I’ve been asked a few times why hockey romance works so well as a subgenre, and I have given this question the serious, considered, academic attention it deserves.

It’s because the men are hot.

I mean, I could dress this up. I could talk about the narrative tension inherent in professional sport, the built-in conflict between individual desire and team loyalty, the way the rink functions as a pressure cooker for emotion, the push and pull of ambition and vulnerability. All of that is true and all of that matters and I will absolutely discuss it with you if you want.

But let’s be honest with each other first.

Hockey players are built like someone sat down and said what if a person, but more. They are large and fast and absurdly athletic. They do something genuinely dangerous for a living and they do it with a level of skill and commitment that is, frankly, its own kind of attractive. They get knocked down and they get back up. They bleed for it. They fight for it. Every single game they go out there and they leave everything on the ice, and there is something in that — in the wholehearted, full-contact, nothing-held-back quality of it — that translates directly into the kind of men they are off the ice too.

Men want to be them. Women want to be with them. And honestly, depending on the day and the specific player in question, some people want both simultaneously and I completely understand that.

But here is where it gets interesting, because hot alone does not sustain a subgenre. Hot gets you through the first chapter. What keeps you reading at two in the morning is something more specific than that.

Hockey players, at least the ones I write, carry their hearts in the same way they play the game — all the way. Deacon Worth does not do anything halfway. Neither does Flynn McKenzie, or Lachlan, or any of the men in this universe who have taken up residence in my head and refused to leave. They are competitive and driven and occasionally absolutely impossible, and they love with that same all-or-nothing energy that makes them great at the game. When one of these men decides you are his person, you feel it in your bones. There is no hedging. No half measures. No carefully managed distance. Just the full weight of a person who has decided and is completely at peace with having decided.

That, combined with the fact that they look like that, is really quite a lot to deal with.

Hockey romance works because it gives us men who are physically extraordinary and emotionally all-in. Men who are tough enough to take a hit and soft enough to mean it when they say I love you. Men who are worth writing about and worth reading about and, on the best days, worth falling a little bit in love with yourself.

The men are hot. The rest is craft.

But mostly the men are hot.

— Bella 🏒