My Hot Stepbrother: A Second Chance Romance

by Aria Ford

  I nodded, not bothering to turn from the window and acknowledge the conversation Janelle tried to start with me. Of course she wanted to know about the study. As of late it seemed that the fucking study was all anyone wanted to talk about when it came to a conversation with me. Even the bartenders in my favorite restaurants asked me about it every time I came in, which only made me want to find new places to drink. I’d worked on nothing but the study for the last six months or so. Despite everyone’s interest in my work, the actual substance of my research would undoubtedly bore the piss out of 99 percent of the population. But for me, it was everything. I put all my efforts and passion into it after my life started to go to shit.

  The study in question was a pilot study on a cheaper sepsis-control protocol I’d been developing, and it had very much been my baby. It was an unusual protocol the seemed to go against the current thinking on the subject. Because of that, other doctors and researchers in the medical field were simply unwilling to get involved. They worried about tarnishing their academic reputations. That was where I and many of my colleagues differed, much to their closeted disdain and my chagrin. Many of them were all about the academia. They cared about it more than they did anything else and based many of their professional decisions on that fact.

  Unlike them, I was a private clinician and couldn’t care less about my academic reputation, whatever it may be. More than a few of my colleagues called me crazy, but all I cared about was developing a better, more effective treatment, and I wanted to make that treatment available to as many people as possible. It was the reason we became doctors, or so I had always believed, to help people, to make their lives better, and to save lives. It was my job to do that, and as far as I was concerned, getting my study off the ground was currently the best way for me to do that very thing.

  The problem was, the same thing that gave me the freedom to pursue studies like the sepsis-control protocol was also the thing that made it impossible for me to continue without the aid of outside funding. I wasn’t a part of some corporate, money-making machine. I wasn’t teamed up with a pharmaceutical company that would take my treatment and jack up the price. And I wasn’t one of those doctors with more money than God.

  I ran a small office, and I did so on my own. Obviously, I made more than the average working man, but a lot of that money went back into my research. What was left over wasn’t close to the kind of money required to fund my own project. That got into sums of money I could never hope to earn, given the choices I had made for my practice. And the bitch of it was, this situation was a sort of catch twenty-two. The only way I’d ever earn enough money to fund the study would be by completing the study successfully. Even by selling my treatment cheaply, it would still bring in massive amounts of money. But I didn’t have the money to get there.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I said, almost under my breath.

  “I’m sorry? What did you say, sir?”

  “I said I don’t have time for this,” I repeated more loudly, even though I’d only been talking to myself the first time. “I said I don’t have time for this, and I don’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” she answered uncertainly, trying my patience with her timidity yet again. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I—”

  “I didn’t mean you,” I interrupted. My fists clenched and unclenched at my sides to keep from unloading on her. “I was talking to myself. I don’t have time to worry about the pilot study or its funding. Not right now. If I can’t get that project off the ground, and it looks like I’m not, I’ll need to put all my focus and concentration into this practice. I’ll need to take on new patients, right? And I’ll need to expand my hours. If I have to spend day and night here working, then so be it. I’m not afraid of hard work, after all.”

  “Of course not, sir. I don’t think there’s a person alive who would question that. It’s just… well, aren’t you forgetting about one little thing?”

  I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she was talking about, and I got my answer. The moment Janelle spoke the words that were, for her, about as close to a rebuke as she would get, both of us heard a sound rising from the waiting room. It sounded like a siren, and in a very real way, that was exactly what it was. After all, a siren was a beacon of danger, a signal that something in the world was amiss. That was exactly what the noise coming from the front of my offices was. Only instead of coming out of a machine, it came out of a little girl.

  I shut my eyes quickly; my hands clenched so tightly now that when I looked at my palms later, I would find little half-moon cuts where my fingernails had done their digging. It was almost like I was living in a movie, or like somebody else directed my life according to their own amusement. I didn’t have these thoughts often. I wasn’t the sort of man to wallow in my own misery, but the timing of this felt like more than simple coincidence.

  “Christ, Janelle, why didn’t you tell me she was here?”

  “I didn’t realize you would want to know! I was already interrupting you more than I should have been.”

  “That’s right, you damn well were! Did you honestly think it was acceptable to interrupt me for these petty things and not tell me that my own daughter was in the waiting room? Seriously, Janelle, sometimes I don’t know why I even keep you on staff.”

  I strode to the door of my office and brushed past my secretary roughly, ignoring the expression of horror and shame my words brought to her face. Knowing Janelle, there was a good chance she’d start crying the minute I got past her, and if she did, I would ignore that too. I didn’t give a shit if she was upset. I didn’t give a shit if anyone was upset except for my daughter, whose wailing got more persistent and panicked with every passing second. Panic tried rising in my gullet as I rushed toward the waiting room, the way it always did when I though Anna might be in trouble.

  If I hadn’t been a doctor and therefore trained to keep panic in check, I might have given into it, whether I wanted to or not; it was that strong of a force running through me. Instead, I moved as quickly as I could without actually running and found my little daughter crumpled up into a ball on the waiting room floor. For a girl of only six years old, the amount of noise she managed to make astounded me.

  After assessing the damage and making sure she wasn’t injured, I fought to suppress a smile. She wouldn’t have appreciated that smile at all, but sometimes it was all a father could do when witnessing his child’s heartbreak. It was either that or cry right along with her, and what good would that do?

  “What is it, baby? What’s the matter?”

  “Daddy!” She sobbed as she buried her wet face into my shirt. That one word was the only thing she offered in explanation.

  “What is it? You aren’t hurt, are you?”

  “No, but Mr. Bunny!”

  “What about him, baby?”

  “He’s hurt!” She wailed, getting louder still. I almost had to cover my ears against the noise. “He’s hurt, Daddy! Fix him, please? You have to fix him!”

  I followed her gaze and saw that yes, Mr. Bunny was indeed injured. She’d managed to snag his midsection on the edge of one of my waiting room chairs. His stuffing leaked out in handfuls. It was precisely the kind of thing that could break a little girl’s heart. Fortunately for the both of us, this was a problem I could fix. After a considerable amount of time spent convincing Anna that this could, in fact, be so, I got her up to a standing position and had her retrieve the wounded stuffed animal. She gathered up his fluffy innards from where it littered my waiting room floor. Then she took my hand and followed me back to one of my examination rooms, a grim look on her face.

  “Can you do it, Daddy?”

  “What do you think, Anna?”

  “Dunno. Hope so.”

  As she watched, I laid Mr. Bunny out with all the reverence typically reserved for a real live patient and went about the business of healing him. The stuffing went back into the already worn little body, and then I stitched him up, trying not to laugh as my baby girl
covered her eyes for the “yucky” part. In no time flat, her beloved animal friend was good as new, and Anna trotted off to play with Janelle. I was sure she’d be much happier playing with my daughter than with putting up with my shit. For my part, I didn’t feel any better than before the almost-crisis. In fact, I felt a hell of a lot worse. My daughter’s meltdown reminded me of one glaring thing on my to-do list I had yet to check off.

  Summer had just started, which meant my daughter didn’t have to go to school for the next few months. Back when my wife was still around, Anna would have spent the months of freedom gleefully getting up to mischief with her mom, and on the evenings I had time to be with them, they’d fill me in on the details of all their fooling around. But now? Now there was no Mom to play with. There was only me, and I couldn’t give up all my patients to stay home with Anna, as much fun as it would be. What I needed was a nanny, and I needed one fast. The world wasn’t going to stop in its tracks for me and my daughter, whether her mother had died or not.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jessica

  “Hear ye, hear ye,” Abby announced, marching proudly into the living room. “The most important thing of the evening has arrived. I’ve got the wine, ladies!”

  “Hear ye, hear ye?” Katy repeated. “Jeez, Abby. What are you, like four hundred years old?”

  “What are you?” Abby retorted, a bag full of booze in one hand while her other rested easily on her hip. “Like, the biggest bitch in all the land?”

  “Someone’s cranky!” Katy said. “What’s the matter, Abbs? Another boyfriend decide not to call you back?”

  “Jesus, you really are an asshole, you know that? Like, the biggest asshole I’ve ever met.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Katy said, grinning. “Now come here and let me see what kind of wine you brought.”

  “Guys!” I shouted, wondering if either of them had taken the time to see if somebody was already in the kitchen they were taking over with their never-ending noise. “Seriously, do you have to be so loud? Some of us are trying to work, okay?”

  “Trying to work, huh?” Katy asked me brightly, the tone of her voice such that I already knew what she was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. “Does that mean you found a job? I had no idea. Looks like it was perfect timing for the wine, then.”

  “No, actually, I didn’t. I did not find a job, and I seriously doubt that I ever will if you two insist on wandering through the house, making all kinds of noise, without checking to see if people are trying to concentrate!”

  My outburst was met by complete silence, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. Out of the three of us, me and my two roommates, I was typically the calmest. The one who was least likely to randomly flip her shit over trivial things. I figured in a house full of chicks, it was important that at least one of us didn’t get her feathers ruffled easily.

  Katy was older than me by a couple of years, twenty-five to my twenty-two, but she was also quick to get pissed off when it came to Abby, our twenty-one-year-old roommate who hadn’t yet gotten old enough or broke enough to stop being a bit stuck up. The two of them were annoyingly quick to bicker, and seeing as I was naturally a laid-back kind of a girl, it made sense to me that I would be the one to take on the role of peacemaker. It had been easy to keep things cool between the three of us, right up until I finally graduated from college. Actually, it had been easy until a couple of months after I graduated, when the glow of my accomplishments began to wear off and the realization that I still didn’t have any kind of a reliable job set in earnestly.

  Once that happened, keeping my cool became a whole lot harder, and everything Abby and Katy did suddenly annoyed me at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t really their fault, which made me feel super bad on the rare occasions when I could take enough time to think about it. The only one who had changed in this situation was me, and it wasn’t a change that was particularly easy on them.

  “Whoa, there,” Katy said slowly, putting both hands up in a “don’t shoot” kind of a gesture. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get in your way, Jessica. You’re right; we should make sure you aren’t trying to work before we just barge into a place, making a bunch of noise.”

  “Or she could just work in her room like normal people,” Abby grumbled to herself, picking at invisible lint on her shirt with an expression full of serious discomfort. “That would be another option.”

  “Are you for real right now?” Katy cried in exasperation, looking at Abby like she was the pettiest person ever to live. “Maybe you should, I don’t know, try and cut her a little slack or something.”

  “No,” I interjected, rubbing my eyes vigorously and trying to stave off what was already promising to be a wicked headache. “No, she’s right, actually. It’s totally unfair for me to lose it at you guys over something like that. I have my own space, and it’s not like you just barged into my room, making a bunch of noise.”

  “See?” Abby answered sulkily, taking one of the bottles of wine out of its bag and opening it up as she did so. “I’m right. She has a bedroom, right? And it’s the master, too, so there’s plenty of room in there for her to freak out.”

  “She’s not freaking out,” Katy said immediately, coming to my defense as she almost always did while simultaneously pulling three wine glasses out from one of the cupboards. “She’s just stressed. Right, Jess? That’s all it is, right?”

  “No, actually, Abby’s got it on this one. I’m most definitely freaking out. I’ve got to find a job, you guys! It’s been like, almost four months since I graduated, and there hasn’t been so much as the hint of a prospect, never mind an actual offer. I’m starting to get really nervous.”

  Abby and Katy exchanged looks at that, quick looks that broke off just as quickly. Abby poured generous glasses of wine, and Katy pulled some snacks out of the pantry. I didn’t know with absolute certainty what that look meant, but I could venture a few guesses. The first thing that came to mind was what I’d studied in college.

  My parents fought me on my choice to double major in art history and French. We argued about it so much it resulted in a year-long standoff, during which I hardly spoke to either one of them, and I didn’t go home for a single family holiday.

  They warned me that my degrees wouldn’t get me anywhere in the real world. They insisted art history and French were impractical. I scoffed, waving a lofty hand in the air and telling them they knew nothing about the way things worked in “modern” times. Much to my dismay after graduating, I found out my parents knew a whole lot more than I’d given them credit for.

  I was extremely qualified for certain jobs. Working in an art gallery immediately came to mind. But no one had openings for those types of jobs. Like, at all. Or if they did, they weren’t anywhere close to my San Diego home with Katy and Abby, and despite my parents’ increasingly overbearing suggestions, I had no plans on moving back in with them. San Diego was my home now, and moving away would be the same as conceding defeat.

  Even worse, it would have been the same as telling my parents they had been right all along, and there wasn’t a shot in hell that I was ready for a thing like that. That was the kind of thing I planned on saving for when it got down to a life or death kind of a situation. I knew that much, but in the meantime, I had no idea what I was supposed to do to live from one day to the next. Abby and Katy were really good roommates for the most part, but that didn’t mean they would, or even should, take on the burden of taking care of me financially. Which left me, as far as I could tell, absolutely screwed.

  “Have you considered going back to school again?” Katy asked me tentatively as she handed me a glass of wine. “Maybe asking them if you can have your bookstore job back until you find something else?”

  “I’ve tried that already,” I answered glumly, feeling worse about my situation with every passing second. “They made it pretty clear that those jobs are only for current students.”

  “Did you tell them they should have given you a de
gree for something other than how to be a super-duper pretentious person?” Katy asked me with a completely straight face, something that put a look of horror on Abby’s face while causing me to burst out laughing.

  “You know what? That question slipped my mind. Maybe I’ll call them back in the morning, see if that argument carries any weight.”

  “You could always just go back to school,” Abby said breezily, sipping her wine casually as if going to grad school was the easiest thing in the world. “If you go to grad school, you’ll be able to get your job back.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, trying very hard not to lose my temper. “There are two things I see wrong with that plan. First of all, that’s a terrible reason to go to grad school. That’s a really big undertaking, and there’s no point in going unless you’re really passionate about the whole thing.”

  “Preach it, sister,” Katy said loudly, sipping on her wine and watching Abby and me, like she watched a tennis match instead of a conversation. “Tell her how it is.”

  I shot Katy a smile that was also a warning. If she wasn’t careful, she would get into yet another fight with Abby. “Secondly,” I went on. “Grad school is crazy expensive, and there’s not a chance that my parents would pay for it. There’s a chance I could get a scholarship, but I doubt it. Besides, all the deadlines for that have passed. I would have to wait a whole year, and in the meantime, I’d still have nothing to live on.”

  Abby shrugged her shoulders and grabbed for the box of crackers Katy munched on. She didn’t have any idea what I was talking about, which was painfully obvious, but it was difficult to blame her. She was still young and not out of college, and her parents seemed to have an unending supply of patience. She wasn’t going to be worrying about finances any time soon.

  Katy frowned. “I know you don’t want to do this—”

  “I’m not moving home,” I interrupted quickly, not even wanting to hear her speak the words. “I’m just not, okay? It’s not an option.”