No, no, no! Why?! This is not my first Tessa Bailey book, so I was very excited to read it. And I figured, it’s a novella, so it will be light, quick, and breezy. Instead, it was clunky, rushed, and cringy! Seeing a glimpse of Britta and Sumner every few months throughout the year was not enough to make me get on board with their relationship. He was already in love with her before the book started, and she was extremely anti-relation from a traumatized childhood. I can’t see how that can completely change in a couple of spread-out scenes. And I was okay with the cringy dialogue until he demanded she love him. No, no, no! Love doesn’t come on demand like that. At that point, I just had an icky feeling for him, and we were only at around 60% of the book. If it weren’t a novella, it would have been a DNF. Also, if your visa in the US expires tomorrow, you don’t go looking for a wife tonight! And what about applying for a marriage license? And who gets a Green Card in 6 months?! My suspension of belief isn’t that good, sorry. I also think reading this book at the heels of The Wall of Winnipeg and Me, which does the whole marriage-for-a-green-card trope way better, amplified my distaste for it.

I ate this book up. I gotta say I have no knowledge about hockey or the leagues and whatever, if there are holes in the story/misinformation then that is truly sad. As someone who does not know anything about hockey that obviously didn‘t bother me. I really like Sumner and the whole fake marriage trope. The tension between those two was there from the start. There are not a lot of plots, it‘s just a fast paced smutty romance book. I was looking for that and I got that and on those 130 pages it really sucked me in.