Step Puck
An MM Sports Romance
by Jace Wilder
📖 Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Stepbrother, Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Rivals to Lovers, Secret Relationship, Class Difference, Teammates to Lovers, One Bed, Hurt/Comfort, Praise Kink, Touch Starved, Slow Burn, He Falls First, Found Family
He waited three seconds in the shower. I stayed for six weeks.
Tyler Kensington is twenty-one, a D-I center at Whitmore with a trust fund, a pathological need for control, and a father who has been managing his career since he was four. He eats standing up. He swims alone at midnight. He hasn’t cried since his mother left when he was seven. His five-thirty AM skating drills are perfect, his shot release is the fastest in the Showcase, and his emotional availability is approximately zero.
Chris Morales is twenty-one, a D-II power forward from Bridgeport who plays hockey to pay for his mother’s MS treatment and his sister’s college tuition. He’s loud, physical, competitive, and carries every dollar he’s ever earned like a weapon against the world that told him he wasn’t enough. He showed up to the summer Showcase in a Honda Civic with a dying transmission and a duffel bag he never fully unpacked — because unpacking means staying, and staying means trusting, and trusting is the thing he’s worst at.
They’re stepbrothers. They’re competing for the same camp invite — the one roster spot that comes with a signing bonus big enough to change a life. They’re sharing a house, a bathroom with two deadbolts, and a mutual hostility that ignites the first time Chris walks in on Tyler naked in the shower and neither of them looks away.
The arrangement is simple: physical only. No kissing. No sleeping over. No feelings. What starts as a pressure valve in a steam-filled bathroom becomes something neither of them budgeted for — a relationship built on broken rules, broken locks, and the gradual, devastating discovery that the person you’re competing against might be the person you can’t play without.
But Tyler’s father makes a phone call. The camp invite gets complicated. And the question that’s been building all summer — what’s earned and what’s given? — detonates in the space between two men who’ve learned to love each other and haven’t yet learned to trust it.
You’ll love this if you enjoy:
✓ Stepbrother MM romance with a D-I golden boy and a D-II grinder from Bridgeport
✓ “He waited three seconds in the shower because he wanted me to see him”
✓ A bathroom with two deadbolts and a marble shower bench that becomes a confessional
✓ Rules designed to prevent feelings that fail spectacularly by Chapter 6
✓ The first kiss that breaks the last rule — in a motel room in Vermont, sober, eyes open
✓ Class difference tension: heated floors vs. a Honda Civic with a dying transmission
✓ A father who loves through control and a son learning to love through honesty
✓ Sofia Morales — a 17-year-old sister who diagnoses the entire relationship in one phone call
✓ Hockey chemistry so electric the scouts can’t stop writing
✓ “Eighty percent cacao” — the drunk compliment that becomes a love language
✓ Tyler eating breakfast sitting down for the first time (you’ll understand why this matters)
✓ The invisible initials traced on skin every night: TK, TK, TK
✓ 104,000 words of slow burn that detonates on a shower bench in Connecticut
✓ Guaranteed HEA
⚠️ Content Warning
This book contains explicit MM sexual content including multiple on-page sex scenes, oral sex, anal sex, shower sex, vanity sex, equipment room sex, car sex, face-to-face penetrative sex with emotional devastation, and coming untouched from prostate stimulation. Themes include parental emotional abuse and control, chronic illness (MS), financial hardship, sports injury, class disparity, internalized shame around sexuality, and a father who treats his son’s career as an investment portfolio. Features escalating heat across 16 chapters. All encounters are enthusiastic and consensual between adult men. Guaranteed HEA.
Reader discretion advised. This book is intended for mature audiences only.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Chapter One: The Intrusion
Click to expand Chapter One…
The bathroom door didn’t lock.
That was the first thing Tyler Kensington noticed about the shared space between his bedroom and the guest room — the room that would belong, starting today, to the stepbrother he’d met exactly once, at a wedding reception where they’d shaken hands with the practiced diplomacy of two people who understood they were being presented as a package deal and resented it equally.
The lock was a simple push-button mechanism on a brushed-nickel handle. Decorative, not functional. The kind of hardware that a builder installs when the aesthetic matters more than the security — when the assumption is that the people sharing the bathroom will be family, or at least civilized enough to knock.
Tyler pressed the button. Turned the handle. The door opened without resistance.
He pressed it again. Same result. The mechanism engaged but didn’t catch — a half-turn of resistance followed by nothing, the door swinging open with the passive compliance of something that had never been asked to hold.
Tyler stood in the bathroom — his bathroom, until three hours from now — and considered the implications. The space was generous by any standard: dual vanity, walk-in shower with a rain head and bench seat, heated marble floors that his father had installed during the renovation because Richard Kensington did not believe in cold feet, literally or figuratively. The room was designed for one person’s morning routine, optimized for efficiency, every surface chosen for its combination of aesthetic value and low maintenance. Tyler’s razor sat in the third slot of the organizer. His toothbrush — electric, the model recommended by his sports dentist — stood in its charging cradle at the left sink. His towel hung on the first hook, folded in thirds.
In approximately three hours, someone else’s towel would hang on the second hook. Someone else’s toothbrush would occupy the right sink. Someone else would stand on these heated floors and breathe the same steam and exist in the same six-by-ten-foot space that Tyler had, until this moment, considered sovereign territory.
…
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
“Both Doors Open” — A 5,000+ word scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Seven months later. Summer again. Tyler and Chris are back in the lake house for development camp — same bathroom, same deadbolts, same marble shower bench. Except now the doors are open, the rules are gone, and the man who used to eat standing up has learned to take his time. What starts with a midnight swim ends on the shower bench with no arrangement, no rules, and no reason to be quiet. This scene was too explicit for Amazon.
More MM Romance
Browse all Jace Wilder books.
Penalty Box Confessions
Boston Brawlers
The PR team called it a bromance. The medical room knew better.
Step Puck
He waited three seconds in the shower. I stayed for six weeks.
Studs & Drywall
Five men. One cabin. One bed built for all of them.
Snowbound Discipline
Love was not a feeling. Love was a structure.
Checked Into Him
He built the perfect system. Then the perfect man walked in and broke it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this book part of a series?
Step Puck is a complete standalone with a guaranteed HEA. Tyler and Chris both earn their camp invites through their own play, survive the distance with weekly letters on cream stationery, and return to the lake house the following summer as roommates at development camp. The deadbolts have been serviced. The bathroom is theirs. No cliffhangers!
How spicy is this book?
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — This is a 5/5 heat level book with multiple explicit MM scenes that escalate from hostile tension to devastating tenderness. Features shower bench sex, vanity sex, equipment room encounters, car sex, face-to-face penetrative sex in a motel room that will restructure your nervous system, and coming untouched from prostate stimulation. The first time Tyler tops — face-to-face, slow, in a Vermont motel — is a reader-destroyer. The invisible initials traced on skin every night (TK, TK, TK) will haunt you. All scenes feature enthusiastic consent between adult men.
Is there a stepbrother element?
Yes. Tyler and Chris are stepbrothers — Tyler’s father married Chris’s mother. They met once before the summer, at the wedding. There is no childhood history, no family dynamic, and no shared upbringing. The stepbrother element creates forced proximity (shared house, shared bathroom) and social stakes (the secret relationship), but the romance is between two adult men who are strangers first, rivals second, and lovers third.
Is there a happily ever after?
Absolutely. Both men earn their camp invites independently. Tyler confronts his father’s controlling behavior and starts building a relationship based on honesty instead of optimization. Chris’s signing bonus pays for his mother’s MS specialist and his sister Sofia’s tuition. They survive seven months of long distance with weekly handwritten letters, weekend visits, and the kind of love that doesn’t require a deadbolt to feel safe. They return to the lake house the following summer. Both doors are open. Always.
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