Five couples. One island. A scrappy pickleball club that accidentally became the heart of everything. Welcome to Saltgrass Key, where nobody dinks responsibly.
Welcome to Saltgrass Key—a Gulf Coast island where the pickleball is competitive, the group chat is a disaster, and the local pelican has better instincts about love than anyone playing on the courts.
The Florida Smash Club started as one woman’s dream and one grumpy ex-tennis player’s inherited mess. Now it’s the heart of everything—the place where enemies become partners, best friends realize they’ve been in love for years, and corporate types learn that spreadsheets can’t predict who you’ll fall for.
Five books. Five couples. One scrappy club that accidentally became a community. An alligator named Gary. A pelican named Gerald. A group chat that has caused at least three breakups. And a hand-painted sign above the entrance that says “Dink Responsibly.”
Nobody does.
Sloane Lachlan is done waiting for permission. She’s spent three years building Saltgrass Outdoor Co. into the most beloved rental business on the island—paddleboards, kayaks, her latest obsession: pickleball. She’s found her tribe. She’s found her sport. Now she just needs a home for her community’s club before the Coquina Grand Resort prices everyone out with their shiny new premium courts. She has a plan. She has sponsors. She has enthusiasm that could power a small nation.
What she doesn’t have: a facility. And the only available space on the island belongs to a man who actively hates pickleball.
Cal Merritt came home to Saltgrass Key to disappear, not to save anything. He inherited his grandmother’s waterfront tennis facility eight months ago—a beautiful, deteriorating relic of her legacy—and he’s been quietly watching it crumble while he figures out what comes next. Professional tennis ended his identity at twenty-nine. Pickleball is an insult to everything he spent his life earning.
But Sloane Lachlan shows up at his facility on a Tuesday with a business proposal, a visioning energy that borders on nuclear, and the complete inability to read the word “no.”
What starts as a business arrangement becomes something neither of them planned. Cal’s facility becomes the Florida Smash Club. Sloane becomes a constant presence in his courts, his business meetings, and his carefully constructed walls. The renovations are chaos. The community that forms is electric. The banter is relentless. And somewhere between teaching her proper tennis form and losing three straight games to her dubious serves, Cal starts noticing things he can’t unnotice.
Sloane, meanwhile, is learning a dangerous lesson: that the person who looks like they need nothing is sometimes the person who needs you most.
This is a spicy (3 chili pepper) sports romance about building something real. It’s opponents becoming partners. A grumpy former pro and a sunshine optimist discovering they fit together in ways that make no strategic sense. It’s about learning to let someone else be the one who shows up, and learning that surrender isn’t failure—it’s just the opposite of being alone.
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Her job is to destroy his club. His mission is to save it. Too bad she's impossible to resist.
Maria Federov is a ruthless overachiever on a mission: build the Coquina Grand's new pickleball club into the hottest destination court on the Gulf Coast, then use that triumph to launch her back to the major markets she belongs in. Get in, build the thing, move on. It's the plan that's never failed her.
Christian Bacca is the warm-hearted, fiercely protective co-founder of the Florida Smash Club, a scrappy waterfront court that's been the social hub of Saltgrass Key for four years. He knows exactly who Maria is—he watched her kind come to this island before, saw them polish everything that made it real, then leave. He's not losing his club to a corporate resort that treats the island like a stepping stone.
Except Maria isn't leaving. When she keeps showing up at the FSC courts—teaching his friends, charming his community, tearing down his carefully built defenses with dry humor and a smile that catches him off guard—Christian realizes his biggest problem isn't the rival club. It's her.
Maria's always been good at running. She's never been good at staying. And when the promotion of her dreams arrives in the form of a sleek Tampa opportunity, she has to choose: the ambition that's defined her entire life, or the scrappy island club and the man who finally made her want to stop dinking around and take the real shot.
From the author of Big Dink Energy comes the second book in the Florida Smash Club series—a fast-paced, funny, and flirty enemies-to-lovers romance about commitment, community, and why sometimes the best victories are the ones you didn't see coming.
