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CHAPTER 65 - PERSONAS

Penulis: Dirty Diana
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-03-23 01:36:55

"What did you say to him Rhys?"

He was still damp from the ice, bag over his shoulder, hair pushed back. The hallway outside the locker room was empty – just us and the fluorescent lights and the question I'd been holding since I watched a nineteen-year-old freshman skate away from Rhys Maddox with his head down and his shoulders caved in like someone had scooped out his confidence with a spoon.

"He needed to toughen up."

"He's nineteen."

"This isn't a nursery."

Flat. Dismissive. The voice of t
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  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 67 - LIES TO PROTECT

    It started with a sentence Sienna didn't know was a grenade.We were in the dorm. Saturday evening. She was getting ready for Cole's game – the not as a friend game, the one she'd changed outfits for three times while pretending she hadn't – and I was on my bed editing my column when she said it. Casually. Offhandedly. The way people deliver information that will rearrange your entire week without knowing they've lit the fuse."Cole was bummed about practice being cancelled yesterday. He'd been working on some new save technique and wanted to test it."My fingers stopped on the keyboard. "Practice was cancelled?""Yeah. Something with the rink – ice maintenance or a scheduling conflict or something. Cole said the whole team had the afternoon off."The whole team. The afternoon off. Yesterday. The same yesterday when Rhys had texted me at 2 PM – can't make the reading, practice runs late, sorry – and I'd said no worries and gone alone and read my piece to a room that didn't include him

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 66 - THE MASK

    I let him in.Not because the apology was good – it wasn't. It came out sideways and defensive, more explanation than remorse, delivered while he stood in my doorway with his hands in his pockets and his jaw doing the thing it did when sincerity was costing him physical pain."I shouldn't have disappeared. But you compared me to Caleb and I–""Needed space. I know. Three days of it.""I'm not good at–""I know what you're not good at, Rhys."Silence. Him in the doorway. Me in the room. The distance between us measured in days and fights and the accumulating weight of patterns that kept repeating no matter how many times we named them.I was tired. Not the kind that sleep fixes – the bone-deep kind that comes from loving someone who requires constant translation. From decoding silences and interpreting shutdowns and doing the emotional labour of two people because one of them had never been taught how to carry his half."Come in," I said. Not warmth. Not forgiveness. Just exhaustion ch

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 65 - PERSONAS

    "What did you say to him Rhys?"He was still damp from the ice, bag over his shoulder, hair pushed back. The hallway outside the locker room was empty – just us and the fluorescent lights and the question I'd been holding since I watched a nineteen-year-old freshman skate away from Rhys Maddox with his head down and his shoulders caved in like someone had scooped out his confidence with a spoon."He needed to toughen up.""He's nineteen.""This isn't a nursery."Flat. Dismissive. The voice of the version of Rhys the campus was afraid of – cold, cutting, a man who left marks with his mouth and called it mentoring. I'd watched from the fourth row. Watched him check a kid half his size into the boards so hard the sound bounced off the rafters. Watched him lean in close and say something I couldn't hear but didn't need to – the kid's body told the whole story as he skated away with the look of someone who'd just learned that the person he admired thought he was nothing.Even Cole looked u

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 64 - CALEB OR CALEB?

    I couldn't stop thinking about the call.Not because I wanted him. I needed to be clear about that – with myself, in my own head, in the private courtroom where I was both judge and defendant. I didn't want Caleb Park. Not his mouth, not his hands, not his future. That door was closed and locked and I'd swallowed the key months ago. What I wanted was simpler and more impossible: I wanted him to make sense.Because the call had split him in two and I couldn't put him back together.There was the boy from fifteen. The one who showed up at my door every day after Dad died with his backpack and a container of soup his mother had made and the quiet, steady presence of someone who understood that grief didn't need solutions. It needed company. He'd sit on my bedroom floor for hours. Didn't talk unless I talked first. Didn't try to cheer me up or tell me it would get better or offer any of the useless condolences adults threw at you when someone died and they didn't know what else to say.He

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 63 - MINE

    The energy was wrong the second he opened the door.Not angry – charged. The apartment humming with something electric and unresolved, the air thick with twenty-four hours of him alone in these rooms stewing over the fight and my walking out and the door he'd chosen not to open. He was in sweats and nothing else – barefoot, shirtless, his hair pushed back, the tattoos on full display like armour he wore when his skin felt too thin.He looked at me. Didn't say hello. Didn't ask how I was. Just looked – his eyes moving over my face, my body, my bag on my shoulder, cataloguing my presence with an intensity that made my pulse climb before he'd touched me."Hey," I said.He pulled me inside by my wrist.Not rough. Not gentle either. The grip of a man who'd spent twenty-four hours imagining me walking away and had decided that the next time I was within reach, he wasn't letting go. The door closed behind me and his mouth was on mine before my bag hit the floor – hard, claiming, his hand fis

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 62 - NOMES

    I was staring at the ceiling when the phone rang.Not the productive kind of staring – not thinking, not processing, not arriving at conclusions. The empty kind. The kind you do when you've had a fight with someone you love and you can't figure out if you were brave or cruel and the ceiling doesn't have answers but at least it doesn't argue back.Sienna was at Cole's. The dorm was dark. I'd been lying there for two hours replaying the parking lot – the door that didn't open, the footsteps that didn't come, the silence that could have been respect or rupture and I still couldn't tell which.My phone lit up on the nightstand. Not Rhys.Caleb Park.I stared at the name. My thumb hovering between answer and decline, my body caught in the no-man's-land between the girl who'd sworn she was done with him and the girl who'd known him since she was fifteen and couldn't unhear the sound of his voice even when she wanted to.I almost didn't answer.Almost."Naomi." His voice was wrong. Slurred a

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 8 - THE FAKE DATING DEAL

    I don’t sit down, but I stop and turn around long enough to let him know I’m listening."Here's the deal," he said. "You tutor me. I keep Caleb off your back.""That's not a deal. That's a hostage negotiation.""It's an exchange of services." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "You need someon

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-17

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 12 - MY NEW NORMAL

    I went to lunch with Sienna and Zara specifically because I thought he wouldn't find me in a crowd.Stupid. Stupid to think a cafeteria full of people would stop Rhys Maddox from doing exactly what he wanted. Stupid to think I could hide from a man who'd already proven he could find me in a bar, at

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-19

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 11 - AVOIDING THE TRUTH

    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

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-18

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 7 - TO KISS OR TO KILL

    Caleb stood at the end of the row with his coffee and his entitlement and waited for Rhys to move.Rhys kept not writing in his notebook."I said you're in my seat.""Didn't realize they assigned seats in college." Rhys still didn't look up. "Thought that stopped around the same time people stopped

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-17
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