by Andrea Niles
STEPBROTHER ROMANCE BOX SET
Romance Stories For My Hot Stepbrother, My Younger Stepbrother Soldier & Dr. Stepbrother (Romance, Alphas Bad Boy Soldier Billionaire Stepbrother Lover, Billionaire Alpha Male)
STEPBROTHER ROMANCE
Taboo Romance: Secretly in Love with Dr. Stepbrother
Table of Contents
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Chapter 1 – The Secret
Chapter 2 – In the Dark
Chapter 3 –Anticipation
Chapter 4 – Together
© Copyright 2015 by Andrea Niles- All rights reserved.
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This book is a fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Chapter 1 – The Secret
“Doing anything this weekend, Andrea?”
Looking up from the chart she was currently writing notes on, Andrea lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
“Not sure just yet. Why do you ask?”
The nurse who had come up beside her smiled.
“Just thought I’d ask. I’m looking at a pretty boring weekend myself.” Her voice went a little flat. “Though I’ll bet he isn’t. Look at that. Doesn’t it just make you want to march in there and start pulling them off to work by their ears?”
Over by the nurse’s station, her stepbrother was holding court, three slender young residents hanging on his every word. Andrea let out a puff of air that might have been a laugh. It might, if she was Nadia. But she knew Darren didn’t have much more than the time of day for those girls. She snuck another glance at him, tall and blond and square-jawed. He caught her looking and shot a grin her way, with a there and gone again expression that said he would rather be standing next to her than in his current location. When Andrea looked down at her chart again, it was to hide her smile.
The thing about her and Darren was, they had a secret.
“Someone ought to,” she said, for Nadia’s benefit. “I’m sure they have better things to do than stand around and giggle at my stepbrother’s overinflated ego.”
Not that she really thought Darren’s ego was over-inflated, but they teased each other frequently as they went about their days, and their coworkers had learned to go along with it.
Their parents had married when Andrea was in middle school and Darren was a freshman. Back then, they’d hated each other. Andrea was convinced that Darren was arrogant, and spoiled. Darren thought she was rude. They'd hardly spoken to each other for months.
Then Andrea they had gone back to school.
She had never really been what a lot of people considered perfect. Too tall to fit the cheerleader mold, Andrea was a big girl. Curvy, but not the kind of curvy high school guys were nice about. The high school girls hadn’t been much better. Andrea had withdrawn into herself. She spent a lot of her time avoiding other people.
When Darren found out how they were talking to her, he hadn’t been happy. He’d walked up on a pack of them around her, slipping snide insults into what was ostensibly a conversation. She’d looked up to find him on the fringes of the group, and had dropped her gaze again, expecting him to take their side, but instead he’d stepped into the middle and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and, with fantastic disdain in his crisply accented voice, told the little huddle of jocks and cheerleaders to shut the fuck up. Andrea had never heard him swear before.
That was when she started looking up to him. Their animosity had thawed, and they had even become friends. Their parents had been pleased.
The rest hadn’t come until later.
They’d been home for Christmas. He’d taken her out on the porch, both of them wrapped up in jackets against the chill of San Francisco’s winter. Standing there with one elbow against the railing, a glass of wine held in his other hand, Darren had confessed that he wanted something more than what they had.
Andrea had been incredulous. He could have his pick of any woman in a fifty mile radius. What did he want with her? Not to mention that he was her stepbrother. That she had always wanted him didn't come into it. Who wouldn't want him? But Darren had shaken his head at the look on her face, and tipped her chin up with a hand beneath it.
“That doesn’t matter. And as for my apparent ability to obtain any woman I want, what I want is you.” His eyes were soft and earnest. “You know I wouldn’t tease you about this, Andrea. I’m not that cruel.”
He wasn’t. She knew it. But there was alcohol on his breath, like he’d had to find the courage to say the words, and it wasn’t something they could ever act on. Darren should never have brought it up. Andrea had retreated, too worried about what would happen if anyone found them out.
He'd invited her to go with him on vacation to Hawaii.
It wasn't the kind of thing people usually did for her. In fact, no one had ever invited her on a vacation anywhere, though after high school she'd had her share of boyfriends. It had turned out that once they grew out of the immature name-calling phase, boys weren't so bad after all.
It was the trip to Hawaii that had done it for them. Andrea had agreed, though she knew what might be waiting there. She wasn't stupid. But she also wasn't sure she wanted to keep holding him at arm's length.
Hawaii had been... Andrea smiled down at the chart in her hand as she tried to come up with a word that wasn't a cliché. Beautiful.Utterly fantastic. Andrea shook her head at herself. She was starting to sound ridiculous. Like a smitten teenage girl. Which she wasn't. She was a grown woman with a college degree and a good job.
The first night in Hawaii, Darren had taken her out to dinner, and they'd sat
on the balcony of the restaurant, looking out over the sea where it stretched dark and faintly glimmering toward the horizon, stars reflected in its moving surface. The sounds of laughter and conversation from the other guests had been faint, as though they didn't matter. Andrea had looked back at Darren with a drink in her hand, and she'd found that, at least for that moment, all the things that could go wrong if they chose to have a relationship were as quiet and distant in her thoughts as the sounds of the other guests.
"Tell me again," she said.
"I want you," he answered. "I've wanted you since... I don't know. Maybe since we met.Maybe since high school. But you're beautiful, Andrea. They don't tell you that enough."
She had felt heat rise in her cheeks.
"You sound like you're trying to seduce me."
He’d grinned that perfect white grin at her.
"Is it working?"
She was ready to admit that maybe it was. Darren's smile had been worth it. He had the best grin, wide and confident – conspiratorial, like there was a secret between him and you, and he expected you to know what it was, even when you didn’t.
Of course, now there really was a secret between them, and that edge to his grin had only grown sharper.
Andrea felt eyes on her, and looked up. It was Darren, looking across the length of the open space, one eyebrow slightly raised in silent question. Later? Andrea dipped her chin in a nod. Later.
Chapter 2 – In the Dark
Later turned out to be an empty room in the general ward. It wasn't exactly an administration approved activity; they would be in trouble for more reasons than one if they were caught. But there was something exhilarating about the threat of discovery, and so they found themselves locking the door behind them as they slipped into the dark room, and Darren turned and pressed her against the wall, claiming her mouth with his.
Andrea's arms wrapped around her stepbrother's shoulders, and she pressed into the kiss, into him, feeling the hard line of his body against her own. He was not that much taller than she, not wider, but the solid strength of him was a pleasure. Since that day at school, Darren had always felt like safety: her knight in shining armor. She sighed into the space between them, and tangled a hand in his hair, though she didn’t use it to draw him any closer. If he wanted to deepen the kiss, he would.
Darren’s own hands were sliding down the curve of her ribcage, over the dip of her waist to the broad swell of her hips. They slid back up beneath the shirt of her scrubs, moving over bare skin. He didn't move to take the top off. They couldn't go that far, not here. That was saved for other places. For the moment, it was just this, just the pleasant tease of kissing in the space that they made theirs for a little moment, the rising heat between them that would have to be banked in the hours between their tryst and the ends of their shifts.
The kiss broke, and Darren pulled back enough to look into her eyes.
"I don't know how I get this far into the day without touching you," he said, voice coming out a little breathless. "Every time I look up and see you I want to drag you down here and ravish you."
Andrea laughed softly, eyebrows lifting up toward her hairline.
"Ravish? This isn't a Harlequin romance."
He kissed her just to shut her up, as she knew he would. This kiss was longer, slower, stretching out between them until she wished that she didn't have another six hours left on her shift, because what she really wanted to do was pull him over to the empty bed and take things a whole lot farther. She wasn't stupid enough to do it.
When they broke off again, they were both panting. He dipped his head to brush kisses up her neck while she tipped her head back against the wall and curled a hand around his shoulder for something to hold onto.
"It's not that long," he said against her skin, as though he could read her thoughts. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as he was her. "A few more hours."
A few more hours could be very long, Andrea wanted to argue. But he knew that. She didn't point it out.
His hand was sliding reluctantly downward, out of her shirt, and Andrea let her own fingers etch a line down his back, nails scratching lightly through his clothing and making him groan low and hot against the place where her shoulder met her neck. He was half-hard. She smiled over his head.
"Are you sure you're going to make it?" she teased.
The laughter that bubbled up against her skin sounded a little rueful.
"Not entirely," he said.
He lifted his head and looked down at her, and his mouth curled into a smile, a grin with an utterly wicked edge. Andrea's breath caught in her throat. "Are you sure you will?" he asked.
She nodded, though she wasn't any surer than he was. Six hours. That wasn't so long in medical professional time. A fraction of a shift. But her nipples were hard against her bra, and between her thighs she ached for him.
"Yes," she said, despite that, because she had to; because it was what he wanted to hear.
"Yes," he agreed, leaning down to kiss her once, briefly. “You will.”
His mouth dragged up along the line of her jaw.
"You will," he breathed against her ear, making her shudder with the heat of his breath. "Because I say you will."
Andrea swallowed hard. Darren pulled back. His grin had disappeared, hidden once more behind a facade of professional calm, but she could still see the glint of it in his eyes.
"Tonight," he said. "I'll make it up to you."
And then he was gone, sliding out the door and leaving her alone in the room to wait for her heart to stop pounding, for her breath to come a little slower. She ran a hand over her hair to make sure it wasn't disheveled, tugged the hem of her shirt back into place.
When he had been gone for five minutes, she stepped out into the hall to go attend to her own duties. The slide of her thighs against each other, the pressure of the movement on her clit, was a delicious torment, and she allowed herself to indulge in it for a moment before she forced her attention back to work. Duty called.
Chapter 3 –Anticipation
The end of her shift came slowly. Time was a relative thing, and even with the nonstop running that her job demanded, it didn’t move with the speed she would have wished. She pushed away thoughts of what would come later, when they were at last alone in the luxurious privacy of Darren’s apartment. A nurse couldn't afford to be distracted.
At long last, it was over. Andrea clocked out and went to her locker to change into her day clothes, gathering up her things and stepping out into the humid warmth of a San Diego night. They hadn't ended up too far from home, either of them. Andrea had always liked California, though she preferred the warmer summers and more temperate winters of the southern cities to the foggy chill of their home town. Darren hadn't seemed to mind it. He didn't seem to mind Southern California either, though. He was content wherever he went. It was one of the things Andrea liked about him. His influence was steadying, warm and calm.
She drove her own car, of course. It wouldn't do for them to arrive in the same one. She had her own apartment too, though she spent as little time in it as she could get away with. People often remarked on how close she and Darren were. They didn’t know the half of it.
Darren would be home already, she knew. His shift had ended an hour before hers. If she was lucky, and she usually was, he would have already ordered takeout. She pulled into a parking spot on the street a few blocks from his building, as close as she could get, and walked up the sidewalk to the large glass and steel facade. It was a simple matter to buzz up to his apartment from the foyer and get his answer. She tapped her foot lightly against the carpeted floor of the elevator as it rose slowly toward the twelfth floor.
As she stepped out into the hall, the door two down from the elevator bay opened for her, and she smiled when she saw Darren, slipping inside and closing the door behind herself.
"Food's just got here," he said. "I was taking it in to the living room. You wanted the fried rice and s
pring rolls, didn't you?"
"Like you even have to ask."
After all this time, he knew her order well.
Andrea settled down on the couch with her boxes of takeout, and Darren joined her a moment later, setting two glasses of wine on the coffee table in front of them.
"How was the rest of your shift?" he asked, kicking his tired feet up on the coffee table as well, careful to avoid the glasses.
"Same old, same old," Andrea answered. She cast a sideways look at him. "I kept trying not to think of you. You make my job very difficult."
He grinned at her.
"Do I?" he asked, no repentance in his voice. It wasn't really a question. He knew full well what he did to her.
Andrea just looked at him, and he ducked his head for a moment, chuckling, then looked back up at her through the now loose fringe of his hair. He'd washed the pomade out then, before she'd arrived. He smelled like his soap, cinnamon and sandalwood. Andrea could smell it even with the fragrant Chinese food sending up scented steam between them.
"Your shift?"
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
"Exhausting, to be honest.Though I still have energy enough for later."
He always had energy enough for later. It was one of the many things Andrea appreciated about him. She took a bite from the box of rice, making a pleased noise at the taste of food. She hadn't eaten anything more than a protein bar since the beginning of her shift, and she'd been run nearly off her feet in the later half.
"Are we watching anything?" she asked, glancing toward the TV.
Darren shook his head. "I thought there might be better things to do."