Power Play by Quinn Ashby

Suki Okonkwo has spent four years being the boards—the enforcer who absorbs every hit, holds every teammate together, and never asks for anything back. Off the ice, they have a secret: a pottery wheel, a shelf of handmade ceramics, and an entire creative life nobody knows about. Not their teammates. Not their best friend. Not even their mother.

Noa Kessler is a journalist who was supposed to be a war correspondent. The daughter of two Pulitzer-winning parents, she’s been assigned to write a feature on the Boston Banshees—a women’s hockey team on the verge of a landmark TV deal. She doesn’t care about hockey. She doesn’t plan to stay. And she definitely doesn’t plan to fall for the team’s six-foot-one enforcer with scarred knuckles and an eighteen-pound orange cat.

But Suki sees through Noa’s professional armor the way Noa sees through Suki’s caretaker persona. And when Noa uncovers a morality clause buried in the broadcast contract—one that could be used to punish the team’s most visible queer players—she’s faced with an impossible choice: the story that could make her career, or the person who makes her feel like she’s already enough.

Power Play is a slow-burn high heat sapphic romance about the courage it takes to stop performing for everyone else and start claiming what’s yours. It’s about hands that fight and hands that shape clay. About the difference between being seen and being known. And about an eighteen-pound cat who has opinions about all of it.