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CHAPTER 15 - OUR FIRST CRACK

作者: Dirty Diana
last update 公開日: 2026-03-05 15:11:15

Caleb didn't even wait for me to ask.

He found me before I could find Rhys – outside the English building, coffee in hand, that concerned expression he'd been perfecting since childhood. The one that made teachers trust him and parents love him and girls like me mistake control for care.

"Hey. Got a second?"

"Not really."

"It's important." He fell into step beside me. Casual. Unhurried. Like we were still the kind of friends who walked together. "I didn't want to say this over the phone. It fel
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  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 100 - FALSE PEACE

    Everything was quiet.Not the held-breath quiet that came before something broke. Not the loaded silence of two people choosing which grenade to throw next. Just quiet. The ordinary, unremarkable quiet of a life that had decided, for once, to stop testing the people living it.Rhys and I were solid. Not the fragile kind that shattered if someone looked at it wrong – we'd been that. Lived inside it for months, walking on glass, waiting for the next crisis to prove what we'd always feared. This was different. This was the kind of solid that comes from having been broken and choosing to rebuild anyway. Welded together by everything that should have torn us apart – his father, my mother, the campus, the cemetery, the word on the whiteboard, the letter on cream paper, the thirteen-year-old boy who'd walked in at the worst possible moment.We'd survived all of it. And what was left standing wasn't delicate. It was earned.The column was confirmed. Rebecca had sent the contract – real terms,

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 99 - SUSPICION

    The notebook had seventeen pages now.I spread it across my bed on a Tuesday afternoon while Sienna was at Cole's and the dorm was quiet and the light through the window was the flat, grey kind that made everything look like evidence. Seventeen pages of dates, incidents, connections. Lines drawn between events that looked random until you laid them side by side and watched the architecture emerge.Every public Naomi-and-Rhys moment followed by a crisis within forty-eight hours. Every crisis serving the same three purposes – destabilize the relationship, damage Rhys's reputation, position Caleb as the reliable alternative. Every escalation slightly bigger than the last, calibrated to the size of the stage. The pattern was undeniable. Consistent. Almost elegant in its precision.But pattern wasn't proof.Zara had said it and she was right. A timeline of coincidences, no matter how damning, wasn't evidence. I couldn't take seventeen pages of dates and arrows to anyone and say look, he's

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 98 - AN ORDINARY LIFE

    The argument started at the grocery store."It's not milk, Naomi. It's nut water. They squeezed an almond and called it dairy and you fell for it.""It has calcium.""So does chalk. Doesn't mean I'm putting it in my coffee.""You don't even drink coffee. You drink whatever that brown liquid is that Cole makes in your kitchen that tastes like engine failure.""That's called drip coffee and it's fine.""It's not fine. It's a war crime in a mug."He put the almond milk in the cart anyway. Because he always put the thing I wanted in the cart while arguing against it – the protest performative, the whole routine a language we'd invented for saying I love you without the words he still couldn't manage.Saturday morning. Grocery store. The fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored, completely unromantic reality of two people buying food together like it was normal. Like we did this every weekend. Like the cart between us and the argumen

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 97 - THE FLOOR

    I caught him at his car."What happened in there?"He was unlocking the door. Not looking at me. The parking lot half-empty, the distant noise of the rink still carrying through the cold air – the aftermath of a win that should have been ours to enjoy together."You touched him.""I touched his SHOULDER, Rhys. For half a second. While saying good game. The same thing you'd say to any player after a–""I know what I saw.""Then you saw basic human decency. That's it. That's the whole thing."He turned around. His face in the parking lot light – controlled, the jaw working the way it did when he was managing something volatile behind his teeth. Still in the afterglow of four goals and a future forming in a press box and the best night of his career, and all of it overshadowed by my hand on another man's shoulder for less time than it took to blink."You touched the guy who's been systematically destroying our lives. In a corridor full of people. After a game where every scout in the bui

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 96 - THE FIRST ROUND

    The rink was louder than I'd ever heard it.Every seat filled. Standing room packed three deep along the glass. The student section a wall of noise – painted faces, painted bodies, homemade signs, the kind of energy that vibrated through the building like a heartbeat. This wasn't a regular game. This was the championship first round and Thornfield hadn't made it this far in six years and the entire campus had shown up to watch.I was in the fourth row. His jersey on my back. MADDOX across my shoulders. Sienna on my left, Zara on my right, both of them pretending to understand hockey and failing beautifully."Which one is Rhys?" Zara asked."Number seventeen. The one who looks like he wants to kill everyone on the ice.""That narrows it down to about half the team.""The tall one.""They're all tall, Naomi. They're hockey players."The whistle blew and none of it mattered anymore because Rhys hit the ice and the building shifted.I'd watched him play dozens of times. Practice, scrimmag

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 95 - CONTROL

    I could see him unraveling.Not all at once – Rhys didn't unravel like that. He came apart in increments. A harder check at practice. A longer silence at dinner. The way his hands gripped the steering wheel like he was choking something when he drove me home. The way he'd started sleeping with his jaw clenched, grinding his teeth through dreams he wouldn't tell me about. Elena's letter on the counter. Richard's calls going to voicemail. Miles not texting back. Caleb's name in my brother's phone like a splinter I couldn't reach. The championship two weeks out and the pressure building behind his eyes like something with a timer.He was losing control. Every area, every direction. The ice, his family, his anger, the invisible war being waged against us by a man patient enough to use a thirteen-year-old as a weapon. Rhys was white-knuckling his way through every day and I could see the moment approaching.So I took it.He was sitting on his bed. Still in practice clothes. Staring at the

  • 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 update最終更新日 : 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 update最終更新日 : 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 update最終更新日 : 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 update最終更新日 : 2026-03-25
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