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Power Play #4
Between the Lines
He reads every shot before it happens. He hasn't performed in front of an audience in two years. They've been on opposite sides of the glass for weeks. Tonight, the glass comes down.
Marcus "Mars" Santos is the Atlanta Reapers' starting goalie, and his life is a system. He arrives at a suburban rink before dawn, talks to his goalposts because the posts never ask him to be anything other than what he is, and has spent three seasons building an existence so precisely organized that his own mother says his apartment looks like nobody lives there.
Then a figure skater steps onto his ice.
Theo Kimura was supposed to be the next great American men's figure skater. Then he fell at Nationals—not a normal fall, but the kind that rewires your nervous system and turns every audience into a threat. Two years later, he can only skate when no one is watching. The 5 AM sessions in Decatur are his lifeline. The empty rink is the only place his body still trusts.
Except the rink isn't empty. There's a goalie on the other side of the glass. And his attention doesn't trigger the panic. His attention is the only thing that makes the quads come back.
Mars watches Theo and hears the difference between a clean landing and a flawed one by the frequency of the blade. Theo skates for Mars and discovers that being seen by the right person isn't a performance. It's flying.
But recovery doesn't happen behind glass forever. Theo's coach is pushing toward competition. Mars's teammates are starting to notice the smile he can't suppress. And the 5 AM world they built together has to survive daylight, locker rooms, a competition arena full of strangers, and the question neither of them can avoid: can a man who reads everything learn to stop solving the person he loves?
The ice doesn't care who you love. But the glass between them has to break before either of them can find out what's on the other side.
Between the Lines is a goalie/figure skater MM romance with cold coffee, 5 AM ice, a cat named Axel, bossa nova on vinyl, a Brazilian mother who is always right, and an HEA that proves the best things happen in the space between the notes. Book 4 in the Power Play series. Can be read as a standalone. Dual first-person POV. No cliffhanger.
Tropes: goalie/figure skater, opposites attract, slow burn, performance anxiety/healing, touch starved, only soft for you, found family
The Power Play series:
Book 1: Icing — The rivals. The Russian. The one bed.
Book 2: Breakaway — The enforcer. The equipment manager. The bread.
Book 3: Hat Trick — The best friend's brother. The lamp. Ten years.
Book 4: Between the Lines — The goalie. The figure skater. The glass.
Book 5: Offside — The rookie. The journalist. The line. Pre-order now!
Marcus "Mars" Santos is the Atlanta Reapers' starting goalie, and his life is a system. He arrives at a suburban rink before dawn, talks to his goalposts because the posts never ask him to be anything other than what he is, and has spent three seasons building an existence so precisely organized that his own mother says his apartment looks like nobody lives there.
Then a figure skater steps onto his ice.
Theo Kimura was supposed to be the next great American men's figure skater. Then he fell at Nationals—not a normal fall, but the kind that rewires your nervous system and turns every audience into a threat. Two years later, he can only skate when no one is watching. The 5 AM sessions in Decatur are his lifeline. The empty rink is the only place his body still trusts.
Except the rink isn't empty. There's a goalie on the other side of the glass. And his attention doesn't trigger the panic. His attention is the only thing that makes the quads come back.
Mars watches Theo and hears the difference between a clean landing and a flawed one by the frequency of the blade. Theo skates for Mars and discovers that being seen by the right person isn't a performance. It's flying.
But recovery doesn't happen behind glass forever. Theo's coach is pushing toward competition. Mars's teammates are starting to notice the smile he can't suppress. And the 5 AM world they built together has to survive daylight, locker rooms, a competition arena full of strangers, and the question neither of them can avoid: can a man who reads everything learn to stop solving the person he loves?
The ice doesn't care who you love. But the glass between them has to break before either of them can find out what's on the other side.
Between the Lines is a goalie/figure skater MM romance with cold coffee, 5 AM ice, a cat named Axel, bossa nova on vinyl, a Brazilian mother who is always right, and an HEA that proves the best things happen in the space between the notes. Book 4 in the Power Play series. Can be read as a standalone. Dual first-person POV. No cliffhanger.
Tropes: goalie/figure skater, opposites attract, slow burn, performance anxiety/healing, touch starved, only soft for you, found family
The Power Play series:
Book 1: Icing — The rivals. The Russian. The one bed.
Book 2: Breakaway — The enforcer. The equipment manager. The bread.
Book 3: Hat Trick — The best friend's brother. The lamp. Ten years.
Book 4: Between the Lines — The goalie. The figure skater. The glass.
Book 5: Offside — The rookie. The journalist. The line. Pre-order now!
- GenresHockeyM M RomanceRomance
176 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 31, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 13, 2026
I have some serious reservations about this series, even though I like it and really love some of the writing. Below I’ve listed a number of glaring problems with this book, but before that I want to provide a sample of the good stuff to be found in the book. I don’t think there are any spoilers here - we know it’s a romance. But the author does a pivot at a certain point, moving away from the two main character’s points of view to a character we haven’t heard anything from in this series except a word or two - and that’s Gerald, the security guard:
“I have watched a lot of people find each other in this building.
The blond one and the Russian. The enforcer and the equipment manager. The center and the younger Briggs. I have watched them from behind my desk in the lobby of the practice facility, and I have watched them on the TV during games, and I have watched them at the barbecue in the backyard with the grill and the bread and the string lights, and I have learned, over thirty-one years of watching people, that love announces itself long before anyone is ready to hear it.
The goalie was the last one. The quiet one….
The young man's name was Theo. I learned this not because anyone told me but because Marcus said it in the hallway one afternoon while talking to Luca, and the way he said the name, the specific weight he gave to the two syllables, told me everything I needed to know about the relationship between the goalie and the figure skater.
Love changes the way people say names. This is something I have observed over forty years of marriage and thirty-one years of watching people. The name becomes heavier in the mouth. More deliberate. The speaker handles it the way Marcus handled a puck: with awareness of its value and care for its trajectory.
Lorraine. I have been saying my wife's name for forty years and the name is heavier now than it was when I first said it at twenty-two, because forty years of meaning have accumulated on the syllables and the weight is not a burden. The weight is the opposite of a burden. The weight is what keeps the name from floating away.
Marcus said "Theo" the way I said "Lorraine." I heard it from my desk and I nodded to myself and I wrote nothing down because some observations are not for paperwork."
Yes, I cried reading this.
But there’s so many other issues in these books, issues which simply detract from the good stuff. There are so many errors that fit ongoing patterns it’s clear that something besides a human brain is producing the words we’re reading.
Let’s be real. This has to be written extensively by AI and then dumped into the book by an author who isn’t paying much attention to what’s being dumped. No human author can forget a plot point, prop, or setting in the span of a few sentences, and there are so many in this book (and also the series as a whole) that it’s beyond embarrassing.
Some of the following might seem like nitpicking, but it all adds up to a cascade.
Let’s start with just one instance of seemingly zillions of inconsistencies in these books. In this book, Between the Lines, on page 76 the author writes that Theo arrived early at 5:30am at a skating rink. Mars has not yet arrived. Three short paragraphs later he writes that Mars arrived at 5:15am - which would be before Theo. But earlier in the book, the author writes that Mars always arrives by 5:00am and Theo always arrives by 5:05am - with the idea that these two never deviate from this routine.
Another example: Chapter 20 repeats the scene with which Chapter 19 ends. It doesn’t repeat it in a flashback or replay or “let’s dissect that from another angle” kind of way. It repeats it as if the ending of Chapter 19 doesn’t exist.
Another example: On page 119, Mik Volkov says to Mars, “The figure skater.” Mars responds by saying “How do you know about the figure skater?” But back on page 99 Mik was in the stands watching Theo figure skating with Mars, so Mars already knows that Mik knows about Theo.
Another example: On page 125, in a chapter from Mars’ POV, the text without warning switches to Theo’s POV, (from “I was more vocal….” to ““The regional is in two weeks”) and is then back to Mars’ POV two words later (from ”I’ll be there….”).
Another example: A rink in Kennesaw, Ga is identified as holding 2,400 people but by page 141 it only holds 2,000.
Another example: The second paragraph on page 152 says clearly that Mars is on the ice “in hockey skates.” In the fourth paragraph he’s wearing figure skates. He hasn’t changed skates - it’s crystal clear that the author isn’t paying attention to what’s being written (or being written for him).
Another example continued from above: The author writes the following on page 154, with first Mars (goalie) then Theo (figure skater) speaking:
“I did 270 more degrees than any other NHL goalie has ever done in figure skating blades at 5 AM in a suburban rink."
"That is a very specific record."
"All the best records are specific." I kissed him. On the ice. In figure skating blades and hockey skates."
Once again, Mars’ skates magically transform from figure skates to hockey skates (Theo is wearing the figure skates in this scene - it’s Mars whose skates keep changing).
Another - more problematic - example: On page 155 the author writes, from Theo’s viewpoint:
“This was a different lamp. A small, battery-powered LED that I used for costume sketching at the boards, the portable version of the light that had become the symbol of the Power Play series, the light that said: someone is here. Someone is paying attention. Someone bought a lamp because of a sentence you said five years ago, and the buying was love, and the love was permanent."
The problem with this paragraph is that the reading lamp motif belongs to the book before this one - to Jonah and Ren’s story. The reference to “a sentence you said five years ago” is referring to Ren. So here the text error isn’t just an inconsistency within this book, it’s about something that belongs to two other characters in a totally different book and which has never been a motif or plot point in this book.
These are just a few of the errors rampant in this book.
The problem with all of this is that it prevents me - or any reader paying attention - from enjoying the book. Times, skates, points of view, events and objects are all slippery and inconsistent. It takes away from scenes that are quite lovely, and detracts from the book as a whole.
Am I buying the next book? Yes. Do I hope these problems go away? Desperately.
“I have watched a lot of people find each other in this building.
The blond one and the Russian. The enforcer and the equipment manager. The center and the younger Briggs. I have watched them from behind my desk in the lobby of the practice facility, and I have watched them on the TV during games, and I have watched them at the barbecue in the backyard with the grill and the bread and the string lights, and I have learned, over thirty-one years of watching people, that love announces itself long before anyone is ready to hear it.
The goalie was the last one. The quiet one….
The young man's name was Theo. I learned this not because anyone told me but because Marcus said it in the hallway one afternoon while talking to Luca, and the way he said the name, the specific weight he gave to the two syllables, told me everything I needed to know about the relationship between the goalie and the figure skater.
Love changes the way people say names. This is something I have observed over forty years of marriage and thirty-one years of watching people. The name becomes heavier in the mouth. More deliberate. The speaker handles it the way Marcus handled a puck: with awareness of its value and care for its trajectory.
Lorraine. I have been saying my wife's name for forty years and the name is heavier now than it was when I first said it at twenty-two, because forty years of meaning have accumulated on the syllables and the weight is not a burden. The weight is the opposite of a burden. The weight is what keeps the name from floating away.
Marcus said "Theo" the way I said "Lorraine." I heard it from my desk and I nodded to myself and I wrote nothing down because some observations are not for paperwork."
Yes, I cried reading this.
But there’s so many other issues in these books, issues which simply detract from the good stuff. There are so many errors that fit ongoing patterns it’s clear that something besides a human brain is producing the words we’re reading.
Let’s be real. This has to be written extensively by AI and then dumped into the book by an author who isn’t paying much attention to what’s being dumped. No human author can forget a plot point, prop, or setting in the span of a few sentences, and there are so many in this book (and also the series as a whole) that it’s beyond embarrassing.
Some of the following might seem like nitpicking, but it all adds up to a cascade.
Let’s start with just one instance of seemingly zillions of inconsistencies in these books. In this book, Between the Lines, on page 76 the author writes that Theo arrived early at 5:30am at a skating rink. Mars has not yet arrived. Three short paragraphs later he writes that Mars arrived at 5:15am - which would be before Theo. But earlier in the book, the author writes that Mars always arrives by 5:00am and Theo always arrives by 5:05am - with the idea that these two never deviate from this routine.
Another example: Chapter 20 repeats the scene with which Chapter 19 ends. It doesn’t repeat it in a flashback or replay or “let’s dissect that from another angle” kind of way. It repeats it as if the ending of Chapter 19 doesn’t exist.
Another example: On page 119, Mik Volkov says to Mars, “The figure skater.” Mars responds by saying “How do you know about the figure skater?” But back on page 99 Mik was in the stands watching Theo figure skating with Mars, so Mars already knows that Mik knows about Theo.
Another example: On page 125, in a chapter from Mars’ POV, the text without warning switches to Theo’s POV, (from “I was more vocal….” to ““The regional is in two weeks”) and is then back to Mars’ POV two words later (from ”I’ll be there….”).
Another example: A rink in Kennesaw, Ga is identified as holding 2,400 people but by page 141 it only holds 2,000.
Another example: The second paragraph on page 152 says clearly that Mars is on the ice “in hockey skates.” In the fourth paragraph he’s wearing figure skates. He hasn’t changed skates - it’s crystal clear that the author isn’t paying attention to what’s being written (or being written for him).
Another example continued from above: The author writes the following on page 154, with first Mars (goalie) then Theo (figure skater) speaking:
“I did 270 more degrees than any other NHL goalie has ever done in figure skating blades at 5 AM in a suburban rink."
"That is a very specific record."
"All the best records are specific." I kissed him. On the ice. In figure skating blades and hockey skates."
Once again, Mars’ skates magically transform from figure skates to hockey skates (Theo is wearing the figure skates in this scene - it’s Mars whose skates keep changing).
Another - more problematic - example: On page 155 the author writes, from Theo’s viewpoint:
“This was a different lamp. A small, battery-powered LED that I used for costume sketching at the boards, the portable version of the light that had become the symbol of the Power Play series, the light that said: someone is here. Someone is paying attention. Someone bought a lamp because of a sentence you said five years ago, and the buying was love, and the love was permanent."
The problem with this paragraph is that the reading lamp motif belongs to the book before this one - to Jonah and Ren’s story. The reference to “a sentence you said five years ago” is referring to Ren. So here the text error isn’t just an inconsistency within this book, it’s about something that belongs to two other characters in a totally different book and which has never been a motif or plot point in this book.
These are just a few of the errors rampant in this book.
The problem with all of this is that it prevents me - or any reader paying attention - from enjoying the book. Times, skates, points of view, events and objects are all slippery and inconsistent. It takes away from scenes that are quite lovely, and detracts from the book as a whole.
Am I buying the next book? Yes. Do I hope these problems go away? Desperately.
June 25, 2026
This is my fourth book ( I think) by this author and very quickly in a pattern becomes apparent. There is always one MC overthinking, calculating, and the other is supposed to be the sunshine - so we get a trope of grumpy and sunshine. However, the executions always feels repetitive. The dialogue is always overcomplicated, using too many words in a way that makes it sound fake. I have never heard anyone talking like that. There is always statistics and numbers involved which for day to day conversation is highly unlikely. Unless you are a physicist.
There is a story in there somewhere that unfortunately gets overshadowed by overusage of words that do not fit the characters.
There is a story in there somewhere that unfortunately gets overshadowed by overusage of words that do not fit the characters.
June 20, 2026
How many times did they meet?
This book is the same as the others in a series. I like the characters and their relationship and enjoyed reading about them. However, what is going on with the writing? The main characters meet twice for the first time in two different situations. We learned the Axel is a cat and he is orange over and over again. At one point there are two chapters in a row that cover the same timeline from the same point of view, but with different words. At the end, again, the author discusses the series in the text of the book. I’m annoyed at myself that I keep reading the series, but I like the characters and the team so unfortunately, I will probably read all of them.
Seriously, I am available for beta reading if needed. It would be great if someone edited these books.
This book is the same as the others in a series. I like the characters and their relationship and enjoyed reading about them. However, what is going on with the writing? The main characters meet twice for the first time in two different situations. We learned the Axel is a cat and he is orange over and over again. At one point there are two chapters in a row that cover the same timeline from the same point of view, but with different words. At the end, again, the author discusses the series in the text of the book. I’m annoyed at myself that I keep reading the series, but I like the characters and the team so unfortunately, I will probably read all of them.
Seriously, I am available for beta reading if needed. It would be great if someone edited these books.
April 6, 2026
I didn't enjoy this as much as the rest? It felt a bit clinical? I get it but I just didn't connect with these characters like I did with the others.
"Nobody's ever seen the seem" "Nobody's ever watched you the way I watch you."
"He's worth every door."
"Thank you for letting me see behind the mask." "Thank you for being the reason I took it off."
"You flew" "You watched." "I always watch." "I know. That's why I flew."
"Nobody's ever seen the seem" "Nobody's ever watched you the way I watch you."
"He's worth every door."
"Thank you for letting me see behind the mask." "Thank you for being the reason I took it off."
"You flew" "You watched." "I always watch." "I know. That's why I flew."
June 16, 2026
I binged all 6, but
Between the Lines broke me in the best way. The language of liminal spaces, of a person as a system of systems, of recalibration after desolation, it will stay with me. Definitely worth the book hangover.
Between the Lines broke me in the best way. The language of liminal spaces, of a person as a system of systems, of recalibration after desolation, it will stay with me. Definitely worth the book hangover.
April 9, 2026
The melody for this book was quieter... more gentle. The growing love was not shouted. The physical was not loud. But it was perfect. The mathematician in me loved this book in this series the most.
May 25, 2026
The timeline in this one is very inconsistent which just made me confused
June 28, 2026
A little bit of freshness with the figure skater. I like this.
August 3, 2026
wrong book!
It says Between the lines on the cover and the book is actually Breakaway which I’ve read. Rookie mistake by Amazon. Who’s supervising this stuff?
It says Between the lines on the cover and the book is actually Breakaway which I’ve read. Rookie mistake by Amazon. Who’s supervising this stuff?
June 18, 2026
I really liked this series
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews