LESSONS OF THE GAME

A new student teacher and a young San Antonio high school football coach score “a touchdown for love” in this steamy but decorous romance. Before Kaylene Morales even reports to her supervising teacher, she manages to slop mop water over hunky coach Alex Garrison. The relationship develops from there (though it actually began ten years before, when Alex was her older brother’s classmate and she had a mad crush on him), into long phone conversations, dinners, passionate necking on the sofa, a falling out while Kaylene frets over Alex’s preoccupation with that “hard-hearted wench” football, and finally a climactic clinch and proposal. In the meantime, as Alex juggles his growing love with the heavy demands of Texas football, Kaylene throws out her dull lesson plans for innovative new ones, and endures mild challenges from her students. Romance fans and other tenderhearts will sigh over Bertrand’s mauve prose, no matter how unpolished it is. (Fiction. 11-13)