Jana Gagliardi

Thanks to my needy pet rat, I’m banned from working at all Florida theme parks. So what’s a person to do? Get a job as a mascot for a local hockey team, of course. I didn’t expect to get pushed into a pool on my first day by the grouchiest, hottest player on the team. Nor could I have imagined that we’d get locked into an evacuated building together and share an angry kiss that would get caught on video. Or that said video would go viral, sending ticket sales for our games through the roof.

I wake up chained to the bed of a stranger. He says I’m his wife. I have nothing—no money. No friends. No escape. He’s everything I never imagined: ruthless, calculating, feared. A beautiful monster with a face like a god’s, cold and untouchable. A mafia kingpin whose wealth could buy empires and whose power makes the world tremble. My captor. My husband.

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.

It took Theo Amato one look to know he wanted me. It took me one glance at his chiseled jaw and dimpled smile to know I was in over my head. My wild love affair was Netflix without the chill. I had no business dating the older man who looked as though he'd stepped out of an expensive advertisement. But he was determined to have me. Wickedly sweet, Theo gently and strategically pulled me from my rut, handing me the world in the process. Growing up with nothing, I suddenly found myself with everything. More than I'd even known to dream of.