All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

The offer arrives by courier on a Monday afternoon in a manila envelope with the kind of return address that makes your stomach rearrange itself before your brain can read the words.By the time I’ve opened the envelope and seen the number at the bottom of page three – a number with enough zeros that it looks like a typo until you read it twice and realise it isn’t – Rhys is standing beside me at the counter reading over my shoulder with the stillness of a man whose entire future just changed shape inside a piece of paper.The team is in a city I’ve never been to, and the place exists on the opposite edge of the country from Portland and from Thornfield and from every geography we’ve built since a bar on Valentine’s Day.The contract is offering more money than either of us has ever conceptualised as a real number. It's the kind of money that solves the foundation’s funding gap and the financial anxiety that’s been sitting in our bank account since the PR scandal stripped the sponsors

Naomi's POVThe fan’s messages have graduated from appreciation to need in approximately six weeks.The first message said “your blog saved my marriage” and the fifth said “I feel like you understand me in a way nobody else does” and the eleventh said “I came to your reading in Hillsboro and you looked right at me and I know you felt it too” and the seventeenth, which arrived this morning while I was standing in the kitchen deciding whether cold cereal or cold coffee was the more depressing breakfast option, said “why aren’t you responding? I’ve shared parts of myself with you that I’ve never shared with anyone and the silence feels weird.”I screenshot the message and send it to the lawyer Richard referred me to – a woman named PATRICIA who speaks exclusively in legal outcomes and whose initial consultation felt like being debriefed by a very expensive robot.Patricia responds within the hour with a cease-and-desist template and the instruction to document everything and engage with

The doorbell rings on a Thursday morning while Rhys is at practice.I’m at the kitchen table with my laptop open to the book two manuscript that hasn’t moved in six days, the cursor blinking at the end of a sentence I wrote last week and haven’t been able to follow because the sentence is honest and the honesty muscle has atrophied so severely that following it would require a version of me I’m not sure still has access to the controls. The coffee beside me is cold. The spreadsheet is still glowing red on Rhys’s laptop across the table, the twelve-thousand-dollar deficit pulsing like a wound that won’t close.The doorbell is wrong. Deliveries don’t ring – they knock twice and leave the package against the door. Rhys has a key. Cole texts before he comes over because Cole was raised by a woman who believed unannounced visitors were a sign of societal collapse.I check the peephole.The face on the other side stops my hand on the deadbolt before my brain can process what my eyes are rep

I slide down the door until I’m sitting on the floor with my back against the wood and my hands shaking in my lap.The shaking is the body’s version of the sentence I can’t say out loud, which is that Caleb Park just told me my mother is dying and offered to save her, and the price is performing a fake relationship with the man who nearly destroyed me while hiding it from the man who rebuilt me, and every piece of the equation is designed to make saying no feel like murder.I sit on the floor for twenty minutes. The apartment quiet around me. The spreadsheet still glowing red on Rhys’s laptop. The manuscript still dead on mine. The fan’s card still face-down on the counter. The production company’s offer still on my desk.I pick up my phone. Scroll to Mom. Press call.It rings four times. She picks up on the fifth, and I know before she speaks because the fifth ring is the tell – Lorraine Ellis answers on the second ring when she’s fine, on the third when she’s busy, on the fourth whe

I open my eyes. Grey irises. The scar. His face is three inches from mine, moving, his hips setting a rhythm that’s fast enough to keep my brain offline but controlled enough that I can feel him paying attention – reading my body the way he reads the ice, adjusting angle when my breath catches, slowing when the pleasure tips toward too much.My hands find his back and my nails dig in because the digging is communication – harder, more, don’t stop, keep me here in this bed in this body in this apartment where the worst thing that can happen is an orgasm instead of a diagnosis – and he responds by pinning my wrists above my head with one hand and driving deeper with the other braced against the mattress.The pinning is the thing that finally cracks it open, because the restraint tells my body that someone else is in control and the control means I can stop holding the walls up for thirty seconds and let someone else bear the weight.I cum with a sound that breaks in the middle – startin