Read on if you’r interested in more hockey hotness from Bowen and Kennedy. Stay is the second in the WAGs series (that’s wives and girlfriends for those of you not in the know) after Good Boy. And it features a cool girl and another hot hockey player.
Hailey Emery co-runs (with her ex-husband) her own business, a virtual assistant company called Fetch. They’re basically a concierge, finding services like dog-walkers and housecleaners, picking up and delivering items, and doing other such things for clients. She has one client whose account name is Sniper87 and she’s half convinced he’s the hockey star Matt Eriksson. Who she fancies. But she respects her client’s privacy and resists the temptation to peek at his profile details.
She’s not wrong. Matt’s on the same Toronto team as Blake and Wes, who we’ve seen in the earlier books. At 30, he’s getting old for the game and starting to feel it. He’s also unhappily single, with little time to do anything about it. His ex-wife’s deeply unpleasant and he doesn’t see his two daughters enough. He’s been using Fetch and the person he corresponds with the most is Hailey, or Hottie as he calls her (because her initials are all he sees—HTE). He’s seen a picture of a pretty woman on the site and decided it’s her, and he’s theoretically interested.
He’s not wrong either. How they finally get together is entertaining but not overly cutesy. First, the dog walkers she’s hired aren’t doing a good job with his dog—they’re snooping around his apartment, for instance. So she does the dog walking herself the next day, and he watches over his security cam and decides she really is the cute girl from the website photo. So they’re chatting about it over the Fetch messaging app, and he flirts with her a little because he assumes she knows who he is. He arranges to get her two tickets to the next home game, in a card labeled For HoTtiE. Things go from there, as they do.
Hailey’s pretty shy and although she’s been married before, she’s not really experienced much excitement. Matt takes on teaching her a little about life and… other things. The book is funny partially because of her inexperience and shyness, but there’s plenty of unrelated humor, too. There’s an ongoing thread with a client sending dick pics to Fetch which is pretty funny, especially when it gets explained near the end. As always, the dialogue’s good, the secondary characters are entertaining, and the ending’s satisfying. So if you like hockey romances, Bowen, or Kennedy, you’ll like this one.