Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid says getting free desserts in restaurants, especially with her kids, is one of the best perks of fame.

“Dairy Queen has little ice cream cakes, and somebody brought over a tray of them for my whole family. And that was the first time my kids were like, this is great,” Reid told The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Canada event in Toronto on Thursday.

Her sudden fame for penning the Heated Rivalry book series that has been adapted into the popular Crave and HBO Max romance drama about gay hockey players has also extended to when she leaves the house. “It’s crazy. Authors aren’t supposed to be recognized on the street. Actors, this is what they want. I’ve been getting definitely more attention than I thought I would. I like some of it,” Reid revealed.

Her fame may only grow with the second season of the Heated Rivalry TV series, which Reid teased ahead of the 2027 premiere. “I’m excited for Troy and Harris. Can I say that?” Reid blurted out as she pointed to hockey player Troy Barrett and Harris Drover, his love interest, who will have raised profiles in the next cycle of the queer TV romancer.  

The Heated Rivalry TV series success, besides seeing Reid’s books translated into 35 languages worldwide, has also allowed the stigma around romance novels, especially with gay storylines, to fall by the wayside. “I personally don’t have to defend what I write about anymore, which is a great feeling.  Now I can say I wrote Heated Rivalry and people are very familiar with it. That’s really nice,” she said.

Another revelation: the success of the book-to-screen adaptation on HBO Max and elsewhere internationally didn’t surprise Reid. “I felt when visiting the set I was the only person who understood what was going to happen. Early on, I was, this is going to be huge. I expected Connor and Hudson’s lives to get very different, for the whole world to fall in love with them,” she added during a conversation at the WIE Canada event with Jacob Tierney, who created, wrote and directed the gay hockey TV drama.

Heated Rivalry is part of the book author’s Game Changer series, which follows the steamy romance between Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, played in the Heated Rivalry drama by Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, respectively. Fame for Reid does have its downsides, however.

“I have some social anxiety that I didn’t have before. It’s the worry of being video recorded. I’m always worried about being secretly filmed or recorded. I’m probably being paranoid for no reason,” she volunteered. Getting off social media has helped tame that anxiety, Reid insisted, though Instagram remains her go-to platform.

“The solution is I’m not there anymore. It’s pretty easy to walk away from,” she explained. Reid added a new challenge may be writing books outside of the sport of hockey, and even the romance genre, whether that’s a dark comedy or a screenplay. “I’d like to show myself that I can,” she insisted.

But wherever her pen takes her, Reid said characters and their emotions will remain the foundations of her work. “The most important thing is nailing the character,” she said with a double entendre about her Heated Rivalry books, where characters jump in and out of beds.

Reid will be publishing her seventh book, Unrivaled, in the Game Changers series in June 2027.