Lahat ng Kabanata ng PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Kabanata 171 - Kabanata 180

My editor calls at nine in the morning while I’m standing in the kitchen in Rhys’s shirt and nothing else, which is relevant because the conversation she wants to have is about whether my sex scenes are explicit enough and I’m having it while my husband’s cum is still drying on my inner thigh from the shower twenty minutes ago.The irony of being told my writing lacks heat while my body is still cooling from the source material is the kind of thing I would laugh about if the woman on the phone weren’t deadly serious.“Your readers didn’t come for the Pulitzer, Naomi,” she says slowly, like she’s had this conversation with literary authors before and knows exactly where the resistance lives. “They came for the counter scene.”The counter scene sold forty thousand copies in its first week because I wrote it at 2 AM in a dorm room with my heart rate elevated and my hand between my thighs and the memory of his mouth so fresh on my skin that the prose was practically dictation. The idea th

The agent’s office has the kind of air conditioning that makes you forget what season it is outside. I sit in a leather chair that’s too deep for my frame while Victoria Chen connects her laptop to the projector swiftly enough for me to think she’s given this presentation before, possibly in this exact room, possibly to other wives who sat in this exact chair, others who probably stayed silent and watched the same slideshow rearrange the architecture of their marriages.Rhys is beside me with his ankle crossed over his knee and his hand on the armrest doing the thing where his fingers tap a rhythm that nobody else can hear – the internal metronome he runs when he’s processing something he doesn’t like but hasn’t decided how to fight yet. His agent, DEREK, sits behind the desk with a pen between his fingers and the practiced neutrality of a man whose job is to translate money into decisions and decisions into more money.The first slide is a graph.His endorsement value over three seas

A few days later, we're at the restaurant Victoria chose, which is the kind of place where the menus don’t have prices and the lighting is calibrated to make everyone look slightly more important than they actually are.I sit across from Sasha Volkov in a booth that smells like truffle oil and fresh bread and try to locate the hatred I prepared on the drive over.I can’t find it.The woman is five-ten with cheekbones that could cut glass and the kind of effortless posture that comes from either a decade of ballet or a genetic lottery that the rest of us lost at conception.She’s wearing a white t-shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans with a blazer thrown over it in a way that looks like she didn’t try, which means she tried very hard, and I know this because I also tried very hard to look like I wasn’t trying.Rhys is beside me with his hand on my thigh under the table and his jaw set in the polite, rigid line he uses for business functions. Sasha’s publicist, a man named Brian who spe

The blog post takes me forty minutes to write, which is the first sign that something is wrong because the filthiest posts I've written took much less. All the posts poured out of me at 2 AM like the words had been sitting in my chest with their bags packed, just waiting for my fingers to open the door, and I’ve never in my life spent forty minutes arranging sentences into a shape that says nothing while appearing to say everything.I read it back and the words on the screen sound like a press release dressed in a sundress.“Grateful for this season of growth and the incredible support system that makes it all possible.”I wrote that.Those words came out of my fingers and onto the page and I published them with a caption that includes a heart emoji and a prayer-hands emoji.The post is about Rhys’s foundation work, but it doesn’t mention Deshawn by name or the stick against the boards or the kid’s hands or any of the details that would make it real. Real details are specific and iden

The apartment has been empty for three days. It’s settled into the furniture and the walls. The hum of the refrigerator is louder than it has any right to be, and the clock above the stove is ticking with the authority of an appliance that knows it’s the only thing in the room still performing its function.Five-day road trip. West coast swing. And the schedule that was already partitioned into blocks that belonged to other people has now been physically removed from the same time zone. Which means the twenty-minute windows that used to produce rushed counter sex and stolen garlic bread have been replaced by phone calls that happen at 11 PM his time when his voice sounds like it’s been dragged across gravel and his brain is operating at approximately thirty percent capacity.I call him from the bed at eleven because eleven is the window we agreed on and the agreement is the only structure holding the distance together.“Hey.” His voice is somewhere between exhaustion and unconsciousne