The Long Game
A disgraced soccer exec reluctantly enlists the help of a retired soccer star in coaching a children’s team in this small town love story.
1. THE LONG GAME by Elena Armas
SYNOPSIS
Adalyn Reyes has spent years perfecting her daily routine: wake up at dawn, drive to the Miami Flames FC offices, try her hardest to leave a mark, go home, and repeat.
But her routine is disrupted when a video of her in an altercation with the team’s mascot goes viral. Rather than fire her, the team’s owner—who happens to be her father—sends Adalyn to middle-of-nowhere North Carolina, where she’s tasked with turning around the struggling local soccer team, the Green Warriors, as a way to redeem herself. Her plans crumble upon discovering that the players wear tutus to practice (impractical), keep pet goats (messy), and are terrified of Adalyn (counterproductive), and are nine-year-old kids.
To make things worse, also in town is Cameron Caldani, goalkeeping prodigy whose presence is somewhat of a mystery. Cam is the perfect candidate to help Adalyn, but after one very unfortunate first encounter involving a rooster, Cam’s leg, and Adalyn’s bumper, he’s also set on running her out of town. But banishment is not an option for Adalyn. Not again. Helping this ragtag children’s team is her road to redemption, and she is playing the long game. With or without Cam’s help.
2. THE FIANCE DILEMMA by Elena Armas
SYNOPSIS
Josie Moore has given the opposite sex—and love—plenty of chances. Four exactly, if you count all her failed engagements, and five if you include the absentee father who kept her existence a secret until very recently. So when her father decides to announce his retirement with a splashy magazine piece about the family, Josie realizes her romantic history is a complicated PR issue.
Matthew Flanagan is in the mud, literally. Not only has he been fired from his job, but also the tires of his car are stuck in the muck after taking a wrong turn as he enters Green Oak, North Carolina. So, he grabs a duffel with his essentials and goes in search of a place to crash until he gets his life back on track. But instead, he finds his best friend’s sister, Josie, greeting him as her fiancé.
What starts as a big messy misunderstanding quickly turns into an arrangement with Matthew playing a new role as doting fiancé. A fifth engagement—and a stunt, at that—makes Josie’s stomach turn, but every dilemma requires a choice between equally undesirable alternatives, and Matthew doesn’t seem to mind becoming one more number in a colorful list of grooms-that-never-were. Despite the ring on her finger, Josie knows this is only temporary, even if the rest of the small town believes that the fifth time’s the charm.