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CHAPTER 26 - KEEPING HER CLOSE

Penulis: Dirty Diana
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-03-06 04:22:31

RHYS’ POV

Fourth line.

Caleb put me on the fourth line. Leaned into Coach Harlan during the line change with his clipboard and his captain's face – the one that said team player, leader, just looking out for the program – and my name came out of Harlan's mouth attached to a rotation that had no business being anywhere near mine. Two freshmen who skated like they'd learned last week. A defenseman who'd been riding pine since October. The line you use when you're running down clock in a game nobo
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  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 118 - NOT FOR LONG

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  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 117 - NO SLEEP

    Monday.The dining hall went quiet when I walked in. Not all at once – it moved through the room in sections, table by table, like someone was turning down the volume on a dial. By the time I reached the food line, the silence had settled into something solid. A girl from my Victorian Literature seminar was sitting with her study group near the windows. She saw me, leaned toward the person beside her, and said something behind her hand. The person looked. Then looked away.I picked up a tray. Put it back. Walked out.Tuesday.HOMEWRECKER. Blue marker on the whiteboard outside the athletic building. The handwriting was neat visibly written by someone who wanted the letters to be legible from across the hallway. Underneath: sabotaged the championship for her ex. The “for her ex” was underlined twice.Zara stood beside me. Didn’t erase it. Pulled out her phone and took a photo. “Evidence,” she said in a way that told me she’d shifted into a mode I hadn’t seen before. Zara in investigatio

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 116 - NUCLEAR

    Twenty-four hours ago, those eyes looked at me under Orion and said I love you like the words had been built specifically for my mouth. Twenty-four hours ago, his hands shook when he undressed me because it mattered that much. Twenty-four hours ago, we lay on a motorcycle seat above the city and promised each other things that felt permanent.Now he was standing ten feet away in the ice rink corridor looking at me with the same eyes. But now, all the love was buried under the grief and the rage and the betrayal like a light someone had thrown a blanket over but couldn’t extinguish. And I was watching myself become something he was going to mourn.“Was any of it real?”“All of it.” My voice broke on the second word. “Rhys. All of it was real.”He held the phone between us. Screen facing me. I could see the messages now – close enough to read the timestamps. Thirty minutes before puck drop. Three messages sent to Porter’s number during the pre-game chaos while the stands were filling an

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 115 - THE LOOKOUT

    NAOMI’S POVThe night before the championship.He took me to the lookout.I didn’t realize that’s where we were going until the road started climbing and the city started shrinking below us and the air changed the way it always did up here. I tightened my arms around his waist. Pressed my face against his back. Felt the engine vibrate through both of us like a shared heartbeat.The lookout was a clearing above the treeline where the road ended and the sky began. Every other time we’d been here, we were running from something. But tonight, he’d driven here on purpose. Not running. Arriving.He killed the engine. The silence rushed in. Below us, the city was a scatter of light, and above us, the sky was thick with stars in a way that only happened this far from town.He was nervous. I could feel it in the way he moved – the extra pause before he swung off the bike, the way his hands stayed on the handlebars a second too long. Not game-day nervous. I’d seen that version of him. This was

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 114 - QUESTIONS

    RHYS’ POVI stepped back onto the ice with her face still burning behind my eyes.The tunnel was behind me. The phone was in my bag. The conversation – if you could call it that, if there was a word for the thing that happens when the person you love most explains why they decided you couldn’t be trusted with the truth about your own destruction – was over. And I had a game to finish.Down 3-1. Playbook compromised. Every formation we’d run in the first period handed to the other team on a screen with her name on it. My tendencies. My weak-side vulnerability. Things I’d said in bed with her hands on my ribs and my guard so far down it was underground.I couldn’t think about that. If I thought about it I’d break, and broken men don’t win championships. Broken men sit in tunnels staring at phone screens while the game moves on without them. So I took the thing in my chest – the thing that felt like swallowing glass, the thing that had her face and her voice and I love you, Rhys stamped

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 113 - THE SABOTAGE

    The rumors reached me before the second period did.First intermission. The energy in the arena had shifted – Thornfield down 3-1, the crowd quieter than it should’ve been, the kind of stunned silence that happens when a team everyone expected to dominate comes out looking like they’ve never played together before. I was standing in the entrance getting water when I heard it. Two guys from the lacrosse team leaning against the wall, voices low but not low enough.“Someone leaked the playbook.”“No way.”“I’m serious. Porter – the other team’s captain – he was laughing during the face-off. Told Rhys nice try before the play even started. Like he already knew what was coming.”My hand tightened on the water bottle. I turned. Didn’t know either of them well enough for them to filter themselves around me, which made the information more reliable than anything said to my face.“Leaked it how?”They looked at me. Recognized me. The shorter one’s expression shifted – not hostile, but careful

  • 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 updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-31

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 52 - 2AM

    I couldn't sleep.Twelve days on my childhood bed and I still couldn't sleep in it. The mattress remembered a version of me that didn't exist anymore – the fifteen-year-old version that was grieving and small enough to curl into the corner and disappear. The woman lying in it now was too big for th

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  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 53 - MOM

    She was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs.Coffee in front of her. Both hands wrapped around the mug. Not drinking – holding. The way people hold things when they need an anchor and the nearest one is ceramic. She was wearing the flannel pajamas again. Second day in a row. Whateve

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  • 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

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