All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

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

I opened the door expecting a delivery driver.The woman standing in the hallway was not.She had grey eyes. Steel grey. The exact shade I’d fallen in love with in a bar bathroom – the colour that went dark when he wanted me and light when he laughed and silver when the morning sun hit them through the blinds. Those eyes. On a different face.My mouth went dry.She looked like she was late forties. Beautiful in a way that had been weathered by something heavier than age. Dark hair with threads of silver. Fine bones. The jawline that Rhys had inherited, softer on her but unmistakable. She looked like him if you stripped away the anger and the armour and the scar through the eyebrow and replaced it all with guilt.“I’m looking for my son.”Three words. Her voice quiet. Steady in the way that meant she’d practiced this sentence – probably in a hotel mirror, probably multiple times with the same trembling hands she was hiding by clasping them in front of her like a woman at a funeral.I c

NAOMI’S POVI was in the kitchen making coffee when the silence in the living room changed.Not got quiet – it was already quiet. Changed. The way a room shifts when someone inside it has just learned something they can’t unlearn. I knew that silence. Had lived inside it enough times to recognize the texture of it, the weight, the specific frequency of a person holding very still because moving would mean reacting and reacting would mean feeling, and feeling was the thing they were trying to outrun.I came around the corner with two mugs, and he was on the couch with my laptop open on his knees. The screen was angled toward him, but I could see the layout from across the room. The admin dashboard. The drafts folder. My username in the top right corner.My stomach dropped through the floor.“You’ve been doing this the whole time?”His voice was flat. Not angry. Not anything. The blank tone he used when the thing he was processing was too big for inflection and he needed all his energy

Everything shifted after he said it.Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of shift where the lighting changes and the soundtrack swells. Subtler than that. The way he said my name was different. Naomi. Heavier now. Like the word had more rooms in it than it used to and he’d just moved furniture into all of them. He said it handing me coffee in the morning and it sounded like a whole sentence. He said it across the apartment while I was tying my hair up and it landed on my skin like a hand.Three words had changed the weight of my name in his mouth and I wasn’t sure either of us was ready for what that meant.We spent the morning doing something we’d never done before. Not arguing. Not the charged, electric push-pull that had defined us since the bar. We sat on his couch with our legs tangled and our laptops open and we showed each other the things we’d hidden.He went first. A folder on his desktop – no label, just a date. Essays he’d written and never submitted. A piece about the first t

We didn’t have sex. First time in weeks we’d been in his bed together and not touched each other that way, and the absence of it made the room feel bigger. More honest. Like the space between our bodies was holding something that mattered more than skin.We lay facing each other. Fully clothed. His grey sweats, my oversized shirt that was actually his oversized shirt. The lamp off. The streetlight through the window casting enough glow to see outlines – the edge of his jaw, the shadow of his collarbone, the scar through his left eyebrow, the way it caught the light like a thin silver wire.He reached across the pillow. His fingers found my face. Not reaching for something – mapping it. My eyebrow first. Tracing the arch of it with his thumb. Then my jaw. The line of it from ear to chin, slow, deliberate, like he was committing the geometry of me to muscle memory in case his eyes ever failed him. Then my mouth. His fingertip on my lower lip. Pressing just enough to feel the give of it.