Elle Kennedy has built something genuinely enviable in contemporary romance: a fictional university that feels like a place you have actually been, populated by characters who linger in the memory long after the final page. The Score, the third instalment in her Off-Campus series, is perhaps the most purely enjoyable entry yet, a friends-with-benefits story that earns its emotional payoff through charm, wit, and a surprising undercurrent of tenderness.
Dean Di Laurentis arrives already beloved by readers of the earlier books, the kind of effortlessly confident character who might easily become insufferable in less careful hands. Kennedy keeps him grounded. Beneath the easy smile and the practiced lines is someone genuinely uncertain about who he is outside of hockey, outside of performance, outside of the version of himself he has spent years perfecting for other people. That vulnerability, revealed slowly and without fanfare, is what transforms The Score from a pleasant diversion into something with real emotional weight.
Allie Hayes makes for an ideal counterpart. She is sharp without being brittle, funny without being relentless, and her post-graduation anxiety – that particular dread of standing at the edge of an open future with no map – is rendered with an honesty that will resonate well beyond the campus romance readership. Her dynamic with Dean is built on genuine intellectual and emotional exchange, not merely attraction, and Kennedy takes her time letting the connection deepen before asking the reader to believe in it fully.
The Briar University world continues to expand here with the ease of a writer who knows her setting intimately. The hockey scenes carry authentic energy, but Kennedy never lets the sport overshadow the story; it remains texture and context rather than spectacle.
If the novel has a weakness, it is one familiar to the series: the resolution of the central conflict arrives swiftly, the obstacles dissolving perhaps more readily than the emotional buildup quite demands. But Kennedy’s gift has always been making you feel, in the moment of reading, that everything is exactly as it should be.
The Score is warm, funny, and quietly moving, a reminder that popular fiction, at its best, is not a lesser thing.
