Everyone wants to know what happens to the hero after the final buzzer. But what happens to the bad guy?
Dane Kessler was supposed to disappear into hockey history as the villain.
One brutal swing of his stick shattered Cal Thatcher’s knee, ended a championship celebration, and gave Dane a reputation he couldn’t outrun. Goon. Animal. Dangerous.
The worst part?
Dane knows they aren’t entirely wrong.
Years later, he’s still playing the only kind of hockey anyone seems willing to pay him for—fighting, intimidating, and taking the punishment without complaint. Then Boston sportswriter Nora Bellamy arrives in a small New Hampshire hockey town looking for the story behind the infamous hit.
Dane doesn’t want an interview.
So he offers her something stranger instead.
Old fashioned letters
On paper, the man Nora expected to find begins to disappear. In his place is someone quieter. Smarter. Wounded. A man who remembers exactly what he did to Cal—and refuses to make excuses for it.
And the more Dane writes, the harder it becomes for Nora to keep him safely inside the boundaries of a story.
Especially when he meets her four-year-old daughter, Willa.
Especially when the feared hockey enforcer turns out to be impossibly patient with children.
Especially when Dane begins to wonder if the rest of his life has to be defined by the worst thing he ever did.
But redemption is easier to write about than to earn. And when the most private parts of Dane’s past become public, he’ll have to decide whether becoming a better man means running from the person he used to be… or finally facing the man he hurt.
The Hardest Hit is an emotional hockey romance about redemption, handwritten letters, a determined single mom, an unlikely found family, and the dangerous possibility that the villain of one story might still deserve a love story of his own.
Book 2 in the No Easy Wins Series.
