📊 Poll Time

Which genre is your favourite?

🏆 The Winning Captions

Thank you to everyone who joined in and shared your fantastic captions! Here are the best captions that had me laughing the most. Dea wins yet again with two I couldn’t choose between, but Anne L was a very close runner-up with this fabulous caption: “What do you mean we’re out of catnip???”

Below are Dea’s winning captions. Congratulations to Dea and Anne L!

🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏻 Featured Author

Riley Bauer

The center who lights up every room. The captain who won’t let anyone through the door.

Ash has always been easy — easy smile, easy laugh, the kind of guy who remembers your coffee order and makes you feel like the most important person in the room. But easy is a performance, and the man behind it just walked away from a marriage that quietly fell apart and a city that stopped feeling like home. Atlanta is supposed to be the fresh start. New team. New ice. Clean slate. He’s fine. He’s always fine.

Then he meets his co-captain, and “fine” stops being a word that fits.

Avi hasn’t let anyone close in ten years. Fifteen years in the closet. A secret relationship with a teammate that ended on a highlight reel. A trade that felt like being discarded. He knows exactly what happens when you let someone in — they leave, and you have to rebuild yourself from whatever’s left. As captain of a brand-new expansion team made of castoffs and long shots, his job is to build something on the ice. Not to notice that the too-warm center who texts at midnight keeps finding cracks in walls Avi forgot were there.

What starts as co-captain chemistry becomes something neither of them expected — late nights after team dinners, a drunk confession in a dark hotel room, a first kiss that changes everything. Ash is discovering a hunger he didn’t know he had. Avi is terrified of how much he wants to feed it.

But Avi’s been here before. And the closer Ash gets, the more Avi is sure this story ends the same way it always does.

Meanwhile, a stray cat shows up at the Firebirds’ facility and decides — with absolutely zero regard for Avi’s emotional boundaries — that he belongs to her. He carries her in his backwards hoodie. He refuses to call it love. And when she disappears, it breaks him open in ways he never saw coming.

Fresh Ice is a slow-burn MM hockey romance about a man who’s never wanted another man before, a captain who forgot how to let himself be wanted, and the scrappy team of misfits who accidentally become a family along the way.

GET ‘FRESH ICE’ HERE

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📎 Useless Fact About Me 🎶

My favourite musical is Les Misérables. Or Jesus Christ Superstar. Or Fiddler on the Roof. Or… Oh, don’t make me choose!

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👋 That’s All, Folks!

Until next time, my lovelies!

XOXO
Xanthe
P.S. Did you vote in the poll?!