All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

93 Chapters

CHAPTER 81 - THE LONG GAME

The skates were Bauer Vapor Hyperlites. Second pair. Because apparently the first pair Caleb bought weren't the right fit for Miles's "evolving stride" – his words, delivered to my mother over the phone with the casual authority of someone who'd appointed himself my brother's personal development coach.My mother didn't question it. Why would she? A responsible, polished college athlete was investing time and money into her fatherless son's hockey career. That wasn't suspicious. That was a blessing. That was the kind of thing you thanked God for at dinner and posted about on Facebook with heart emojis and captions about village-raising.I couldn't say a word.Because the cruelty of what Caleb was doing was structurally identical to kindness. He showed up at every youth league practice. Drove Miles to pro games three hours away and bought him jerseys from the team store. Texted him motivational quotes before school – I'd seen them on Miles's phone. Screenshots of athletes with captions

CHAPTER 82 - SCRIMMAGE

RHYS’ POVSaw it before the first whistle.Diamond formation. Caleb calling it from center ice with that captain's voice – authoritative, the voice of a guy who'd earned the C on his jersey and knew exactly how to weaponize it. Diamond formation puts four players in a tight box. Pushes the left wing wide. My position. Wide means isolated. Isolated means no passes. No passes means I'm skating alone on the far side of the ice looking like I don't know where I'm supposed to be.He didn't glance at me when he called it. Didn't need to. The play was the message.I followed it. Skated to my position. Watched the puck move through the diamond – Caleb to Miller to Owens to Caleb again – while I stood on the outside like a kid who'd shown up to the wrong practice. Four passes. None of them mine. The play ended with a clean goal from Caleb and a celebration I wasn't part of."Good movement," Coach Harlan said from the boards. Clipboard. Whistle. Not seeing what he wasn't looking for.Second dri

CHAPTER 83 - BRUISES

NAOMI’S POV He showed up at my door smelling like ice and ibuprofen.Didn't knock the way he usually did – two hard raps, the impatience of a man who expected doors to open because he existed on the other side of them. This was different. One knock. Soft. The knock of someone who wasn't sure he was welcome and was giving me the chance to pretend I wasn't home.I opened it. He was leaning against the doorframe with his bag over one shoulder and his weight shifted to the left side – favouring his right ribs, which meant something had happened to the left ones. His knuckles were still raw from the equipment room door. Scabbed over but not healed, the skin pink and tight in a way that would scar. And blooming across his left shoulder, visible where his t-shirt collar shifted, a bruise the colour of a thunderstorm. Purple at the centre. Green at the edges. Fresh."Caleb?" I asked."Check during the scrimmage. Came in high

CHAPTER 84 - PURPOSEFUL CONSISTENCY

2 AM. Desk lamp. The black notebook open to a fresh page and the apartment so quiet I could hear my own pulse.Sienna was asleep three feet away – face buried in her pillow, her phone still clutched in her hand with Cole's last text glowing on the screen. She'd fallen asleep smiling. I envied that. The simplicity of falling for someone who wasn't surrounded by landmines. Someone whose biggest complication was labelled snack containers and an inability to admit he was in love.I picked up the pen. Started writing.Not the shorthand version I'd been keeping in my head – the full timeline. Every date. Every incident. Every Caleb-adjacent crisis from the very beginning, laid out in chronological order with the precision of someone who'd spent months tracking a pattern she couldn't prove and was tired of carrying it in her skull.I wrote until my hand cramped. Went back. Added details. Cross-referenced. Drew lines between entries – literal lines, pen on paper, connecting the incidents to t

CHAPTER 85 - BREAKING DOWN

The breakdown happened on a Tuesday.It wasn't dramatic. Wasn't cinematic. There was no triggering moment, no phone call, no Caleb sighting, no text that detonated the last wall standing.It was just a Tuesday.10 AM. English seminar. Professor Chen's class. A presentation I'd prepared for all weekend – Virginia Woolf, the way trauma restructures language. I knew the material. Had note cards. Had practiced in front of Sienna twice and the bathroom mirror once. Had my slides loaded and my thesis memorized and my hands steady.I stood up. Walked to the front. Twenty faces. Familiar. Safe. Professor Chen nodding from her desk with the encouraging expression she gave everyone before presentations – the you've got this face.I opened my mouth."Virginia Woolf's approach to–"And the world tilted.Not metaphorically. The room physically shifted – floor tilting left, ceiling compressing, the faces in front of me stretching and warping like reflections in water, my vision narrowed. Not blurre

CHAPTER 86 - INSTINCT

RHYS’ POV She was shaking.Not crying. Not talking. Just shaking – wrapped in a blanket on her bed with her eyes unfocused and her hands trembling against her knees and her breath coming in stutters like her lungs had forgotten the rhythm they'd been running for nineteen years.I didn't know what to do with that.I know what to do with a lot of things. A body check? Drop the shoulder, absorb, stay on your feet. A fight? Hands up, aim for the jaw, don't swing angry. A girl in my bed? I know what to do there too. But a girl shaking on her bed with her eyes looking at something I couldn't see and her heartbeat visible in her throat, too fast, wrong?Nothing. No play. No instinct. No training for this.So I picked her up.Didn't ask. Didn't announce it. Just slid my arms under her – one behind her back, one under her knees – and lifted. She weighed nothing. She always weighed nothing to me. This girl

CHAPTER 87 - IN THE HALLWAY

NAOMI’S POVThree days passed before I felt like myself again.Three days of Rhys making terrible tea and reading Fitzgerald in a low voice and sitting on floors – bathroom floors, kitchen floors, the floor beside his bed when I woke up at 3 AM and couldn't breathe and found him already awake, already there, already sitting with his back against the wall like he'd been waiting for exactly this. Three days of Sienna texting every two hours with check-ins disguised as memes. Three days of my body slowly releasing the fist it had clenched around my nervous system and remembering that breathing was supposed to be automatic.On the fourth day, I woke up and wanted something that wasn't fear.He texted at six: Coming over.I texted back: Door's open.Then I stood in my dorm bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and made a decision that had been building since the bathtub. Since the Gatsby reading. Since watching a man who communicated better with his body than his mouth learn to sit s

CHAPTER 88 - LEARNING

"Is this too much?"Sienna was standing in front of the mirror in a emerald green dress she'd bought the night Cole asked her to the banquet. I knew it was the night he asked because she'd texted me a photo of the receipt at 11:47 PM with the caption this means nothing followed by seven exclamation points and a shoe emoji."It's a pair of earrings, Sienna.""But are they date earrings or friend earrings? Because these–" she held up the gold hoops "–say casual. But these–" the pearl drops "–say I spent forty-five minutes choosing earrings for a man who organizes his snacks by expiration date.""You said this wasn't a date.""IT'S NOT." She put the hoops down. Picked up the pearls. Put the pearls down. Picked up the hoops again. "I just want to look good. For friendship reasons. Cole is my friend. Friends look good for friends. That's a normal human behaviour.""You bought a new dress.""I needed a new dress."

CHAPTER 89 - A LETTER

I woke up to sunlight and the weight of his arm across my stomach.Saturday. His apartment. The blinds doing that thing where they filtered the light into gold bars across the bed, striping his sheets, his skin, the space between us. I could hear campus through the cracked window – the distant, muffled, weekend sounds of a world that wasn't asking anything of us yet.He was awake. I could tell by his breathing. The quiet, measured pattern of a man who'd been lying still on purpose. Watching me. Or maybe just existing beside me. Holding the moment like something he didn't want to startle.I rolled toward him. Eyes still half-closed. My body finding his the way it always did – automatic, the geography of him memorized so thoroughly that I could navigate it in the dark."Hi," I murmured. Into his chest. Into the tattoo I knew was there without looking."Hi."His voice. Morning-rough. Low. The voice that existed only in this window – before coffee, before he rebuilt the walls that kept ev

CHAPTER 90 - ELENA'S EFFECT

He read it standing up. Like sitting would make it too real.I watched from the kitchen table – still in his shirt, the Saturday morning we'd built dismantling itself one sentence at a time. He held the letter with both hands. Two pages. Cream paper. The heavy, textured kind you buy on purpose – the stationery of a woman who wanted this to feel permanent.His eyes moved across the words slowly. Not because he couldn't read fast – because each line was costing him something and he was paying in real time. I could see it in his face. The micro-shifts. Jaw tightening on one sentence. Loosening on the next. A swallow that took too long. A breath that came too short. Nine years of abandonment cycling across his features like weather – storm, clearing, storm again.I didn't read the letter. Didn't ask to. Sat at his kitchen table with my hands wrapped around a cold mug and gave him the only thing I had – the space to feel this without an audience that demanded performance.Seven minutes. He

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