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FORTY-EIGHT - WHY?
publish date:
2026-08-21 05:47:36
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PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE FORTY-EIGHT - WHY?
“Why?”One word. He’s in the doorway with his bag on the floor and his knuckles split and the word between us taking up all the air in the room.I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.“Caleb showed up at the apartment.” My voice is thin and far away. “Three weeks ago, while you were at practice. He had nearly a million dollars that he got from a PR contract through his parents’ hospital network, and the money could fix the foundation deficit and fund the program for years.”Rhys doesn’t move. His face doesn’t change.“The condition was that I show up as his girlfriend while his parents are in Korea. They don’t know about anything that happened at Thornfield, and they think he has a career and a girlfriend named Naomi because he told them about me years ago when we were still friends.”His jaw tightens.“I told him to get out.” My hands are shaking in my lap, the fingers lacing and unlacing because my body needs something to do while my mouth does this. “And then he told me about Mo
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE FORTY-SEVEN - STUPID DECISIONS
RHYS’ POVI text Coach from the gate. Family emergency. Out for a few days. Send. Don’t wait.Cole gets less. Going to Korea. Back soon.Twelve seconds. Go.One word. Cole understands things that don’t need sentences.The flight is fourteen hours. I buy the ticket at the counter because buying it online would’ve taken four minutes, and four minutes is four minutes. The woman at the desk looks at my face and skips the upsell.Smart.I don’t sleep. Economy wasn’t designed for 6′3" and I didn’t check what I was booking because checking would have taken time and time is the thing I’m trying to beat. My phone is off. The window is black. Fourteen hours of sitting with six words.I need you to come to Korea.She gave me no context. No explanation. She called me every night for many days before the text, then she sent that text, and that was all I needed, because they were the first real thing she’s said to me since she left.I knew something was wrong already, but I didn’t push because push
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE FORTY-SIX - WATCHING
The dinner is at a restaurant in Itaewon. Eight people, same arrangement – the aunt, the cousins and the physician friend, Mrs. Park beside me with her hand finding my arm at intervals because touching me is the language she speaks to the daughter-in-law she doesn’t have.I am not present.My body is in the chair and my hands are holding chopsticks as my mouth makes the right sounds, but the woman operating the body is somewhere else – between the source file on Caleb’s laptop and the pregnancy test and the flight tracker I’ve been checking under the table every four minutes, which currently shows a blue dot over the North Pacific that's quickly moving across an ocean toward me.Caleb is watching. I can feel it on the side of my face and at my temple, the weight of being observed by someone who’s spent years memorising what my expressions mean and is currently reading one that isn’t in his catalogue.“You’re quiet tonight,” Mrs. Park says.“Tired. The hospital visits take it out of me
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE FORTY-FIVE - MY HOME
He doesn’t stop me. Maybe he saw the laptop and did his own math. Or maybe he knows that stopping me now would take something physical, and putting his hands on me in anger is the one line he hasn’t crossed because crossing it would make him something worse than what he already is.I pick up my bag and walk past him without looking at the laptop, because looking would confirm what he’s suspecting and the confirmation would start a conversation I can’t have in this room while his parents are in the garden.The car is waiting downstairs because there’s always a car waiting downstairs in this life that isn’t mine. I get in and give the driver the hospital address, then I put my face in my hands and cry.My tears come out loud and ugly – the managed version I’ve been doing for seventeen days into pillows and bathroom tile is gone, replaced by the full-body kind Rhys has held me through a hundred times, except Rhys is somewhere over the Pacific and what’s holding me is the leather backseat
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE FORTY-FOUR - ZERO FINGERPRINTS
Breakfast is at their house. My hair is wet because the blow-dryer sounds like a jet engine and I couldn’t take the noise this morning. Mrs. Park says something about catching cold that sounds like my mother would say it, and the comparison sticks in my chest like a thumbtack.Caleb is at the table. He looks at me when I sit down and I can feel him scanning me. I give him nothing. I eat and smile and answer Mrs. Park’s questions about the bathhouse near the hotel.After breakfast his father brings up the ceremony.“We’ve been thinking,” Mr. Park says, setting his teacup down with surgical precision. “Since the family is together and you’re already here, perhaps this is the right time.”My hand stops halfway to my own cup.“Let’s have the ceremony,” Mrs. Park says, and her face is bright with the hope of a mother who’s been waiting for this. “A small traditional one with just family, so you have a proper introduction. We can do the Western wedding later.”I look at Caleb. He’s looking
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE FORTY-THREE - THE PACIFIC
I dream that Rhys is gone.In my dream, the apartment is the same apartment, the counter is the same counter, the spreadsheet is still glowing red on his laptop, but the coffee mug is washed and put away, and the closet on his side is empty the way closets get empty when a person has taken everything rather than packed for a trip. The hangers are bare. The drawer where he keeps his socks – the one I’ve opened a thousand times looking for the thick grey pair he stole from Cole – is pulled out and vacant, and the vacancy has a sound, a low hum like a freezer running in an empty house.I’m standing in the bedroom doorway with my hand on the frame while the hum gets louder until it fills the apartment and the apartment is just a series of rooms where a man used to live.I wake up at 4 AM with my heart slamming against my ribs hard enough to feel it in my throat.I’m still in the hotel room in Seoul with the jacket on the back of the chair and the ring in the pocket.I lie there with my pu
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