Books Like Heated Rivalry: 9 Slow Burn Queer Romances to Obsess Over
Rivals, secrets and years of yearning for readers who never got over Shane and Ilya.
Ask a room of romance readers to name the best MM hockey romance ever written and you will start a fight, but Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid wins more often than not. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are the two best players of their generation, professional rivals whose every meeting is dissected by the sports press, and secretly, across nearly a decade, something much more than that. Reid's masterstroke is the timeline: hookups stretched over years, feelings nobody will name, and a secret that gets heavier every season it is carried.
That specific cocktail (rivals to lovers, a relationship hidden from the world, a slow burn measured in years, and chemistry that could melt the ice) is what these nine books deliver in their own ways. Some stay in the arena, some leave sport behind entirely, but every one of them understands the exquisite agony of wanting someone you are not supposed to have.
What to read after Heated Rivalry
Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy
Best friends who fell out spectacularly as teenagers meet again as college hockey stars at a summer training camp, with four years of silence and one unresolved night between them. It is warmer and quicker to combust than Heated Rivalry, more second chance than rivalry, but the hockey world feels lived-in and the longing is top shelf. The sequel, Us, follows the same couple, so the binge is built in.
The Understatement of the Year by Sarina Bowen
Two men who shared a painful, closeted history in high school collide on the same college hockey team years later, and neither has finished carrying what happened. This is the pick for readers who loved the weight of secrecy in Heated Rivalry: the fear of being seen is the antagonist here, and Bowen handles it with real tenderness. Reads perfectly as a standalone within her True North-adjacent Ivy Years series.
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You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian
A grieving sportswriter is assigned to cover the worst shortstop in 1960s baseball, a young man mid-slump and mid-crisis, and their prickly interviews turn into something neither can print. The secrecy here is imposed by the era rather than a rivalry, which gives the same hidden-relationship ache a historical melancholy. Sebastian writes kindness better than almost anyone in the genre; this one is a hug with a lump in its throat.
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Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
The First Son of the United States and a British prince publicly loathe each other, until a tabloid disaster forces a fake friendship that becomes a very real, very secret transatlantic romance. It swaps locker rooms for state dinners, but the DNA is identical: rivals, secrecy with genuinely enormous stakes, and correspondence that will ruin you. Funnier than Heated Rivalry, and just as devoted to the slow reveal of two people who fit.
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The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic
A runaway with a false name joins a disgraced university team in the invented sport of Exy, and the trilogy that follows is one of the internet's great cult obsessions. The central relationship is the slowest burn on this list, hostile, wary and earned an inch at a time across three books. Fair warning: it is dark, with heavy content throughout, and the romance is a thread rather than the whole cloth, but the payoff inspires the kind of devotion Heated Rivalry readers understand.
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Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall
The scandal-prone son of a washed-up rockstar needs a respectable fake boyfriend; the buttoned-up barrister he recruits needs the opposite of everything Luc is. British to its bones, laugh-out-loud funny, and underneath the banter a genuinely moving story about believing you are too much of a mess to be loved. No sport, no rivalry, but the fake-to-real arc delivers that same slow slide from performance into truth.
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The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun
A burnt-out producer on a Bachelor-style dating show is assigned to babysit its awkward new leading man, and the romance the cameras are hunting for happens where they cannot see it. The forbidden, behind-the-scenes secrecy scratches the Shane-and-Ilya nerve directly, and the honest handling of anxiety and OCD gives it unexpected depth. Soft where Heated Rivalry is smouldering, and lovely for it.
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Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell
A charming imperial prince is ordered into a political marriage with a quiet, grieving widower, and the empire's stability rests on two strangers pretending their arrangement works. This is the wildcard pick: space opera rather than sport, but the mutual pining, catastrophic miscommunication and gradual, careful trust-building are pure slow-burn craft. For readers who loved watching Ilya's armour come off one plate at a time.
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Icebreaker by Hannah Grace
When a collision forces a university's figure skaters and hockey team to share a rink, the skating captain and the hockey captain start a war that does not stay a war. This one is MF rather than MM, so it is the pick for readers whose loyalty is to hockey romance itself: the rink politics, the team banter, the rivals-sharing-ice tension. Considerably spicier and frothier than Reid, and very bingeable, with the Maple Hills series waiting behind it.
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Keep the streak going
If your heart is still at centre ice, let What Should I Read Next? scout your next favourite, keep the contenders on your TBR list, and browse our Romance collection for more slow burns worth the wait.