Screened

The goalie everyone leans on has never let anyone see that he's the one falling apart. The quiet artist painting the arena wall noticed anyway.
Hockey goalie meets quiet muralist · He performs calm, she sees through it · Mental health rep · Friends-to-lovers · Spicy (5/5) · Standalone in series

Mars Tremblay is everyone's favorite person. He's the first to crack a joke, the last to leave the rink, the guy who makes every room warmer just by walking into it. He remembers birthdays. He calms down rookies. He is, by all accounts, the most easygoing man in Millhaven.

He also hasn't slept through the night in three years.

Mars has generalized anxiety disorder. He's managed it since college with therapy and medication, but goalies don't get to be afraid, and the guy the team depends on for emotional stability absolutely cannot admit he's held together with duct tape and willpower. So he performs calm. Every day. For everyone. Until the quiet artist painting the mural on the arena wall stops buying the performance.

Wren Castillo came to Millhaven to disappear into her art and find herself after a relationship that consumed her entirely. She's painting the Rebels' history on the arena wall, and she keeps bumping into the team's goalie, who is annoyingly kind, impossibly warm, and the only person in town who doesn't ask her to explain herself. They become friends. Easy, natural, the kind of friendship where you text memes at midnight and argue about whether geese are evil. (They are, Mars. THEY ARE.)

But Wren starts noticing the circles under his eyes. She finds him in the empty arena at 3 AM, sitting in the crease, staring at the ceiling. And the moment she realizes the calmest person she's ever met is drowning, her worst fear rears up: she has done this before. She has loved someone and lost herself in their struggle. She swore she never would again.

"She painted me the way I actually am. Not the mask. Not the pads. Me. And I stood in front of it with the whole town watching and I cried, because nobody had ever looked at me that closely and stayed."

Screened is Book 3 in The Northside Rebels. Each book is a complete standalone romance with a guaranteed HEA. No cliffhangers.

Friends-to-lovers. Sunshine-sunshine (but one of them is faking it). She paints him the way he really is. He cries in front of the whole town. Touch her and the whole team shows up. The goose argument is ongoing and unresolved. Books that make you ugly-cry about a mural.

For fans of friends-to-lovers hockey romance, second-chance sports romance, and the friend you were always rooting for.

Free with this complete series.