Read by Kate Handford
From the publisher:
A bookshop romance with a hunky hockey love interest and a pinch of spice from USA Today Bestseller Amy Andrews!
A bookshop face-off!
NHL hot shot, Nick Hawkeye Hawke has 4 months to recuperate from a potentially career-ending injury. All he has to do is take it easy and keep things low-key. So, looking after his grandmother’s beloved second-hand romance bookshop and working very closely with the ruthlessly efficient Samantha Evans is just what he needs right? Wrong!
Career-driven Sam has impulsively decided to swap her highly stressful corporate job for a slower pace in her favourite bookshop at the exact time her biological clock has started to tick. And she wants absolutely none of that. But when your boss is a hot hockey superstar and you can’t stop daydreaming of him being your baby daddy, forced proximity takes on a whole new meaning.
With temptation around every bookshelf, Nick and Sam find themselves skating on thin ice until they put themselves firmly in the friend zone. But the more they try to resist their slow burn, the more they want each other. How long can they stay in the zone until one of them breaks the ice?
Perfect for fans of Elle Kennedy, Bal Khabra, Emily Rath, and Hannah Grace.
Previously published as Risky Business
A professional ice hockey player and a bookstore? Count me in! When the owner of Sam’s favorite romance bookstore passes away, she is shocked to find the owner’s grandson taking over. Nick is a pro athlete; what could he possibly know about a romance bookstore?
Sam is in finance and setting the world on fire, that is until her boss decides to give all her accounts to his loser nephew. Sam is furious and quits her job. When Nick finds out she is unemployed, he offers her a job in the bookstore. She takes it, thinking it will be a nice break while she waits for the nephew to bomb out and her old boss to beg her to come back.
Sam and Nick find they have more in common than either originally thought. Sam has some body image issues (shocking, I know) and can’t understand why Nick is flirting with her. On the other hand, he thinks she’s gorgeous and loves her curves; he can’t understand why she puts herself down. The more time they spend together, the more feelings start to grow.
This is a slow-burn, friends-to-lovers romance, and there is a lot of cute banter and a bit of heat, making this a fast and fun read. The narrator was really good, too; she totally brought me into this world, and I hated to leave.
Note: I’ve mostly been listening to audiobooks through Hoopla, a fantastic resource available through many public libraries. Like everything else online, they have an algorithm that suggests other books I may like based on what I’ve checked out. The next thing I knew, I was knee-deep in ice hockey romances! Some are definitely better than others, and I thought this was a good one, although, frankly, hockey had no real part in it! I will be reviewing a few others that I enjoyed.
On the other hand, Pucking Around by Emily Rath was a DNF for me, I got about three quarters of the way through and finally gave it up. It started out good but soon devolved into what just felt like bad porn to me. The plot was pretty thin; the story revolved around the female team doctor for a new hockey team and the men she was hooking up with. It started with a one-night stand leading to more encounters with that man, followed by a throuple. When it turned into a foursome, I gave it up. At that point, it was just descriptions of one sexual encounter after another, and all pretense at a plot was forgotten. It just didn’t feel like a romance anymore.
1/2025 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch
BREAKING THE ICE by Amy Andrews. Narrator: Kate Handford. Boldwood Books; November 07, 2024. ASIN: B0DHWD1TC3. Listening Length: 8 hours and 23 minutes
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