Blindside

About this book

A journalist takes a media job at a sports club under a false name, to uncover the corruption inside it. The captain, Jude Calloway, spots her at their first meeting and soon controls her access. Each needs the other, and neither trusts the other. A steamy, dark sports romance.

She’s lying about who she is. He’s decided she’s his anyway — and a man like Jude Calloway doesn’t revisit decisions.

Jude Calloway runs the Coastal Raptors the way he runs everything: with total control. Captain, on-field enforcer, the man who holds the club together in the boardroom as much as on the pitch. When the Raptors hire Maren Cross as their new media manager, he clocks her in the first meeting. She asks the wrong questions. She watches the wrong people. She doesn’t belong — and he can’t stop looking at her.

Maren Cross is not a media manager. She’s an investigative journalist planted inside the club to expose a corruption scandal that runs from CEO Nico Salter to the league itself. Her source is a young player who saw too much. Her job is to get close enough to prove it — and get out before anyone learns her name isn’t the one on her contract.

But Jude makes getting out impossible. He doesn’t charm his way into her schedule. He simply takes it over — her work, her access, her space — with the quiet certainty of a man who has already decided. Maren tells herself his possessiveness is useful cover. Proximity to the captain means proximity to everything. She believes that right up until the night she stops believing it.

Then Jude catches her where she has no business being: the CEO’s office after hours, the medical suite’s restricted files. He doesn’t report her. He watches her. He starts controlling her access — not to stop her, but to make sure that when she needs something, she comes to him. Now she has the story, he has the access, and neither of them can afford to trust the other.

As the investigation tightens — match-fixing, doping coverups, a culture of silence enforced by loyalty — Maren and Jude cross lines that can’t be uncrossed. The intimacy is real. Her identity is not. And when Jude finally learns who she is, the only question left is which of them he’ll protect: the club he built, or the woman who lied to him.

Book 1 in the Coastal Raptors series. Each book can be read as a standalone.

Meet Jude and Maren tonight — the whistle blows on page one.