Cold War On Ice

She refused to fold. He couldn't stop watching. The ice was about to run out for both of them.

Skyler Daniels has been at the rink since five in the morning for as long as she can remember — before the school wakes up, before anyone has opinions, before the world arrives with its measurements and verdicts about what a girl who looks like her has the right to want.

She wants the triple axel. She wants the scout's attention. She wants the figure skating program that has been her whole life to survive the budget cut that threatens to erase it. What she does not want is Mason Reid.

Mason Reid is the Harlow Kings' hockey captain — golden, magnetic, and standing directly between Skyler and everything she has worked for. When the school announces that only one athletic program will survive the funding cuts, Mason tells her to withdraw. To save herself the humiliation of losing.

Skyler tells him exactly where to go.

What follows is an arrangement neither of them agreed to, eleven weeks of shared ice, enforced proximity, and the slow, devastating discovery that the boy who has been her obstacle might be the only person who has ever really looked at her.

But Mason Reid has secrets of his own. A shoulder that needs surgery he's been hiding from everyone who matters. A father who has had a plan for his life since he was six years old, and an identity built entirely around a future he has never been allowed to choose. And a memory he's been carrying since freshman year — a morning in September, a spin combination in the dark, sixty seconds of stopped walking — that he has never told anyone about.

Until now.

Cold War on Ice is a full-length slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance about two athletes who have been in the same building for three years without ever really looking at each other. About the things we carry alone. About what it costs to perform fine for so long that you forget it's a performance. And about what happens when the ice you've been standing on — the version of yourself built for other people's comfort — finally, irrevocably, thaws.

Skyler Daniels will not fold. Not for a budget cut, not for a hockey captain, not for a world that has always had opinions about the space she occupies.

She will keep skating.

And he will keep watching.

And somewhere in the eleven weeks between a mandatory assembly and a parking lot in November, two people who were supposed to be enemies will learn that the most dangerous thing you can do is look at someone long enough to actually see them.