Two teammates with a past they don’t talk about. One broken-down bus. A Christmas Eve that won’t let them avoid it any longer.
When a winter storm strands the Rochester Copperheads at a cute New Hampshire bed and breakfast on their way home from a game, Bob and Arnaud end up sharing the last room, courtesy of their captain, Walker, who’s done watching them circle each other on and off the ice.
Nobody on the team knows what happened between them two years ago. Nobody knows about the moose, though half the roster brings it up whenever they want to watch Bob’s ears go red. And nobody knows that Bob has spent two seasons acting like that weekend never happened, because pretending is easier than admitting he never stopped thinking about it.
Arnaud is the goalie with something to prove, the kind of charm that gets him in trouble in every city they play. Bob is the defenseman who’d rather eat a slap shot than talk about his feelings. Trapped together with only one bed, there’s nowhere left to hide from the moose story, that fateful weekend in Quebec, or the two years of silence in between.
As the snow keeps falling and one night’s stay becomes more, old wounds turn out to be hard to ignore. When the roads clear and the bus rolls on, will they go back to pretending nothing happened? Or is this the Christmas Eve that finally makes them stop?
Frost and Firelight is a steamy MM hockey romance with forced proximity, second-chance tension, and all the warmth of the holidays.
