Sports romance is quite popular these days, and I love that authors are branching out and giving us more sports to fall in love with. I hadn’t thought much about rugby as a sport for a good romance, but the fine team of Forever were singing this book’s praises, and I trust them. So really, this is all their fault…

Red Card [Buy Bookshop Amazon LibroFM] is a dual POV novel following Rory and Cillian. Rory has spent her whole life around rugby since her dad is a college coach. While that’s given her a spectacular sence for the game, that proximity has left her as one of the guys.

Enter Cillian. He is a British bad boy who is joining the team, but he’s on thin ice due to something in his past that got him kicked off his last team. The guys don’t take kindly to him, and he’s not the coach’s favorite either. But Rory has a plan. She offers to help win the team over for him, but he’s gotta teach her how to get the guy in return.

Yes, my friends, we have flirting lessons in our sports romance and it’s about as delightful as Cillians thick thighs. They are referenced many a time and I’m not mad about it.

The spice in this is wonderful, yet there’s still some great depth to the characters. I wasn’t expecting so much in their personal stories, but this really packs the emotion. Really, the only thing that I’d change with this book is more on the rugby side of things. For as much as Rory is an expert and Cillian is an excellent player, we don’t see much of the game play out on the page.

But that’s really such a minor thing. This was still a book I couldn’t put down, which is big words while in the midst of a slump. I wanted to keep going with it so much that I grabbed the audio from LibroFM and enjoyed that as well.

Shoutout to my husband for taking this book to his friend’s rugby game to snap a picture for me… and by ‘a picture’, I mean about 50 until I was satisfied. Bonus for jerseys being similar.