مكتبة
بحث
بيت / Romance / PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE / CHAPTER 11 - AVOIDING THE TRUTH

مشاركة

CHAPTER 11 - AVOIDING THE TRUTH

مؤلف: Dirty Diana
last update تاريخ النشر: 2026-03-05 15:05:00

I left at 5 AM like a coward.

No note. No kiss on his forehead. No romantic morning-after moment where I make coffee in his shirt and we smile at each other across the kitchen like people who haven't just detonated their entire lives.

I simply peeled myself out from under his arm one inch at a time – holding my breath when he stirred, freezing when he mumbled something into the pillow that sounded dangerously close to my name – and grabbed my shoes from the hallway floor and my bag from the kit
استمر في قراءة هذا الكتاب مجانا
امسح الكود لتنزيل التطبيق
الفصل السابق الفصل التالي
الفصل مغلق
تعليقات (1)
goodnovel comment avatar
Calvin Mogoje
this is my new favourite
عرض جميع التعليقات

أحدث فصل

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 111 - THE SAME ZIP CODE

    RHYS’ POVBefore the championship.She said I love you back and the world didn’t end.I’d been bracing for it. The way I brace for everything. Waiting for the hit that always follows the good thing. My mother said those words and left. My father said them and meant I own you. Every time love had been spoken in my life it preceded someone packing a bag or tightening a grip. Cursed. Poisoned. Three words with a body count.But she said them back on my couch in the dark with her forehead against mine, the taste of tears between us, and nothing exploded. The walls didn’t collapse. Nobody left. Nobody tightened anything. She just breathed the words into me and they sat there. Warm. Real. Not detonating.I didn’t know what to do with that. So I practiced.“Love you.” Over coffee. Casual. Wanted to see if it still worked with the lights on. If it still felt true when she wasn’t crying and I wasn’t breaking and the room wasn’t dark.It did. And that scared me almost as much as saying it the f

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 110 - REMEMBERING

    We didn’t have sex. First time in weeks we’d been in his bed together and not touched each other that way, and the absence of it made the room feel bigger. More honest. Like the space between our bodies was holding something that mattered more than skin.We lay facing each other. Fully clothed. His grey sweats, my oversized shirt that was actually his oversized shirt. The lamp off. The streetlight through the window casting enough glow to see outlines – the edge of his jaw, the shadow of his collarbone, the scar through his left eyebrow, the way it caught the light like a thin silver wire.He reached across the pillow. His fingers found my face. Not reaching for something – mapping it. My eyebrow first. Tracing the arch of it with his thumb. Then my jaw. The line of it from ear to chin, slow, deliberate, like he was committing the geometry of me to muscle memory in case his eyes ever failed him. Then my mouth. His fingertip on my lower lip. Pressing just enough to feel the give of it.

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 109 - SEMI FINALS

    I’d watched Rhys play a hundred times. Knew the way he moved on ice the way I knew his handwriting – the specific rhythm of it, the language his body spoke when skates replaced shoes and the boards replaced walls and the version of him that couldn’t articulate feelings in a kitchen became fluent in a way that made your chest hurt.This was different.This was something I’d never seen before. Not from him. Not from anyone.I spotted Elena before the puck dropped. Three sections to my left, alone, small in the crowd, clutching her purse on her lap with both hands like it was the only thing keeping her anchored to the seat. She wasn’t watching Rhys warm up. Her eyes were across the arena – fixed on a section I knew without looking. Richard’s section. I followed her gaze and found him. Suited. Silver-templed. Sitting with the rigid posture of a man who owned the building his son played in and resented having to be inside it.Their eyes met. One second. Maybe less. Elena looked away first.

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 108 - WRITE EVERYTHING

    Everything shifted after he said it.Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of shift where the lighting changes and the soundtrack swells. Subtler than that. The way he said my name was different. Naomi. Heavier now. Like the word had more rooms in it than it used to and he’d just moved furniture into all of them. He said it handing me coffee in the morning and it sounded like a whole sentence. He said it across the apartment while I was tying my hair up and it landed on my skin like a hand.Three words had changed the weight of my name in his mouth and I wasn’t sure either of us was ready for what that meant.We spent the morning doing something we’d never done before. Not arguing. Not the charged, electric push-pull that had defined us since the bar. We sat on his couch with our legs tangled and our laptops open and we showed each other the things we’d hidden.He went first. A folder on his desktop – no label, just a date. Essays he’d written and never submitted. A piece about the first t

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 107 - SINCE THE BAR

    Neither of us spoke for a long time.I sat in the chair across from the couch. Not next to him – he hadn’t moved since I’d come in, hadn’t shifted to make room, and his body was speaking a language I’d learned to read by now. Close but not touching. Present but not ready. So I gave him the space his silence was asking for, even though every part of me wanted to cross the room and put my hands on him and make this something I could fix by being close enough. But this wasn’t a closeness problem. This was a man sitting in the wreckage of being fully seen and trying to decide if the exposure was survivable.Minutes passed. Ten. Twenty. The apartment was so dark I could barely see his face but I could see his hands – gripping his knees, the same white-knuckle hold he used on the kitchen counter when the world was pressing too hard and he was trying to keep himself from pressing back.Then he looked up.His face was raw. Not from crying – from the effort of not crying. The effort of sitting

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 106 - THE BLOG

    NAOMI’S POVI was in the kitchen making coffee when the silence in the living room changed.Not got quiet – it was already quiet. Changed. The way a room shifts when someone inside it has just learned something they can’t unlearn. I knew that silence. Had lived inside it enough times to recognize the texture of it, the weight, the specific frequency of a person holding very still because moving would mean reacting and reacting would mean feeling, and feeling was the thing they were trying to outrun.I came around the corner with two mugs, and he was on the couch with my laptop open on his knees. The screen was angled toward him, but I could see the layout from across the room. The admin dashboard. The drafts folder. My username in the top right corner.My stomach dropped through the floor.“You’ve been doing this the whole time?”His voice was flat. Not angry. Not anything. The blank tone he used when the thing he was processing was too big for inflection and he needed all his energy

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 42 - HALF THE STORY

    I sat in the driveway for eleven minutes before I could make my hands stop shaking long enough to turn off the engine.My mom's voice was still in my ears – how COULD you and I'm finally happy and fix it – playing on a loop that got louder every time I tried to think past it. I'd driven here becaus

    last updateآخر تحديث : 2026-03-31

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 39 - SLOWLY CHANGING

    Rhys got a B+ on the American Literature midterm.Three nights of flashcards and highlighters and him sprawled across his apartment floor complaining that Fitzgerald was "a rich drunk who wrote about other rich drunks" while I threatened to leave if he didn't focus. He'd focus for twenty minutes. T

    last updateآخر تحديث : 2026-03-29

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 34 - NO WORDS

    He followed me home.I didn't invite him. Didn't ask. Just walked across campus with my arms wrapped around myself and the words captain's leftovers still ringing in my skull and Rhys Maddox three steps behind me like a shadow that refused to detach."I'm going back.""You're not.""One conversatio

    last updateآخر تحديث : 2026-03-27

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 31 - HOW WE WORK

    I came to return a textbook. That was it. That was the entire plan – drop off the Gatsby anthology he'd left at my dorm, leave it on his counter, walk away before the conversation turned into something neither of us could control.The plan lasted until the parking garage.He followed me down the st

    last updateآخر تحديث : 2026-03-25
فصول أخرى

قد تعجبك أيضًا

استكشاف وقراءة روايات جيدة مجانية
الوصول المجاني إلى عدد كبير من الروايات الجيدة على تطبيق GoodNovel. تنزيل الكتب التي تحبها وقراءتها كلما وأينما أردت
اقرأ الكتب مجانا في التطبيق
امسح الكود للقراءة على التطبيق
DMCA.com Protection Status