A responsible hockey player. A sunshine chaos girl with something to prove. One viral bet that was supposed to be terrible for both of them.
Maren Brooks knows exactly how to make people look. At the perfect sunset. At the perfect moment. At the kind of summer story everyone wants to follow.
What she does not know is how to make people take her seriously.
When Ridgeview’s Lake Briar Summer Challenge Weekend needs a spark, Maren finds one in Griffin Hayes: the team’s serious, steady, impossibly controlled safety-first hockey player.Griffin is the guy who stops bad ideas before they become emergency-room paperwork.Maren is the girl who thinks the best stories happen right before someone falls in the lake.
So when one teasing comment turns into a viral team-wide challenge, The Bad Idea Bet is born.
Can Griffin survive one weekend of Maren’s bad ideas?
Can Maren make the human safety manual loosen up?
And can either of them pretend the chemistry between them is just good content?
As fan votes, lake challenges, team chaos, and one very inconvenient almost-kiss turn the weekend into the campaign opportunity Maren has been waiting for, Griffin starts to see the woman behind the sparkle.The strategist. The fighter. The girl who has spent too long being called cute when she is trying to be undeniable.
Maren sees him too.
Not just the responsible one.
The protector. The leader. The man who has been holding everything together so long he forgot joy was allowed to include him.
But when the line between real romance and public performance starts to blur, Maren and Griffin have to decide what matters more: giving everyone the story they want, or protecting the one thing that is finally becoming real.
The Bad Idea Bet is a funny, flirty, closed-door hockey romance packed with viral summer chaos, lake-town banter, team found family, opposites-attract tension, and one very responsible man learning that the best bad idea might be falling first.
