Sacked & Tackled Books in Order

Sacked & Tackled is Palessa's football romance series, but the real action happens away from the field. The books are set around the Steinger Football League, a semi-pro world where careers are fragile, egos run hot, and private messes never stay private for long. Football gives the stories their shape, but relationships, reputation, and second chances drive them.

The first book, Tobey Fine, centers on Niveah Wallace, a smart, ambitious woman who has built a growing software company and lands the contract to create the SFL's first fantasy football app. She does not have time for old feelings, and she definitely does not want to get tangled up again with Tobey Fine, the man who once hurt her. Of course, that plan collapses as soon as work, chemistry, and history start colliding.

The scoreboard is not the whole story.

That is really the hook of this series. These books care about the people around the game just as much as the athletes inside it. In Tobey Fine, the sports world is mixed with tech work, ambition, and the kind of attraction that feels risky because both people know exactly where it went wrong the first time. The football setting adds swagger and pressure, but the emotional stakes come from whether Niveah can trust herself around Tobey at all.

Devereaux Cox keeps the same basic promise while changing the angle. Rebekkah Stallman is trying to rebuild after a life-altering rupture, while Christopher Devereaux Cox should be celebrating a future that could lead him toward the SFL or even the NFL. Instead, family legacy, public image, and an unresolved past keep both of them stuck in the same painful story. The book leans into the idea that truth is slippery when pride, fear, and other people's expectations are all in the room.

Nobody gets to leave the past in the locker room.

What makes Sacked & Tackled stand out is the way it uses sports as pressure, not just decoration. Being part of the league affects careers, money, status, and how easily a mistake can turn public. At the same time, Palessa keeps the focus close to the characters' emotional blind spots: old insults that still sting, chances they missed, and the ways love can get tangled up with competition and self-protection.

So if you are expecting game-by-game sports fiction, this is not quite that. These are contemporary romances set in football's orbit, with heat, tension, and a lot of attention paid to what happens behind the image of the confident player. The tone is brisk and emotional, and the books read best if you want romance where ambition and vulnerability are always sharing the same room.