The team's funniest man. The league's most honest journalist. One red light.Calla Bright spent one season making a hockey captain famous for the worst mistake of his career, a hot mic he ended up framing on his own wall. Now she's back at Moontower Arena with a hand recorder and a bulb on its spine, embedded for eight months to film a season-long documentary, and one rule she says out loud on day one: red light means recording. No red, no tape. What you say without the light does not exist.Pete "Pickle" Dillard has been the Chupacabras' joke, mascot-adjacent, and everyone's little brother for three seasons. Nobody asks about his hockey. Nobody anywhere uses his real name. Calla is the first person in the building who asks about everything, on the record and off it, and somewhere in the gap between the two, off the record is exactly where they fall.Three hours of unrecorded footage end up on a network server neither of them controls, and a documentary built on the sacred difference between red-light and real is about to test its own rule at the worst possible time.The documentary is called Expansion: Year Four, one season embedded start to finish, the first story about this franchise written from inside the glass instead of outside it. Pete didn't sign up to be a character in it. Calla's camera disagrees.He's spent three seasons being the punchline. She's about to make him the headline, whether he lets her or not.Welcome to Moontower Arena, where the ice fights Texas for eight months a year, the mascot suit keeps secrets, one cat runs the building's morale, and everybody on this roster is one bad day away from falling in love in front of a few thousand witnesses.His name is Pete. She's about to put that on the record.You'll love this book if you love:Overlooked hero, underestimated hockey playerSunshine hero, skeptic heroineDocumentary crew, behind-the-scenes sports romanceOff-the-record slow burnBanter-forward workplace romanceFound-family hockey world (Book Three of the series)Behind-the-scenes media/press settingBanter with real stakesFull happily-ever-after, no cliffhangerTHE HEADLINE HAT TRICK is Book Three of the Austin Chupacabras and a complete standalone romance. Contains explicit scenes and adult language, 18+. If you love the guy everyone underestimates finally getting seen, keep the red light on. Read more
