The Clause
- Slow Burn
- Witty
- Grumpy Sunshine
- Forced Proximity
- College
- Hockey
- Fake Dating
- Sports Romance
- Emotional
- Found Family
Frankie Reyes runs the machine that decides who gets to stay at Carrick University, and this year the machine needs a love story. Her love story.
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The story
The story
Frankie Reyes runs the machine that decides who gets to stay at Carrick University, and this year the machine needs a love story. Her love story. She drafts the contract herself: escalating public appearances with the team's new captain, one private rule that keeps it from ever being real, and an endowed scholarship line waiting at the end if she can sell it.
Cal Rhodes has spent his whole life being the guy who never needs anything, the one everyone leans on so no one has to ask if he is okay. Pretending to want the sharpest, most exhausting woman on campus should be easy. He just has to follow the rules.
But contracts do not account for the way he starts noticing what she actually needs, or the way she starts keeping score on a heart she never agreed to spend. Every appearance gets a little less staged. Every rule gets a little harder to keep.
Some clauses were never meant to survive the season.
Spice map
Where it gets hot
Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.
The world
Know your way around
Character
- Cal Rhodes
- Carrick's hockey captain, a junior from a harbor town, who fixes the skate a freshman swears is fine and takes his brother's calls about the family truck. The whole team leans on him, and he never asks anyone for a thing.
- Danny Rhodes
- Cal's seventeen-year-old brother back home, who calls when the family truck starts making a new noise. He pitches his voice lower than it wants to go and insists he's not a baby.
- Frankie Reyes
- The woman behind Carrick's donor mailers and events, in the office that decides whose story gets sold, and the only person on campus who can read Cal back. She once called his mailer profile too clean, and when he turned her down she wrote his no in the planner she carries everywhere.
- Roland Ashby
- The silver-haired donor whose name is on the biggest building on the hill, and who speaks for the Founders' Circle. His handshake lands like a door closing on a deal, and he has Cal's yes to a season of donor appearances before a single term is on the table.
Place
- Carrick
- The school on the hill where Cal plays hockey and Frankie works the donor side, with Roland Ashby's name on its biggest building. For a kid from a harbor town it costs more than the team's aid covers.
Hockey
- D-man
- Hockey slang for a defenseman, a skater whose first job is keeping the puck out of his own team's net. Petrov, a kid from Saskatchewan who learned his English on the ice, is one of Carrick's.
- The C
- The letter C stitched on the chest of a hockey captain's jersey, and shorthand for the captaincy itself. Cal wears it this season as a junior, and his team calls him Cap.
Term
- The crooked knuckle
- The ring-finger knuckle on Cal's left hand, which set wrong at sixteen because he taped it and kept playing rather than sit a game and hand his father a doctor's bill. Every year, early in the season, the cold gets into it.
Organization
- The Founders' Circle
- Carrick's circle of big givers, which picks one story every year to say what Carrick is and tells it to the people who keep the place standing. A Founders' Circle supplement closes the gap on Cal's athletic aid.
Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.
