There are a few things that life doesn’t prepare you for. Like what to do when a super-hot guy catches you sneaking around in his basement, or what to do when a mysterious package shows up with tickets to a hockey game (because, apparently, he’s a professional athlete). Nor how to handle it when you get to the game and realize he’s freaking famous, since half of the 20,000 people in the stands are wearing his jersey.

Beckett Langfield is grumpy, rich and hates kids. I’m an overworked, overstressed, and overweight single mom. The only reason we’re getting married is because he needs to fix a PR disaster and I am available. As in sitting next to him, in a bar, when he has this brilliant idea. Considering I just got divorced, I’m not looking to do that again. But Beckett makes me an offer that I literally can’t refuse, so I don’t.

Running away from home at 17 wasn't easy. Let's face it, though, nothing before or in the ten years since has ever been easy for me. And I'm doing okay—sorta. I just need to keep scraping by, living under the radar. Staying out of people's way, off people's minds. When a man walks through my open patio door, stepping boldly into my home and my life, I should be scared, frightened, terrified. I must be more broken than I realized because I'm none of those things. I'm intrigued—and I'm wondering if the way to take control of my life is by giving in to him.

I should have run the other way. Paid my tab and gone back to my room. But he was there. And he was…everything. I figured, what’s the harm in letting passion rule my decisions for one night? So what if he looks like the Devil in a suit? I’d be leaving in the morning, flying home to my pleasant but predictable life. I’d never see him again. Except I do. In the last place I expected. And now everything I’ve worked so hard for is in jeopardy.

I'm a dangerous man. A man who has spent the last two decades removing so many souls from this earth that it's a miracle my hands aren't permanently stained red. I'm a man who belongs in the shadows. I certainly don't belong in my pretty little neighbor's bedroom when she's not home, touching her things and inhaling her scent. I shouldn't follow her. Shouldn't watch her. No number of cookies on my doorstep will change the fact that love isn't an option for me. The only option left for me is violence.

When I discover my boyfriend is cheating on me, I move out right away taking what I love most – my dog. As I fly out the door, I make sure to swipe the thing my ex loves best–the VIP tickets he won to a hockey game, complete with the chance to spend an evening with the city’s two biggest NHL stars. I can’t wait to snap selfies with my ex’s idols and rub it in his face.

Five hockey players, a cabin in the woods...and little old me, Winnie Berlin. Sounds like the start of a fantasy, right? But it's not. It's my reality. It all started when I got lost in the middle of the Canadian Rockies. A wicked thunderstorm sent my car mud sliding into a ditch, and for a girl whose survival skills involve finding the nearest Starbucks, I was in deep trouble. Forced to abandon my car in search of help, I stumbled upon a cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Hockey star Max Yearwood was everything I needed at the time - fun, sexy, up for anything, and only around for a few months, since he’d signed with a new team 3,000 miles away. Max proposed we spend the summer helping me forget my ex. It sounded like a good plan. Things couldn’t get too serious when we had an expiration date. Right? Though, you know what they say about the best-laid plans. 

When romance novelist Kate Smith suddenly gets writer's block as she's beginning the final installment of her international best-selling erotic Bed 'n Breakfast series, she'll do pretty much anything to get her groove back. Like sneak into a Tire Depot waiting room because her words flow there just like complimentary coffee - smooth, sweet, and scorchingly hot. She manages to fly under the radar until the rugged and charming mechanic, Miles Hudson, notices the quirky redhead slinking in and out of the employees-only entrance. But she's way too intriguing to blow the whistle on.

Carter Beckett is the NHL’s resident bad boy, top player both on the ice and in the bedroom, and quite possibly the sexiest man to ever grace my field of vision. But worst of all? He knows it. He’s arrogant, self-centered, and the man doesn’t seem to know what a filter is, let alone how to use one. He’s had everything served to him on a silver platter, including endless strings of women, and apparently, I’m up next. I have the solution to all my sexual frustrations in a drawer at home, and it’s far less complicated than Carter Beckett.