The Score

**By Elle Kennedy**

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A guarded college hockey star who treats relationships like temporary arrangements collides with a woman determined to protect her independence. Their no-strings fling becomes something neither of them planned, and grief forces both to confront who they really are when everything falls apart.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love sharp banter, genuine emotional stakes, and romance that earns its happy ending through real loss and growth.

Elle Kennedy's *The Score* is the third novel in her Off-Campus series, and it arrives with a reputation to uphold. The first two books established Briar University as a place where hockey players are more than walking stereotypes and the women who love them have ambitions that matter as much as any championship game. This installment turns its attention to Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis, the charming, sexually confident defenseman who has spent the previous books as comic relief and occasional provocateur. Readers who thought they knew him are in for a reckoning. The premise is deceptively simple. Allie Hayes, a theater major nursing a fresh breakup, shows up at the hockey house to hide from her ex. Dean is the only one home. One night of tequila and terrible television leads to sex, and both of them wake up insisting it was a mistake. But Dean's body has other ideas, and so does his heart, though he would rather skate naked across center ice than admit it. What follows is a romance built on the collision of two opposing philosophies. Allie has spent her entire adult life defined by a relationship. She has been someone's girlfriend since she was fifteen, and she is terrified that she does not know who she is without a man beside her. Dean has built his entire identity on avoiding exactly that kind of entanglement. He is honest about his intentions, scrupulous about boundaries, and convinced that love is a trap for people who lack imagination. Their fling is supposed to be simple: exclusive, discreet, temporary. It becomes none of those things. The novel earns its emotional weight by refusing to let its characters stay comfortable. Kennedy introduces grief in a way that feels sudden and brutal, the way grief actually arrives. When Dean loses his best friend, the carefully constructed persona he has worn for years collapses. The boy who always knew what to say, who could charm his way through any situation, who treated life as a series of pleasurable detours, disappears into a bottle. What remains is someone Allie barely recognizes, and the novel asks whether love is enough to pull him back. The tone walks a careful line between comedy and heartbreak.…