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Keep: A Grumpy/Sunshine Football Romance
Paperback
Series: The Men of Ashcombe FC, Book 1
RomanceGeneral GLBTQIA Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 14 2026
Pages: 408
Weight: 0.80
Height: 1.01 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
He's the captain who only knows how to be useful. He's the 58-million signing everyone wants, and no one keeps.
Six years of building Ashcombe Athletic have taught Marcus Kilbride exactly what he's for. Turn up. Hold the back four together. Be the man the club leans on and never the man who needs anything back. It's kept him safe his whole career, right up until the gaffer parks Ashcombe's record signing in his spare room just till the lad finds his feet.
Theo Salt is sunshine in boots: quick feet, quicker mouth, and a smile that makes the terraces forget how to breathe. He's also spent his career being wanted right up until he became inconvenient, then quietly shipped on: four temporary homes in three years and counting. So he grins, and he dazzles, and he never lets anyone close enough to move him first.
Under one roof, the grumpy captain and his golden problem are meant to keep it professional. They manage it about as well as you'd expect. But every touch is a headline the club's sponsors would hate, every soft night behind drawn curtains a risk to two careers. And the clocks are running. A rival club is circling Theo with a fee that makes grown men lose their arithmetic. Marcus's own deal expires in June, and nobody's said the word renewal.
Marcus falls first, and he falls hard. Now he has to work out whether a man who trades in what he provides has anything worth keeping for himself, and whether letting himself want this is a risk he's allowed to take. Theo has spent years being easy to let go. This time he wants to be worth holding on to. But wanting it out loud could cost them both everything they've built.
Some things you protect quietly.
And some things you keep.
This book contains:
- Grumpy captain and sunshine golden boy
- Forced proximity, with only one spare room
- He falls first, and it wrecks him
- Closeted footballers and the commercial squeeze of coming out
- Two ticking clocks: a record bid and an expiring contract
- Age gap, praise, and claiming coded as mine / ours
- Hurt/comfort and found family
- Dual first-person POV
- A guaranteed, hard-won HEA
Heat: Open-door / Level 3. Steamy, tender, and firmly hurt-and-heat, never dark.
Book 1 in The Men of Ashcombe FC, a series of interconnected standalones set at a fictional South London top-flight club. Each book is a complete romance with its own couple and its own happy ending. No cliffhangers, no cheating.
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