Cross Check

When Evan Halloway must travel to Northern New Mexico to stand-in with his best friend’s son, Max, because the fool kid has gotten into a sticky situation, that last thing he expects is to love the place. Everything there seems designed to poke, scrape, prod, or burn a guy including the food, but it makes Evan admire the landscape. And then there’s cowboy bull fighter Sam Marron, the father of the young woman his best friend’s kid has gotten pregnant. He rubs Evan the wrong way from the get-go. Until he doesn’t.

Sam is a cowboy through and through, and he has no time for the fancy retired hockey player from Boston. Or his adopted family. It’s his little girl who will have to deal with this for the rest of her life, and he’s going to defend her to his last breath. But Sam finds out that Even is not only unreasonably hot, he’s a good guy, too. And that goes a long way with him in making Evan his lover, not his enemy.

The two of them navigate family politics, careers where they both travel, and wrangle some long-distance problems, but everything comes to a head when Sam and his daughter come to Boston meet Max’s family face to face. Then Evan has to decide what family means to him, and Sam as to learn to lean on Evan a little bit and fully let him in. Can they learn to let ‘er puck and be together all the way, or will the stress tear them apart?

When a hockey family collides with a rodeo man, the ice might crack and the dirt may fly.