Mara Calloway has exactly one rule about hockey players: never fall for one. She has broken it once, watched it burn her family to the ground, and she is never, ever making that mistake twice. Especially not with Roman Vale — Boston’s most hated captain, the man the entire city blames for ending her brother’s career, the man she has hated with the kind of precision that only comes from loving someone first. Then Roman shows up at her door with a folder that could clear her brother’s name and a proposal that could ruin her life: marry him for one year, and the truth is hers. Mara says yes with her teeth gritted and her heart locked. This is a transaction. Nothing more. Except Roman doesn’t play by the rules of a transaction. He learns the exact way she likes her coffee in one morning and he sleeps on her floor during her worst nights, inches away, never once reaching for her, like touching her is a line he’s terrified of crossing because he already knows what’s on the other side. Mara came for evidence but started to fall for the man she signed a contract to hate. And there’s one clause in that contract nobody showed her. If Roman falls in love with his wife, he loses everything. His team. His name. His freedom. Because her own father wrote that clause — to protect her from a truth he thought would break her. Now Mara has to choose: walk away with the evidence and leave the man she loves to pay for a sin that was never his, or burn the whole rulebook down and stand beside him while the entire hockey world watches him fall. She was supposed to leave in one year. Roman never planned on letting her go. And now, neither does she.