All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

RHYS’ POVBefore the championship.She said I love you back and the world didn’t end.I’d been bracing for it. The way I brace for everything. Waiting for the hit that always follows the good thing. My mother said those words and left. My father said them and meant I own you. Every time love had been spoken in my life it preceded someone packing a bag or tightening a grip. Cursed. Poisoned. Three words with a body count.But she said them back on my couch in the dark with her forehead against mine, the taste of tears between us, and nothing exploded. The walls didn’t collapse. Nobody left. Nobody tightened anything. She just breathed the words into me and they sat there. Warm. Real. Not detonating.I didn’t know what to do with that. So I practiced.“Love you.” Over coffee. Casual. Wanted to see if it still worked with the lights on. If it still felt true when she wasn’t crying and I wasn’t breaking and the room wasn’t dark.It did. And that scared me almost as much as saying it the f

The rumors reached me before the second period did.First intermission. The energy in the arena had shifted – Thornfield down 3-1, the crowd quieter than it should’ve been, the kind of stunned silence that happens when a team everyone expected to dominate comes out looking like they’ve never played together before. I was standing in the entrance getting water when I heard it. Two guys from the lacrosse team leaning against the wall, voices low but not low enough.“Someone leaked the playbook.”“No way.”“I’m serious. Porter – the other team’s captain – he was laughing during the face-off. Told Rhys nice try before the play even started. Like he already knew what was coming.”My hand tightened on the water bottle. I turned. Didn’t know either of them well enough for them to filter themselves around me, which made the information more reliable than anything said to my face.“Leaked it how?”They looked at me. Recognized me. The shorter one’s expression shifted – not hostile, but careful

NAOMI’S POVThe night before the championship.He took me to the lookout.I didn’t realize that’s where we were going until the road started climbing and the city started shrinking below us and the air changed the way it always did up here. I tightened my arms around his waist. Pressed my face against his back. Felt the engine vibrate through both of us like a shared heartbeat.The lookout was a clearing above the treeline where the road ended and the sky began. Every other time we’d been here, we were running from something. But tonight, he’d driven here on purpose. Not running. Arriving.He killed the engine. The silence rushed in. Below us, the city was a scatter of light, and above us, the sky was thick with stars in a way that only happened this far from town.He was nervous. I could feel it in the way he moved – the extra pause before he swung off the bike, the way his hands stayed on the handlebars a second too long. Not game-day nervous. I’d seen that version of him. This was

Monday.The dining hall went quiet when I walked in. Not all at once – it moved through the room in sections, table by table, like someone was turning down the volume on a dial. By the time I reached the food line, the silence had settled into something solid. A girl from my Victorian Literature seminar was sitting with her study group near the windows. She saw me, leaned toward the person beside her, and said something behind her hand. The person looked. Then looked away.I picked up a tray. Put it back. Walked out.Tuesday.HOMEWRECKER. Blue marker on the whiteboard outside the athletic building. The handwriting was neat visibly written by someone who wanted the letters to be legible from across the hallway. Underneath: sabotaged the championship for her ex. The “for her ex” was underlined twice.Zara stood beside me. Didn’t erase it. Pulled out her phone and took a photo. “Evidence,” she said in a way that told me she’d shifted into a mode I hadn’t seen before. Zara in investigatio

My depression didn’t announce itself. It moved in quietly, like water under a door – by the time I noticed the damage, the floor was already soaked.I missed my first assignment deadline on a Wednesday. Victorian Literature. A close reading of Wuthering Heights that I’d outlined in my notebook two weeks ago and then never opened again because the notebook now had a different purpose and every time I reached for it my hands found evidence instead of essays.I saw the notification – ASSIGNMENT OVERDUE – and felt a distant pulse of something that might have been panic in a woman who still had room for academic panic. I didn’t have room. The panic space was occupied.I missed the second deadline on Friday. Poetry Analysis. The one I could normally write in my sleep – metaphor identification, line-by-line breakdown, the mechanical work of a woman who understood language the way mechanics understood engines. I sat at my desk and opened the document and stared at the cursor blinking on a whi