The Thornbay Corsairs

Three books, three couples, one club that does not exist.

The Corsairs play in a league that is not named, in a town that is not on a map, on a schedule that is exactly the schedule a professional hockey season keeps: a camp in September, eighty-two games, a deadline in February, and a summer that decides who is still here. That part was researched carefully enough that people who have lived it should not wince.

What the three books have in common

• Slow burns with earned hostility. Nobody is unpleasant for the plot's sake. When two men cannot stand each other at the start, the reason is on the page and it is a good one.
• Symmetrical couples. Nobody outranks anybody. No coach and player, no manager and employee, no man with power over the other man's job.
• Endings that stay happy. Every book ends happily for both men, with no cheating and no third-act breakup — nobody walks out near the end to be won back.
• No cliffhangers. Each book closes its own season completely.

Reading order

Every book stands alone. You can start anywhere, and each one says on its own page exactly what it contains and how explicit it is, so you can decide one book at a time.

Read in order, you get something extra: a room that fills up. The men who carry books two and three are already on the ice in book one, with names, jobs and one scene of friction apiece.

1. Two Minutes for Hating — Fiore and Kellow. Enemies to lovers; the hostility is earned. Open door, but restrained.
2. Two Minutes for Keeping — Vogt and Deschamps. Two goaltenders, one job, nobody outranks anybody. Explicit.
3. Two Minutes for Hiding — Okonkwo and Prescott. Two captains, opposite benches, one file. Explicit, and further than either book before it.

A note on heat levels

They are not the same across the series, and that is deliberate rather than careless. Book one was written with the door open and the camera turned away. Books two and three do not turn away, and book three goes further than either.

Each book carries its own version of this note, inside the book and on its page here, so nobody finds out at sixty percent that they picked up the wrong one.

Thornbay Corsairs

Two Minutes for Hating

Traded four times in seven years, Dominic Fiore signs with the one club whose captain called him a headhunter on a national broadcast — and the coach puts them on the same line.

Two Minutes for Keeping

Two goaltenders share the same nine feet by eleven every morning, and by June the club will have kept one of them. A rivalry that is real, professional, and symmetrical — nobody outranks anybody.

Two Minutes for Hiding

Two captains on opposite sides of a playoff bracket, fourteen years across the line from each other, and a relationship the league they both work for does not allow.

Every book stands alone and ends happily. Read them in any order.