Breaking Away
Nashville Assassins • Book 1
by Toni Aleo
Why You'll Love This
A grieving hockey player becomes guardian to a furious teenager — and the one person who helps them both is exactly who he shouldn't want.
- Great if you want: sports romance with emotional weight beyond the usual heat
- The experience: warm and fast-paced with genuine heartache underneath the romance
- The writing: Aleo writes grief and attraction with equal sincerity — no irony, just feeling
- Skip if: you prefer slow-burn tension over quick emotional connection
About This Book
What happens when a professional hockey player suddenly finds himself raising a grieving teenage girl—and falling for the one woman helping her heal? Breaking Away introduces the Nashville Assassins series with a story that earns its emotional weight: loss that feels real, a found-family dynamic that surprises you, and a romance that builds slowly enough to actually mean something. Phillip Anderson's world is already cracked open by grief before Reese Allen walks into it, and that vulnerability is what makes their connection feel like more than attraction.
Toni Aleo writes romance with a warmth that doesn't tip into sentimentality—her characters carry their damage visibly, and the relationships grow from that honesty. The pacing here is deliberate, giving readers time to invest in Phillip as a guardian and a man before pushing him toward love. The result is a story where the hockey backdrop feels lived-in rather than decorative, the emotional beats land with genuine force, and the romance satisfies precisely because it had to fight to exist. It's the kind of series opener that makes you reach for the next book immediately.
