She built something worth protecting. He came back to prove he could stay.
The question is whether trust can survive what neither of them planned for.

Mara Nguyen has spent two years fighting for the Clearwater Sports Complex’s community programming wing, the room that will put two hundred kids on the ice who couldn’t get there otherwise. What she doesn’t need is a former NHL player with a checkbook and an exit strategy showing up as her investor six months before opening.

Cole Bennett came back to Clearwater for one reason: his teenage niece needs somewhere to land. He wasn’t planning to stay past the paperwork. He wasn’t planning on a project manager who runs toward hard problems. He wasn’t planning on any of this.

But the project is real, the town is starting to feel like something, and Mara Nguyen is the most specific person he’s ever met. Staying is beginning to look less like a temporary inconvenience and more like the only thing that makes sense.

When past legal complications surface and community scrutiny threatens everything they’ve built, they’ll have to decide what they’re actually building, and whether they trust each other  enough to build it together.

Home Game is a slow-burn small-town sports romance about the patient, imperfect work of choosing someone. It features a single mother who keeps meticulous documentation, a former hockey player learning what staying actually costs, a sixteen-year-old who is wiser than both of them, and two wooden foxes named Gerald and Frances.

This is Book Two in the Under the Lights series. It can be read as a standalone but is best enjoyed after Book One, Second-Chance Season.