Icebound

Icebound opens Meredith Trapp's Boundless Players series, a fake-dating, age-gap hockey romance.

Rhode Tremblay is a thirty-three-year-old NHL player with a reputation and one hard rule: no dating anyone under thirty. Nina Alstyne is a twenty-two-year-old art student finishing her degree, done shaping herself around anyone else's plans after a past relationship that asked her to disappear into it.

An accident throws the two of them together, and a faux situationship follows — one Rhode enters believing Nina is a thirty-year-old doctor. As the arrangement deepens and the truth threatens to surface, both of them have to decide whether the walls they've built — his age rule, her vow to stay guarded — are worth keeping up.

The book combines banter-heavy fake dating with open-door spice and a grounded look at anxiety and self-image, following Rhode and Nina from a staged relationship into something neither planned on wanting.