Changing Lines

Two years after his wife died between one phone call and the next, Jonah Pike runs his house by eleven laminated rules. Breakfast at seven. One story at bedtime. Do not move the photographs. His six-year-old daughter Hattie wears a bicycle helmet everywhere and hasn't said more than a word at a time since the funeral.

Then the fourth nanny since September arrives. Sadie Albright is twenty-six, hums while she cooks and breaks rule one with a pancake shaped like a bear. On her first afternoon she finds Hattie's favourite book on the pillow, read so often the spine has gone soft. Sadie wrote it. She drew every page the winter her mother was dying, and she hasn't been able to draw since.

She doesn't tell anyone. Not Hattie. Not the big, careful widower who starts learning the songs she hums and fixes the squeal in her car. Not even when a kiss in the laundry room ends with him looking at the hair tie on his wrist and saying it can't happen.

But the trade deadline is coming, Jonah's name is on a list, and his in-laws have painted a room purple in Minneapolis, just in case. To keep his daughter safe, he is about to build his highest wall yet. To bring Sadie home, he will have to say something out loud in front of forty-three children.

Changing Lines is a dual-POV, slow-burn, single-dad-and-nanny hockey romance about grief, bedtime stories and learning to leave the light on. Open door, not explicit. Tender, funny, and a guaranteed happily ever after.

Book three of the Hartford Hounds Hockey series. Every book is a standalone romance with a new couple.