The Dare

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The cruelty of social hierarchies, the weight of secrets, the fragile performance of confidence, and the radical act of letting someone see you exactly as you are.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love college romance with emotional depth, stories about found family and hard-won self-acceptance, and heroines who learn that the opinions of cruel people matter far less than the courage to be seen.

The Dare opens in a familiar place: a college party where everyone is performing, and no one is quite sure who is watching. Taylor Marsh has spent three years at Briar University learning to make herself small. She knows exactly where to stand at a Kappa Chi party, which corners offer the best camouflage, and how to laugh at jokes that make her skin crawl. She is a junior with a curvy body she has been taught to apologize for, a sharp wit she mostly keeps to herself, and a best friend named Sasha who loves her fiercely. She has survived this long by being forgettable. Then Abigail Davenport, the sorority's vice president, decides to make her the evening's entertainment. Elle Kennedy builds The Dare around a simple, cruel mechanism: a game with no truth option, only dares, and no way to refuse without social exile. The dare Abigail issues is designed to humiliate. Taylor must approach Conor Edwards, the impossibly attractive new hockey player, and convince him to go upstairs with her. Abigail expects rejection. She expects Taylor to slink back across the room, red-faced, while the sorority's inner circle howls with laughter. What happens instead changes everything. Kennedy, a bestselling author known for her sports-themed new adult romances, has a gift for taking the glossy surfaces of college life and finding the tender, damaged people underneath. The Dare is part of her Briar U series, a world of hockey players, sorority politics, and young people fumbling toward adulthood. But this novel stands on its own as a story about two people who are both, in different ways, trapped by the stories other people tell about them. Conor Edwards looks like he has everything: height, beauty, athletic talent, money. But from the moment he agrees to Taylor's desperate plea, it becomes clear that he is just as lost as she is. He is a finance major who does not want to study finance. He is a son who has never felt seen by his wealthy stepfather. He is a young man drifting through a life someone else designed for him, smiling because smiling is easier than explaining. The novel's tone is warm and witty, full of banter that crackles and scenes that balance comedy…