Captain of My Downfall

When the hockey captain gets her boyfriend cut from the roster, Tessa sets out to destroy him. She has sources. She has a sharp pen. She writes for the campus paper and she's going to take down the golden boy of Thornton University hockey. NHL draft prospect. Campus celebrity. The most infuriating human being she has ever encountered. But Jude doesn't run from her investigation. He walks straight into it. He shows up to her literature seminar. He annotates her library books. He answers every question she throws at him, including the ones that make him bleed. He treats her investigation like an invitation and her anger like a dare. The closer Tessa gets to the truth about why her boyfriend was really cut, the less the story looks like the one she planned to write. The sources contradict. The timeline fractures. And the man she's supposed to destroy keeps rewriting everything she thought she understood about loyalty, about love, and about herself. She came to bury him. He's making that impossible. Tropes: enemies to lovers, sports romance, forced proximity, investigative tension.