A warm welcome to authors Jeff Adams and Will Knauss joining us today to talk about the release of their first book together “The Hockey Player’s Heart”.

Jeff and Will talk about their main characters and they also brought a double! giveaway to participate in!

Welcome Jeff and Will 🙂

Many thanks to Dani for hosting us here at Love Bytes as we celebrate the release of The Hockey Player’s Heart, which is #50 in the Dreamspun Desires line from Dreamspinner Press. The book, which just came out yesterday, marks our first collaboration as authors and were excited and proud to get this second chance at love story into your hands.

The Hockey Player’s Heart is the first and our Hockey Hearts series. It was important us to have great hockey players as the driving force in the series. Each book features a different player, but everyone is part of the the same story universe. We’ve enjoyed populating our world with many recurring characters to play with as we continue forward with the series.

Hockey was essential to this book for Jeff since hockey has factored into most of his books. Along with the sport, we also considered the trope we wanted to use as the central focus for The Hockey Player’s Heart. Since Dreamspun Desires are category romance, the tropes are a significant part of the book. We selected second chance romance because it is one of our favorites.

As we created characters, we decided Caleb Carter was a superstar NHL player for the New York Rangers. He’d played hockey all his life and had successful high school and college runs that led him to the NHL. He was the hometown sports hero from his Foster Grove, New York, a fictional town that we made a suburb of Albany.

The next question was, of course, who would Caleb’s second chance be with? There were plenty of options–a former teammate, someone from college… but someone from his small town past was the choice we made. Aaron Price was only a year older than Caleb and during his senior year of high school, Aaron tutored Caleb in geometry. What neither boy knew at the time was that there was a secret crush happening on both sides.

It’s when they meet again years later, as Caleb is home recovering from an injury, that they’re able to explore what had been off-limits in their past. They’re both out, so that’s no longer an obstacle. There are still a few things for them to navigate on the way to their second chance, but, as with any category romance, they do get to that HEA.

Make sure you check out the Rafflecopter below because we’re giving away an e-book copy at each tour stop plus there’s a grand prize of an autographed paperback for a US winner or a $10 Amazon e-gift card for an international winner. Make sure to check out all the stops to maximize your chance to win.

We hope you enjoy The Hockey Player’s Heart and would love to hear what you think. If you read it, please consider leaving a review on your favorite site or dropping us a comment on one of our websites.

Blurb:
Hometown hero. Hockey superstar. Perfect boyfriend?

When hockey star Caleb Carter returns to his hometown to recover from an injury, the only thing he’s interested in is a little R & R. He never expects to run into his onetime crush at a grade school fund-raiser . Seeing Aaron Price hits him hard, like being checked into the boards. The attraction is still there, even after all these years, and Caleb decides to make a play for the schoolteacher. You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take, right?

Aaron has been burned by love before and can’t imagine what a celebrity like Caleb could possibly see in a guy like him. Their differences are just too great. But as Aaron spends more time with Caleb, he begins to wonder if he might have what it takes to win the hockey player’s heart.

Buy Links:
Dreamspinner Press

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Jeff Adams and Will Knauss are husbands, authors, and podcasters based in Northern California. They write gay romances, sometimes together and other times separately. Jeff also writes young adult LGBT fiction. Together they host Jeff & Will’s Big Gay Fiction Podcast, a weekly show devoted to gay romance literature and the pop culture they love.

Websites:
Jeff: JeffAdamsWrites.com
Will: WillKnauss.com
Podcast: BigGayFictionPodcast.com