose own body won’t take orders.

Three winters. Three podiums that stop mattering the moment love is on the line. High-heat, open-door romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after in every book — three interconnected standalones, one frozen empire of a sport, and the women who thaw it.

Book One — Fall Line (Zane & Ingrid)

“He found the fastest hands in ski racing hiding in a barn. She agreed to make him fast on one condition — nobody ever learns her name.”

Zane Kessler was the fastest American downhiller of his generation, two winters and two surgeries ago. Now he races at the discretion of a federation director, in a jacket with the sponsor logo peeled off, on a knee that does not do lateral — and he has until Friday to produce a signed technician contract he cannot possibly afford. Then a blizzard comes down Main Street carrying the smell of restricted racing wax, and he follows it.

The slouching barn off Sentinel holds better tools than his national team truck. The woman inside has graphite-stained fingertips, a Norwegian accent and no interest whatsoever in being found. Ingrid Solheim built globe-winning race skis for nine years, until a factory report blamed her for a wax call she never made; she packed everything she was into four road cases and stopped opening them. Fourteen months on, she is tuning nine-year-olds’ slalom skis and telling anyone who asks that the technician they are thinking of does not exist any more.

The deal is written on a legal pad. He pays. He does not touch her tools. Nobody learns her name. What neither of them writes down is what happens across nine hours of road, one motel with one bed, and a season where half a second is the difference between a career and a hobby — or what it does to a man to be handed something built for him by someone who owes him nothing. And Giles Sterling, the director who signs the funding, does not lose an asset quietly: there is a contract on the table with a clause that excludes independent contractors, and a concrete hallway outside a finish area where Zane is asked to choose.

Forced-proximity, only-one-bed alpine sports romance where the technical work is the courtship — a woman who has been essential and invisible her entire working life, and a man who has spent two years learning how to need nobody at all. One of them is going to have to say the other’s name out loud, in front of everyone, and mean it.

Alternating First Person, Present Tense (Zane & Ingrid) • HEA

Book Two — Four Across (Crew & Paloma)

“He is paid to smile. She is marked down every time the effort shows. Neither of them expects to be seen at five in the morning, on empty ice, by the one person who isn’t scoring.”

Crew Kessler has a crystal globe in a box somewhere, a face worth three billboards in Denver, and a laugh he can switch on and off like a light. He wins another World Cup snowboard-cross race, looks up at the mountain he has just conquered, and feels absolutely nothing. Then a dawn detour through Ledyard Arena puts him at the boards at five in the morning, watching the best figure skater in the building throw herself at a quad and land on her hip five times in a row.

Paloma Vanterpool does not want a softer programme. She wants a score that matches what her body can actually do. The panel keeps telling her she is too tall, too strong, too obviously working — that grace, on a scoresheet, means small, means don’t let us see the work. So when the federation’s golden boy offers her the one thing nobody has offered her since she was six years old — empty ice, before dawn, with nobody keeping score — she takes the deal. Professional distance where the cameras are. Early mornings they train, and only train. It holds for exactly as long as you would expect.

Because Giles signs the funding for both of them, and Giles has a method: he never threatens the person standing in front of him, he threatens what they love. He has the rehabilitation budget for Crew’s brother in one hand and a holiday marketing campaign in the other — and once he is holding arena swipe logs with two athlete IDs and a column of entry times starting at 4:58 a.m., he has something far more useful than a contract. He has a story he can sell.

Secret-relationship, high-heat winter romance about the difference between being measured and being seen — two athletes graded every day of their lives, one frozen Adirondack town in December, and a man with a tablet who has finally found a price for the only thing neither of them has ever been scored on.

Alternating First Person, Present Tense (Crew & Paloma) • HEA

Book Three — The Range (Magnus & Seren)

“He calculated the luck out of his life. She reads the wind by feel. Neither of them planned on being the variable.”

Magnus Kessler has spent twelve years turning fear into a system. A laminated log for every session. A heart-rate monitor he never takes off. A four-minute warm-up performed the same way, in the same order, at exactly zero-six-hundred every morning. It has carried him to the top of American biathlon and it has never once let him rest. Then he walks onto Lane 4 before dawn and finds his targets moved three metres left — and the chief of range proves, from two years of her own wind vectors, that his best mornings were never skill at all. They were luck.

Seren Madoc runs the firing line, the timing tower and the weather. She is Welsh, she is the finest wind reader on the mountain, and her joints are staging a quiet mutiny she has told nobody about. Cold takes her hands away by degrees, and she has built a whole professional life out of never letting anyone see it happen. She has three weeks to turn a machine into a marksman, because Giles has set the price of keeping biathlon alive at ninety percent standing accuracy — a number Magnus has never come close to.

The contract they sign says she is the coach and he obeys. He hands over the logs, the monitor, the ritual, the whole cathedral. What the contract does not cover is the firing line at night, or the timing hut on the mornings her hands will not close, or the day he quietly rebuilds the entire training roster around her clinic appointments and falsifies his own sacred data to hide what he has done. Because Giles has already built the scale: Magnus’s career sits on one side of it, and Seren’s whole department sits on the other.

Coach-and-athlete, grumpy-and-grounded biathlon romance set across five weeks of blizzards, wreaths and red bows on the fence posts — a man who engineered every trace of chance out of his life, and the woman whose body is the one variable neither of them can control. It closes the trilogy with all three Kessler brothers on the page and their mother presiding over the kitchen.

Alternating First Person, Present Tense (Magnus & Seren) • HEA

Throughout All Three Books

Series Details

Heat Level

Content Warnings

What You Get

Three Books • Three Brothers • One Man Holding the Money ♥