All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 161 - Chapter 166

The book proposal got accepted on a Saturday at 10:14 AM, which meant Rhys was sitting across from me in our corner booth at the coffee shop with a paperback he was actually reading when I screamed loud enough to make a poetry major spill her latte.I built that. The reading. Gave him book after book during the long-distance months until he stopped pretending literature was homework and admitted he’d been devouring everything I recommended. He was on his third Toni Morrison. The margins of his copy of Song of Solomon looked like his Gatsby – crammed with observations that were too good and too personal to be called notes.Saturday mornings were ours. The brick-basement coffee shop two blocks from his apartment. I wrote. He read. The barista knew our order without asking. We had a ROUTINE – the word alone made something in my chest do a complicated thing, because I’d never had routines that lasted longer than a crisis. Routines required peace. Peace required trust. Trust required two p

Miles was fifteen and three inches taller than the last time I’d seen him in person, which meant the hug at the airport arrivals gate involved me standing on my toes and him pretending not to notice.He was wearing the number seventeen jersey – not the old one from the championship, a new one, his own, the junior varsity version with ELLIS on the back because he’d earned the number through tryouts and not through anyone else’s name.He’d brought his gear. Of course he had. The visit was three days and he’d packed like he was relocating – sticks in a travel case, skates wrapped in his practice jersey, tape in three colours, because Rhys had told him over FaceTime that black tape was for forwards and white was for defencemen and Miles had said “what about blue” and Rhys had said “blue is for people who want to get chirped” and Miles had still packed blue anyway.Rhys rented ice time at the practice rink. An hour on a Tuesday morning when the building was empty and the lights were indust

We were drinking the cheap champagne Cole had brought to the reading as a gift. We’d carried it home unopened because drinking in a bookstore basement felt wrong when the book was still warm in my hands.Rhys popped it in the kitchen with his left hand and the foam ran over his wrist, but neither of us reached for a towel.He poured two plastic cups because we didn’t own champagne glasses yet.“To the writer,” he said.I drank. Set the cup down. Pulled his mouth to mine.The sex was different from everything that came before it because we were celebrating this time.He lifted me onto the kitchen counter – our counter, the one I’d measured with my eyes during the apartment tour and he’d caught me doing it and said “I know what you’re doing” and I’d said “I don’t know what you’re talking about” – and I wrapped my legs around him and we laughed when the champagne fell off the edge and shattered on the tile.We moved to the bedroom – his hands on my hips steering me backward, my hands pul