Title: Two for Boarding
Series: Minor Penalties, Book Two
Author: S.B. Barnes
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 02/17/2026
Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 280
Genre: Contemporary, contemporary, gay, bisexual, San Francisco, sports/ice hockey, gay, bisexual, interracial, coming out, over 40
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Description
With fourteen years as the San Francisco Sea Lions’ top defenseman under his belt, Phil Easton is tired. After his coaches push him into playing on a bad knee and he ends up on long-term injured reserve, the chances of having his contract renewed dwindle before his eyes. He’s ready to hang up his skates when head coach Ben Morris shows up on his doorstep to help him recover. As what starts as a short-term boarding situation turns into friendship and maybe more, Phil can’t help noticing a few things about his coach that don’t add up.
Barring a short stint on a college hockey team, journalist Ben Sinclair has never been a sports fan. Every day he spends posing as the Sea Lions’ coach while investigating a scandal at the heart of the Sea Lions’ management, he hopes he can finish the job quickly and move on. But living in Phil’s spare room, growing closer to him by the day, Ben begins to wonder if putting down roots would be so bad. When Ben’s family calls in a favor in the form of taking in his wayward nephew, Charlie, Phil offers his support. The closer they grow, the more Ben relies on Phil for help with coaching and Charlie, going against every instinct he’s trained into himself for two lonely decades.
With his heart on the line, can Ben accept Phil’s offer of a convenient marriage to keep custody of Charlie? Can Phil figure out his own sexuality in time to make the marriage real? And can both of them work together to protect the Sea Lions from a conspiracy going all the way to the top?
Reading book 1 in advance is recommended.
Two for Boarding
S.B. Barnes © 2026
All Rights Reserved
The NHL was exhausting. Why become a hockey player when other sports offered up to six times the salary for playing a fraction of the games? At the end of November, with less than a third of hockey season completed, Ben needed three cups of coffee to get to the team bus on time, and he wasn’t even playing. Granted, he, unlike the players, had done zero summer conditioning to prepare for spending a big chunk of his day on ice skates. Also, the real job he had on top of fake coaching and subterfuge was almost as exhausting as an eighty-two-game schedule.
Especially when he lived with the nicest hockey player Ben had ever met. Phil welcomed him back from the road trip with a home-cooked meal and an offer to let the laundry service take care of all the damn suits Ben had to wear on the road. Given Ben was still coming down from a three-day tension headache because of the stupid goal horns during the back-to-back in Montreal and Toronto, he accepted gratefully.
The next day, Phil showed him a notebook full of ideas about how to make the new lines the team had started using gel together better.
“It’s just a few basic drills, but if you do it this way,” Phil said, then proceeded to describe things Ben had no hope in hell of remembering.
“Maybe you should come in and work on this with the team,” he suggested.
Phil’s eyes narrowed.
“I think it would do them good,” Ben said. “Keep morale up, you know.” He was absolutely talking out of his ass, and he felt like a terrible person for it when Phil’s face lit up. He wanted to help his friends, his team, and Ben was taking advantage of his kindness as well as his spare room.
“About the morale thing,” Phil said just when Ben thought the conversation had ended. “I invited everyone who can’t be with family to come over for Thanksgiving today. Sorry—I should have told you. I do it every year, so I kind of forgot to mention…”
Oh God. It was Thanksgiving, Ben’s second-least-favorite holiday. He’d known the date because he had to keep checking the team calendar to remember who their next opponent would be. (At thirty-two, there were too many teams in the league, and he kept getting confused as to which ones played in which conference. Why were Florida and Buffalo in the Atlantic but New York and DC weren’t? Had these people ever seen a map?). But Ben hadn’t remembered the holiday. If he’d spared a thought to it, he’d have assumed he’d be celebrating the same way he had for the last decade—with a cup of cocoa spiked liberally with peppermint schnapps and Chinese takeout.
The last thing Ben needed was more time with the team.
“That’s fine,” he said instead. “I can just stay out of your way. I’m sure no one wants to see more of me during the holidays.”
“Are you sure? The more the merrier, and—”
“No, it’s fine.” Did a part of him cry out desperately to say yes and join the party? Of course—he was only human, and he hadn’t spent a holiday with other humans in years. Ben quashed it down instantly and ruthlessly. He wasn’t a part of this group, and they wouldn’t want him to be when they knew the truth.
Not even Phil in his soft sweater with his warm eyes and his big hands.
Ben was a guest here.
He got comfy in his room, which had about as many square feet as Ben’s last apartment. Getting comfy for Ben meant flannel pants, a washed-out T-shirt he’d gotten in Anchorage the one time he’d been, and setting up his laptop at the desk. He fired up his proxy server, set it to access the internet from Peru (because why not), and opened a new incognito Firefox window. He then entered the URL he’d caught sight of on Trout’s phone a few weeks ago when Phil had gotten injured and logged in. If anyone involved with law enforcement caught him on a dark web betting site before he managed to make decent headway on this investigation, he’d be screwed.
The site had subheadings for all the NHL teams, which probably merited some more intense research, but Ben was in this for the Sea Lions and the Sea Lions alone. Someone who actually knew anything about the legal ramifications could handle the rest when Ben had finished doing what Pulvermacher had hired him for. He tabbed straight over to their subheading.
The odds were against them for the next couple games. Not a shock after the showing in Toronto. That wasn’t what interested Ben though. He headed for the player subcategories. A user— fishfordinner—had laid a hefty sum on Phil not returning for the season. The same user had bet on Hayes being traded and Tom Crowler going out injured as well. According to the website, none of the three events carried a high likelihood of occurring, which was understandable given that the team hadn’t released any information on Phil‘s injury. Tom also hadn’t missed a game all season despite favoring one hip as soon as the cameras were off, and Hayes had been on the team five years with another three to go on his contract.
Fishfordinner clearly had some insider information, and it didn’t take a genius to guess who hid behind the username. Although Ben did wonder what he had on Hayes. He hadn’t heard any trade rumors himself. Now, if only Ben could find hard evidence to connect the account to Trout. Then, he could write up an article or two about the whole sorry business, let Pulvermacher know he’d solved the case, and get out of this job and Phil’s guest room. The longer Ben stayed, the worse he felt about it. Phil deserved to know that Trout was profiting off of his injury, and Phil deserved to negotiate his future on the team with a head coach who knew when to call for goaltender interference.
Ben took a series of screenshots of fishfordinner’s activity and debated starting a conversation with him via the betting site. Maybe he could—what was the word… Dogfish? Catfish? Jellyfish?—trick Trout into revealing himself. He managed to type out “hi,” then ran out of ideas and stared at his laptop screen blankly until his phone rang and jolted him out of his reverie.
It was “The Imperial March.”
Closing his eyes and holding his breath, Ben accepted the call. “Hi, Mom.”
“Benjamin.”
A silence about as long and frosty as clinging to the Death Star’s exterior while being hurtled through space ensued.
“How are you?” Ben asked.
“Fine, thank you.” She didn’t return the question. She never did. Ben assumed she didn’t want to know if he was happy. If he was, she couldn’t be happy for him; if he wasn’t, nothing he had done had been worth it. He hadn’t yet worked out how to explain the difference between not being happy and being constantly miserable.
“Are you still in Massachusetts?” she asked instead.
Massachusetts. Ben nearly laughed. He’d last been there two years ago while working up his book on medical insurance fraud. Since then, he’d been living in Wisconsin, doing in-depth reporting on food safety standards and the craft beer boom. It hadn’t been the most interesting work, but he’d gotten a decent advance from the New York Times cooking section. And after he’d hit forty, the low cost of living in Wisconsin and the prospect of putting something in his savings account had enticed him into the project.
“I’m in San Francisco now.”
“Good, that’s much closer.”
Ben raised his eyebrows in shock, then immediately dropped them because he knew what his mom would say about any sort of quizzical expression.
“We’re sending your niece Charlotte to stay with you,” she continued.
His niece Charlotte?
“She’s Chelsea’s daughter?” he asked.
“Amanda’s.”
Ben winced. He hadn’t seen Amanda or Chelsea in seventeen years, and they’d both had multiple children already by then. He’d lost track. Some combination of his frequent changes of address and his mom’s communication embargo meant Ben had stopped getting the birth announcements.
“She’ll be there by Saturday at the latest, maybe sooner. I’ll let you know what bus she’ll be on.”
“Uh, Mom—”
“She needs a place to stay and a job. You’ll find something.”
“I don’t know how permanent my living situation is here. It’s—”
“She can’t stay here, Benny.”
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S. B. Barnes attended college in the Hudson Valley, studying English Language and Literature and Anthropology (although unlike her characters, her time there was not interrupted by crime-solving). She grew up split between the USA and Germany, attending university in both countries before eventually settling in Germany. Today, she works as a teacher and lives with her husband and two cats in an apartment with too little shelf space. Fiction has always been one of her greatest loves, as a reader, as a teacher, and as a writer. While S.B. has been writing for most of her life, this is her first foray into publishing her work.
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