All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The deal was dead. The fake was over. We were real – publicly, privately, no asterisk, no arrangement, no fine print. Just two people who'd chosen each other through scholarship threats and family fractures and a word on a whiteboard and every other thing the world had thrown at us.I should have been relieved. And I was – for about five minutes. Then the real relationship started and I discovered something nobody warns you about: the fake version was easier. The fake version had rules. The real version had Rhys.It started small. The location check I noticed two weeks ago – my phone screen glowing with the "Rhys viewed your location" notification while I was at the library. I dismissed it. He'd been through hell. People had tried to tear us apart with fabricated pregnancies and anonymous posts and his own father's money. Of course he wanted to know where I was. That was reasonable. That was love under siege.Then the texts. I came back from the bathroom at his apartment and my phone

The energy was wrong the second he opened the door.Not angry – charged. The apartment humming with something electric and unresolved, the air thick with twenty-four hours of him alone in these rooms stewing over the fight and my walking out and the door he'd chosen not to open. He was in sweats and nothing else – barefoot, shirtless, his hair pushed back, the tattoos on full display like armour he wore when his skin felt too thin.He looked at me. Didn't say hello. Didn't ask how I was. Just looked – his eyes moving over my face, my body, my bag on my shoulder, cataloguing my presence with an intensity that made my pulse climb before he'd touched me."Hey," I said.He pulled me inside by my wrist.Not rough. Not gentle either. The grip of a man who'd spent twenty-four hours imagining me walking away and had decided that the next time I was within reach, he wasn't letting go. The door closed behind me and his mouth was on mine before my bag hit the floor – hard, claiming, his hand fis

"What did you say to him Rhys?"He was still damp from the ice, bag over his shoulder, hair pushed back. The hallway outside the locker room was empty – just us and the fluorescent lights and the question I'd been holding since I watched a nineteen-year-old freshman skate away from Rhys Maddox with his head down and his shoulders caved in like someone had scooped out his confidence with a spoon."He needed to toughen up.""He's nineteen.""This isn't a nursery."Flat. Dismissive. The voice of the version of Rhys the campus was afraid of – cold, cutting, a man who left marks with his mouth and called it mentoring. I'd watched from the fourth row. Watched him check a kid half his size into the boards so hard the sound bounced off the rafters. Watched him lean in close and say something I couldn't hear but didn't need to – the kid's body told the whole story as he skated away with the look of someone who'd just learned that the person he admired thought he was nothing.Even Cole looked u

It started with a sentence Sienna didn't know was a grenade.We were in the dorm. Saturday evening. She was getting ready for Cole's game – the not as a friend game, the one she'd changed outfits for three times while pretending she hadn't – and I was on my bed editing my column when she said it. Casually. Offhandedly. The way people deliver information that will rearrange your entire week without knowing they've lit the fuse."Cole was bummed about practice being cancelled yesterday. He'd been working on some new save technique and wanted to test it."My fingers stopped on the keyboard. "Practice was cancelled?""Yeah. Something with the rink – ice maintenance or a scheduling conflict or something. Cole said the whole team had the afternoon off."The whole team. The afternoon off. Yesterday. The same yesterday when Rhys had texted me at 2 PM – can't make the reading, practice runs late, sorry – and I'd said no worries and gone alone and read my piece to a room that didn't include him

RHYS’ POVThe water was too hot. I kept it that way.The burn was the only thing that worked. Not ice, not running, not the bag in the corner I'd punched until my knuckles split last week and taped up before she could see. Hot water on my shoulders, my back, my neck. Skin turning red. And for three, maybe four minutes the noise went quiet enough to breathe.The noise sounded like my father.You're a disappointment. You're dangerous. You're exactly like me and that's the part you can't stand.I braced my hands on the tile. Water down my face. Tried not to think about the freshman. Thought about him anyway.The check was too hard. I knew it the second my shoulder connected. He went into the boards and the sound echoed and I felt nothing. That's the part. Not guilt. Not remorse. Nothing. The cold satisfaction of a body doing what it was built to do.The guilt came later. Always later. I was sitting in the locker room after everyone left, staring at my hands. Seeing them the way the kid s