Home Ice
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Home Ice
Copyright © 2015 by Catherine Gayle
Cover Design by Kim Killion, The Killion Group
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.
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For Heather, Kaelyn, Lexi, and Killian. And for Christi, Rory, Reagan, and Riley.
Thank you to my friend Christi Caldwell for pointing me in the right direction when it comes to all things related to raising a child with Down syndrome.
There’s only one person Portland Storm head coach Mattias Bergstrom allows to see his soft side: his sister, who was born with Down syndrome. She lives in Sweden, so he doesn’t worry he’ll accidentally reveal other than the hard-assed defenseman-turned-coach his players know. At least not until his sister’s doppelganger leaps for one of his young D-men before the team’s charity skills competition and melts Mattias’s frozen heart.
Paige Calhoun has her hands full with four exceedingly boy-crazy, hockey-loving daughters—three teens and a pre-teen with Down syndrome. Everyday life is a challenge. Taking all four girls to the StormSkillz event with no assistance? The magnitude of her task was daunting enough before her youngest spotted the hockey player of her dreams and barreled through the crowd to claim him.
The team’s sexy-as-sin coach intervenes, and Paige feels just as boy crazy as her daughters. Charmed by the youngest, he decides to give the girls a weekend they’ll never forget. It never crossed his mind that, in doing so, he might end up giving himself an unexpected happy ever after with Paige.
When it comes to hockey, Mattias has a Home Ice advantage. But when it comes to life? He likes the look of Paige’s arena.
HOME ICE is Book 7.5, a novella in the
Portland Storm
hockey romance series written by
USA Today
bestselling author Catherine Gayle. If you enjoy it, look for the other books in the series.
There are also currently two boxed sets of books within the series, if you would prefer to purchase them in that way.
PORTLAND STORM: THE FIRST PERIOD
(Contains Breakaway, On the Fly, Taking a Shot, and Light the Lamp)
PORTLAND STORM: THE SECOND PERIOD
(Contains Delay of Game, Double Major, In the Zone, Holiday Hat Trick, and Comeback)
LOSING AN EDGE
will release on February 18, 2016. Also, join Catherine’s
mailing list
to receive
ICE BREAKER
, a
Portland Storm
short story prequel that you can’t get anywhere else.
Want to join in the
Portland Storm
discussion? Join the
Facebook reader group
.
If you enjoy this book and want to try more of the same, be sure to look for the spinoff series, the
Tulsa Thunderbirds
. Book 1,
BURY THE HATCHET
, is available now. Look for Book 2,
SMOKE SIGNALS
, on October 22, 2015, and Book 3,
GHOST DANCE
, on May 5, 2016. The T-Birds also have a
reader group on Facebook
.
“OH MY GOD
.” My eldest daughter, Zoe, stopped dead in her tracks, her face completely pale as though she’d just seen a ghost.
Her sudden halt caused a pileup of my girls, all screeching to a standstill right beside her. The huge crowd surrounding us in the concourse at the Moda Center—all here for the Portland Storm’s StormSkillz Competition, the same as we were—nearly ran our little group over in their quest to get food and drinks and get to their seats for the day of family fun.
Clueless as to what led my girls to cause a traffic jam, I took a cursory look around, but all I could see was the ocean of purple and silver jerseys jockeying for position. Nothing stood out as being anything that should cause that kind of reaction in my sixteen-year-old daughter. “What?” I asked, since I didn’t have the first inkling what was going on.