PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE

CHAPTER 16 - MEMORIZING IN PIECES

"Her name was Sophie."

He said it still standing in the doorway, like he couldn't let me inside until the whole truth was out. Like the apartment behind him was somewhere I could only go if I knew everything first.

"She was a freshman. Eighteen. Barely been on campus two months." His voice was flat – not emotionless, but controlled. Holding the words at arm's length so they couldn't touch him. "The party was at the hockey house. Coach Murray's son – Tyler – had been following her around for weeks. Everyone knew. Nobody did anything because his dad ran the program and the program was everything."

I stood on his doorstep and listened.

"I walked into the upstairs bedroom because I heard something. She was saying no. He wasn't listening." His jaw tightened. A muscle ticked beneath the bruise that was finally fading. "I didn't think. Didn't calculate. Didn't consider the politics or the scholarship or any of it. I just – hit him. And I kept hitting him until two guys pulled me off and there was blood on my hands and he was on the floor."

"Fractured jaw," I said quietly. "Three broken ribs."

"Yeah." He looked at his hands. The taped knuckles. The scars that never fully healed because he kept splitting them open. "They called campus security. His father called the dean. By Monday I was expelled and Sophie had transferred out and Tyler Murray was back at practice with a wired jaw and a story about a bar fight."

"And nobody–"

"Nobody believed us. His father made sure of it. My dad paid the settlement to avoid a lawsuit, told me I'd embarrassed the family, and found me a spot at Thornfield because it was the only school that didn't google my name before accepting the transfer."

The silence between us was heavy. Full. He was looking at me the way he had that first night at the bar – like he was waiting for a verdict, braced for the worst, too tired to perform anything other than the truth.

"Caleb found the disciplinary record," he said. "Not the real story. Just the headline – expelled for violence against a teammate. He's going to use it. You know that."

I knew that.

"Rhys."

"If you're going to leave, just–"

I kissed him.

Not gently. Not carefully. I grabbed the front of his wrinkled shirt and pulled him toward me and pressed my mouth against his and put everything I couldn't say into it – I'm not leaving, I'm not scared of you, I see what you did and it makes me want you more, not less.

He froze for half a second. Then his hands came up – my face, my jaw, my hair – and he kissed me back like a man who'd been holding his breath for three days and had just remembered how to inhale.

We stumbled backward through the doorway. His hand fumbled behind him for the door – missing it once, twice, finally shoving it shut with his shoulder while his mouth never left mine. The apartment was dark. I didn't care. I knew the layout by now – hallway, kitchen, the bedroom door that stuck if you didn't lift the handle.

He lifted the handle without breaking the kiss. Muscle memory. The door swung open and we fell through it together.

This time was different from every time before.

Not the bar – frantic and anonymous and fueled by mutual destruction. Not the restaurant – stolen and forbidden and dripping with adrenaline. Not even the first night in his bed – slow, yes, but still careful. Still performing the version of intimacy that felt safe.

This was none of those things. This was terrifying.

He laid me down on his bed and hovered over me and his hands were shaking. Actually shaking – this man who'd scored four goals in his first game and shoved Caleb into a wall without blinking, his fingers trembled against my jaw like I was something he wasn't sure he was allowed to hold.

I reached up. Touched his face. Traced the scar through his eyebrow with my thumb. His eyes closed and something in his expression broke – not dramatically, not with noise, just a quiet fracture. The last wall coming down.

"I'm here," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

He kissed me again. Slower now. Deeper. His hands found the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head, then stood back for half a second just looking at me – my bra, my skin, the marks he'd left days ago that were still fading on my collarbone. His thumb traced one. Then he unhooked my bra with one hand and his mouth was on my breast before the fabric hit the floor.

I gasped. His tongue circled my n****e – slow, wet, deliberate – before he sucked it into his mouth hard enough to make my back arch off the mattress. His hand found the other one, rolling, pinching, his mouth and his fingers working in tandem until I was squirming under him and making sounds I couldn't control.

"I've got you," he murmured against my skin. Then his mouth moved lower.

He kissed down my stomach. Hooked his fingers into my jeans and pulled – jeans and underwear together, one motion, leaving me completely bare while he was still half-dressed above me. The imbalance should have made me self-conscious. Instead it made me feel like something he was unwrapping with intention.

His mouth landed on my hip bone. Then my inner thigh. Then higher – so close I could feel his breath against me, hot and uneven – and I was already wet, already aching, already gripping the sheets because I knew what was coming and the anticipation alone was enough to make my thighs shake.

He licked me once. One long, slow stroke from entrance to c**t that made my entire body jolt.

"f**k–"

"I know." Quiet. Almost reverent. Then he did it again. And again. His tongue moving through my folds with a patience that bordered on sadistic – tasting, exploring, learning what made me gasp versus what made me moan versus what made me grab his hair and pull. He found my c**t and sucked gently and my vision went white.

"Rhys – I need–"

"I know what you need." He slid two fingers inside me while his tongue kept working my c**t. Slow. Deep. Curling against the spot that made my legs clamp around his head. He groaned against me – the vibration radiating through my core – and I realized he was hard, pressed against the mattress, grinding into it slightly while he ate me out like he'd been starving for it.

He pulled back before I could c*m. I actually whined – a desperate, embarrassing sound that I'd deny later – and he climbed back up my body, shucking his shirt and jeans as he went. When he settled between my legs I could feel him – thick, hard, the head of his c**k sliding through my wetness without pushing in. Teasing. Both of us slick and trembling.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

Those grey eyes – wrecked, raw, every wall demolished. He wasn't performing. Wasn't commanding. He was asking.

He pushed inside me slowly. So slowly it was almost cruel – inch by inch, stretching me open, his forehead dropping to mine, his breath ragged, his eyes locked on mine because this time neither of us was hiding. I felt every inch of him and my mouth fell open and no sound came out because the fullness was overwhelming – not just physical, but everything. The truth in the doorway. The shaking hands. The vulnerability of a man who'd let me see the worst thing that had ever happened to him and was now inside me asking with his body if I was going to stay.

"Naomi." He said it like a prayer he didn't know the words to.

I wrapped my arms around his neck. Pulled him closer – deeper – until there was nothing between us. He started to move. Long, deep strokes that I felt in my spine, in my teeth, in the backs of my eyes. No urgency. No performance. Just his c**k dragging against my walls with a slowness that made every nerve ending catch fire.

His face dropped to my neck. Buried there. His breath hot and ragged against my skin while he thrust into me with a rhythm that was less about f*****g and more about holding on. Like I was the only solid thing in a life that had been pulling the ground out from under him since he was old enough to notice.

I held him back. Fingers in his hair. Legs around his waist. Hips rising to meet every stroke, taking him deeper each time until he was bottoming out and both of us were gasping. Every point of contact a promise – I see you. I know what you did. I know why you did it. And I'm still here.

The orgasm built like a tide – slow, inevitable, rising from somewhere deeper than my body. When it hit, I didn't scream. Didn't bite down. Just gasped his name against his ear and let it shatter me, my whole body arching into his, clenching around his c**k, pulling him impossibly deeper while wave after wave rolled through me and left me shaking and boneless and unable to do anything but hold on.

He came hard seconds later. Hips shaking, rhythm breaking, burying himself to the deepest point and spilling inside me with a sound so raw and unguarded it made my eyes sting. Not a moan. Not a groan. Something closer to relief – the sound of a man who'd been carrying something impossibly heavy for a very long time and had finally been allowed to set it down.

He didn't pull out afterward. Stayed buried in me, stayed pressed against me, his face in my neck and his arms wrapped around me and his breathing slowly, slowly evening out while I felt him softening inside me. I ran my fingers through his hair and stared at the ceiling and felt the weight of what had just happened settle over both of us like something permanent.

We lay there for a long time. His head on my chest. My fingers tracing idle patterns on his skin – the tattoos I'd been memorizing in pieces since the bar. The constellation on his forearm. The handwriting on his inner bicep that I now knew was his mother's – he'd told me that much, in fragments, in the dark.

My fingers found the date on his ribs. Elegant script. Numbers I didn't recognize.

"What's this one?"

His body stiffened. Subtle – a tension that ran through him like a current, there and gone, except it wasn't gone. It was held.

His jaw tightened.

"The day my mother left."