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CHAPTER 23 - NOT A COINCIDENCE
publish date:
2026-03-05 15:19:10
Latest chapter
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 105 - FROZEN IN TIME
RHYS’ POVShe smelled the same.That was the thing I couldn’t get past.Nine years.Nine years of nothing. No calls, no texts, no birthday cards, no explanation that didn’t come filtered through my father’s lawyers or my own invented versions of why a woman walks out on a twelve-year-old who still slept with the hallway light on.I’d built an entire person out of her absence. Filled in the blank space with a mother who was sick, or scared, or broken in a way that made leaving feel like mercy. I’d written her a thousand excuses she never asked for and filed them in a part of my chest I didn’t visit and called that healing.Then she stood in my doorway still smelling like almond soap and the lavender she used to keep in her closet, and something in my chest that I’d spent nine years bricking over collapsed like it was entirely made of paper.I couldn’t look at Naomi after Elena left. Couldn’t look at anything. I sat on the couch and stared at the wall across from me – the one with the c
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 104 - ELENA
I opened the door expecting a delivery driver.The woman standing in the hallway was not.She had grey eyes. Steel grey. The exact shade I’d fallen in love with in a bar bathroom – the colour that went dark when he wanted me and light when he laughed and silver when the morning sun hit them through the blinds. Those eyes. On a different face.My mouth went dry.She looked like she was late forties. Beautiful in a way that had been weathered by something heavier than age. Dark hair with threads of silver. Fine bones. The jawline that Rhys had inherited, softer on her but unmistakable. She looked like him if you stripped away the anger and the armour and the scar through the eyebrow and replaced it all with guilt.“I’m looking for my son.”Three words. Her voice quiet. Steady in the way that meant she’d practiced this sentence – probably in a hotel mirror, probably multiple times with the same trembling hands she was hiding by clasping them in front of her like a woman at a funeral.I c
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 103 - WRONG
The fight started with the laptop.I told him the thing about the laptop including Caleb being two seats away with his smile and his nice laptop case.He heard Caleb touched your laptop and stopped listening.“I’m going to talk to him.”“No.”“Naomi–”“You confront him now and he denies it and you look paranoid and jealous during championship week and Coach benches you and the scouts see an anger problem instead of a future. That’s exactly what he wants.”“So I just let him–”“You let ME handle it. Trust me.”He didn’t want to trust me. Every line of his body said fight – the tension in his shoulders, his hands opening and closing, the restless energy of a man being told to stand down when every instinct was screaming charge. He wanted to walk across campus and put his fist through Caleb’s golden-boy face and let the consequences sort themselves out.“Trust me,” I said again. Quieter.He didn’t say okay. Just stood there with his jaw working and the silence filling with everything his
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 102 - THE BUZZ
Championship week turned the campus into something unrecognizable.Banners on every building. THORNFIELD HOCKEY across the student union in letters six feet tall. The rink buzzing with energy even during empty hours with maintenance crews painting fresh lines, media setting up cameras in the press box, the particular electricity of a school that hadn’t been this close to a title in six years and was determined to make it everyone’s problem.Social media was also counting down. Four days. Three days. Every post tagged, every story reposted, every student suddenly a hockey expert with opinions about line rotations and power plays they couldn’t have defined two weeks ago.Rhys was locked in. Not the angry focus I’d seen before. This was something different. Cleaner. The disciplined, deliberate focus of a man who understood that this week was the hinge and everything after it swung on how he played.He was skating like I’d never seen – controlled, with the raw power still there but harnes
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 Updated : 2026-03-31PUCKED 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 Updated : 2026-03-29PUCKED 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 Updated : 2026-03-27PUCKED 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 Updated : 2026-03-25
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