She was hired to fix his image. He was determined to get her out of his camp. Neither planned on her becoming part of the family he’d been trying so hard to protect.

Vincenzo Messina has one job: win the World Cup.

He has no patience for celebrity nonsense, media games, or anybody who thinks a football team needs to be charming when it could be disciplined.

Sofia Hofer has been hired to make Italy's most impossible coach and his equally impossible squad survive the world's attention without creating an international PR disaster.

Thirty days inside the same secure camp should make them enemies.

Instead, Sofia starts seeing what Vincenzo is actually protecting.

The players behind the headlines. The pressure behind his temper. The strange, infuriating family he has built out of twenty-six men carrying a country's expectations.

And Vincenzo starts trusting the one woman he was certain did not belong there.

The closer the tournament gets, the harder it becomes to tell where their professional battles end and something far more dangerous begins. Every argument crackles. Every accidental touch lasts a second too long. And somewhere between stolen looks, late-night conversations, and twenty-six footballers who notice far too much, Sofia stops being the outsider in camp.
She becomes part of the team.
And Vincenzo starts wanting her to become something more.
He built the camp to keep chaos out.
He did not plan on letting her in.