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CHAPTER 67 - LIES TO PROTECT
publish date:
2026-03-25 00:47:10
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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 24 - HIS NEW PLACEHOLDER
Jade struck at the interdepartmental mixer, because Jade always struck in public where the audience could double as witnesses who'd later say she was just joking, you're being sensitive.A group of us standing near the drinks table – Sienna, two girls from my English seminar, a guy from Zara's stud
Last Updated : 2026-03-23PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 27 - HIS SURRENDER
NAOMI’S POVHe stood in the doorway and took it.Every word. The Caleb comparison. The accusation. The truth he didn't want to hear from the one person whose opinion could actually cut him. He took it the way he took hits on the ice – absorbed it, let it land, didn't flinch.Then he stepped back. L
Last Updated : 2026-03-24PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 28 - I'M STAYING
He came off the ice looking like a car wreck that had somehow won.I'd watched the whole game from the fourth row – my spot now, the one I didn't share with anyone, the one where I sat with my hands clenched in my lap every time someone checked him into the boards. Tonight was worse than usual. The
Last Updated : 2026-03-24PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 26 - KEEPING HER CLOSE
RHYS’ POVFourth 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 bus
Last Updated : 2026-03-23
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