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CHAPTER 40 - THE TALK
publish date:
2026-03-09 05:27:38
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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 101 - WRONG ANGLES
He was sitting at a wrong angle.I noticed it twelve minutes into the study group – Caleb’s chair positioned two inches to the left of where it normally was. A nothing detail. The kind of thing nobody would clock unless they’d spent weeks cataloguing the behaviour of a man who never did anything without purpose. Two inches to the left put him at exactly the right angle to see my phone screen when I typed.I typed nothing. Kept my phone face down. Watched him not watch me with the particular attentiveness of someone who was aware of every object in the room while appearing to focus on absolutely none of them.Caleb Park was currently the calmest person on campus.That terrified me more than anything he’d done all year.The frantic energy was gone – the drunk calls, the weaponized apologies, the Miles campaign, the coincidences that arrived like clockwork every forty-eight hours. All of it replaced by something still and controlled and purposeful. The energy of a person who’d stopped im
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 51 - TWICE A DAY
I didn’t move.Stood in the hallway with my water glass and my bare feet and the cold tile under my soles and listened to my mother talk about the boy I loved to the man who was trying to erase him from my life.“He never asks to talk to her, Richard. That’s the thing.” My mom’s voice was quiet. Ti
Last Updated : 2026-04-04PUCKED 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 : 2026-03-27
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