Illegal Contact

By Cole Barnes

Two teammates. One connection neither can ignore.

About the story

He can charm a locker room. Being known is another risk entirely.

Jake Reyes makes difficult catches look easy and uncomfortable questions disappear beneath a joke. Three seasons into professional football, the performance is almost instinctive. Smile, keep the room laughing, and give nobody a reason to look too closely.

Mason Steele is the teammate who makes that strategy harder to maintain. Quiet, reliable, and deliberately unremarkable off the field, he seems to see the fraction of honesty before Jake turns it into a punchline. Their familiar banter has begun to feel less like a safe routine and more like something neither man can keep calling incidental.

An M/M sports romance about teammates, carefully built defenses, and the cost of letting someone see past the version of yourself the world expects.

Your kind of romance?

• Professional football teammates
• Jake Reyes and Mason Steele
• Private longing beneath public confidence
• The Tight Ends Series

Read a short excerpt

From the opening pages

Practice ground on through special teams and situational work, the kind of unglamorous reps that make up ninety percent of any given Tuesday, and I did what I always do, which is perform competence loudly enough that nobody looks too closely at the parts of me I keep quiet.

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Keep the story going

Book 2 in The Tight Ends Series

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