Skin in the Game Books in Order

Skin in the Game is Christine Bell's two-book new-adult romance series set around college football. The stories pair athletes with women who have their own ambitions, wounds, and reasons for avoiding a relationship that could complicate everything.

The first book, Score, introduces the series' campus world and its focus on what happens when public expectations collide with private feelings. Football creates a constant pressure cooker. Players are expected to perform, represent the school, and stay focused, while the women around them are often carrying expectations of their own.

The romances are not only about winning the game. They are about figuring out how to be honest when image, reputation, and fear of being hurt get in the way.

Hustle follows another couple in the same circle, with appearances from characters readers meet in the first book. Ty and Flora are both dealing with painful experiences that have shaped how they see themselves and what they think they can risk with another person. Their story is more emotionally bruised than a simple sports-romance setup might suggest.

The series has the quick pace and chemistry of new-adult romance, but it also gives space to friendship, recovery, and the uneven process of learning to trust. The football setting adds stakes without taking over the books. These are character-centered love stories where the central challenge is often whether two people can stop protecting themselves long enough to build something real.

Read Score before Hustle. Each book centers on a different couple, but the friendships and returning characters make the second story more rewarding after the first.