Draft Bust is a surprisingly sweet and emotional story about an injury-prone professional hockey player and the journalist he hired to tell his story to the world after he announces his retirement.

Oliver Swan is a professional hockey player who has to hang up his skates at the age of 26 due to injury. Hockey is all he’s known from a young age, putting all of his time and energy into being the best, proving his talent and trying to not be a draft bust. But all of his injuries cut his time on the ice short and left him struggling to figure out what comes next and how to stay healthy enough to do whatever comes next. Oliver has a reputation for being cocky but underneath it all, he’s lonely, hurting and grieving the loss of his favorite thing in the world - hockey.

Jordan Walsh finds himself laid off from his dream job as the beat reporter for the Minnesota Northern Lights and travels to spend a month with Oliver Swan to work on a secret project. He feels uncertain what to do with his life next since his original dream of playing hockey didn’t work out and then his journalism career was cut short. Jordan is caring, compassionate and understanding in a way that Oliver never expected and he fills the empty spaces in Oliver’s life and mansion with happiness and fun.

These two strike up an easy friendship at first, understanding each other on such a deep level even though they’d never met before. Oliver and Jordan are both at a crossroads in their life, looking for what’s next while still grieving the loss of their past and that commonality brings them closer together. This story is soft, sweet, emotional and so unexpected but I loved seeing these two flourish together with the new hand that they’ve been dealt to do something exciting next and move past all of their hurt and pain with love.

I love that each book in this Delay of Game series feels totally unique but also still connected to the same hockey world. The crossovers are fun to pull out and I’m excited to finally read Blake Brennan’s story next!