My Not So Wicked Stepbrother (My Not So Wicked Series Book 1)

by Jennifer Peel

  I lay back down on the grass with my phone weighing heavily on my chest. Was that a sign or an unfortunate coincidence?

  Chapter Three

  “Good morning.” Sawyer’s groggy voice on speaker phone filled my bathroom.

  “What are you doing up so early?” I managed to get out between brushing my teeth. “The reminder you set for me hasn’t even gone off.”

  “I was worried you would forget your lunch reminder went off and . . . I was worried about you.”

  I dropped my toothbrush in the sink and stared into the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t exactly a pretty sight in the morning, unless I had the help of my sisters. Even then, it was subjective. I think I was blushing. I wasn’t sure I ever had.

  “Um . . . you’re worried about me?” I tugged on my ponytail. It was about as fancy as I got with my hair.

  “Of course, Em, that’s what friends do.”

  My reflection snarled back at me. The dreaded F-word had struck again.

  “I know how hard this past year has been on you,” he continued, “and we are coming up on the anniversary of your mom’s death. I just want you to know I’m here for you and I’ve been thinking that . . .” He paused for an uncomfortable amount of time.

  “Thinking what?”

  “I . . . was thinking if you wanted to, we could do something to celebrate your mom. Maybe . . . do . . . a camping trip next weekend since you said she loved it so much.”

  Mom did love to camp. She taught us silly songs about yodelers and fried ham to sing around the campfire. And she could make some amazing food over a fire. I would only eat pineapple upside down cake now if it was made in cast iron. But back to camping with Sawyer and blushing.

  “Mom would love that. Were you thinking of getting a group together?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “We could . . . I mean . . . yes. That’s a great idea.”

  “Are you sure?” He wouldn’t want it to be only the two of us, right? Seriously, that would have been like a dream.

  “Yeah. Usual suspects?”

  That’s what I thought. No dream camping trip. “Okay. I’ll ask Jenna and Brad. I’ll even see if Aspen can come.”

  “I’ll talk to my brother and Kellan to see if they’re in.”

  “Thanks, Sawyer.”

  “Anything for you.”

  If that were true, he’d be in my bathroom right now kissing my neck and making me late for work.

  “Oh, and thanks for the ice cream last night. You didn’t need to buy three pints of it.”

  “I didn’t know what you would be in the mood for.”

  “I’ll admit I tried all three.” Chocolate chip, chocolate, and rocky road.

  He laughed. “I would have expected nothing less. I hope you didn’t mind me using the housekey you gave me. I figured it was an emergency.”

  “Feel free to put ice cream in my freezer anytime.”

  “You got it.”

  “I better go before I’m late.”

  “Don’t forget your lunch.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll call you after work.”

  “Talk to you then. Bye.” I hung up, feeling all sorts of conflicted. On one hand I felt loved—you know, the platonic kind, which was not bad at all. On the other hand, it kind of sucked when you considered that he had the makings of the world’s best boyfriend. Not to mention my love for him went well beyond platonic. Maybe I could help him change his mind during this camping trip. I could accidentally fall into the river next weekend and fake hypothermia. He’d then feel obligated to strip down to his undies and cozy up with me in a sleeping bag. That would be great until he felt how squishable I really was under my clothing, which wouldn’t help catapult me out of the friend zone. And knowing my luck, Jenna would jump to the rescue first and we would end up in a very awkward situation like we did my senior year of college. A situation we shall not visit again either in my mind or in real life.

  Fine. No faking illness or injury. Not sure what I had left up my sleeve. He already knew I could make any kind of pancake, his favorite food. Maybe I should get cozy in the friend zone.

  I walked out the door when Sawyer’s reminder went off. I looked at my phone.

  Go back in the house and get your lunch. Have a good day.

  Oh crap. I marched back into my house to get my lunch. Sometimes I amazed myself. How could I be so forgetful, yet I had the capability to graduate from the Colorado School of Mines, one of the toughest engineering schools in the nation, with a B+ average? I probably could have had an A average except Jenna came to visit me one too many times and maybe I forgot a homework assignment or two. I’d needed Sawyer in my life then. Well, maybe. Not sure I could have handled over a decade of this kind of torture. In ten years, if I was still pining for him, I might move away and join a support group or something. Heck, make that a year. A year from now, if I couldn’t get over Sawyer, I was moving.

  I had to stop and think about that. I never thought of moving out of Colorado. There was so much to love about every season here, from camping in the summer to skiing in the winter. Not to mention most of my family and friends lived here. What would I do without Jenna, Brad, and their little bambino who I was going to be godmother to? I could still be a rocking godmother from out of state and I would visit, of course, though it wouldn’t be exactly the same. However, if I moved, perhaps I could find someone. Perhaps my name only cursed me here. I doubted that, but it was worth a shot looking elsewhere. What if Mr. Right-After-The-Real-Mr.-Right had gotten the wrong GPS coordinates and he was waiting for me to find him? And it wouldn’t be all that bad living away from my wicked stepmother.

  I grabbed my lunch and continued to give this some serious thought.

  In the summers, I went to work earlier for two reasons. First, the steel plant became Satan’s spa in the middle of the day. The temperatures could get above 140 degrees near the furnaces in the melt shop. Also, summertime meant internship time, and for some reason I was in charge of babysitting them. That was, I was tasked with molding and shaping them. Basically, weeding out those who could hack it and those who, let’s say, needed a softer environment they could pin all their hopes and dreams on. Babysitting them meant I had to come in early, so I could get some actual uninterrupted work done. You don’t know how many times a day I was asked, “Can I take a break now?” or “What does KPI stand for again?” Was it really that hard to remember key performance indicator? My favorite was the guy last year who kept asking me how to do basic formulas like addition and subtraction in Excel. He went in the maybe you should think about a new career choice pile. I really wanted to tell him he should probably pick a new major altogether.

  I settled in my tiny office that was dingy like most offices in the mill. I’d tried making it cheerier by putting up pictures of family, friends, and the Colorado landscape, but nothing helped. If Sawyer’s face didn’t make a place look better, you knew it was a lost cause.

  I was ready to face my day armed with Dr. Pepper and a protein bar, the breakfast of champions. On my screen was the data for a recent corrosion test I had been conducting. I had barely started my analysis when I had a welcome interruption.

  Wallace Hodge walked in wearing an old, worn-out smile on his weathered face. He was not only my boss, but one of the reasons I decided to be a metallurgist in the first place. Wallace had been around long enough that he was once my biological father’s boss. He thought the world of Anders Loveless and had made sure to keep in touch with Mom over the years. I remembered Wallace taking me on tours of the plant when I was a girl. Something here called to me. I thought maybe it was Anders. Like he wanted me to get to know him and working here would help me. I had to say it had. Wallace wasn’t the only guy from back in the day still around. The old timers all loved to tell me stories about how Anders worked harder than anyone they knew but played just as hard. Kind of like his daughter. He was the resident prankster on top of being the melt shop electrician. He was infamously remember
ed for setting up mannequins in each stall in the men’s bathroom. It took them hours to figure out why the stalls were never unoccupied. They’d also been wary of any food he brought to share. Caramel apples could have been caramel onions. He sounded like my kind of guy.

  I learned more about my funny first father working here than I had my entire life. It wasn’t that Mom had been keeping him from me. We talked about him, but I don’t think she ever wanted to make Dad feel as if he had someone to live up to, so I never knew a lot. And I don’t think she ever wanted me to feel as if I was loved any less by either her or Dad because Dad’s blood didn’t run in my veins. Dad never treated me any different than my sisters. Well . . . until Josephine entered the picture. Marlowe and Macey had a lot in common with Josephine, like running up Dad’s credit cards and preening for hours, so my sisters embraced the new marriage.

  I didn’t have a good poker face or mouth. Dad knew I was unhappy about the union. I felt a distance between us that had never existed before. I knew I bore some of the blame. I resented Dad for not only marrying Josephine, but Sawyer’s mother. I knew that sounded silly as they were one and the same, but in my mind the only marriage that should have happened between our families was the Sawyer and Emma one. Which was absolutely ridiculous when you considered we had never been on a date and he thought of me as a friend.

  I smiled at Wallace instead of continuing to contemplate my bizarre family relationships.

  “Morning, Emma,” Wallace’s rumbly voice filled my small corner of the plant. If you didn’t know him, you would have thought he’d smoked all his life, but his voice was naturally rough.

  “Good morning. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  He scrubbed his face filled with salt and pepper scruff. “I wanted to see how it was going with the interns. I heard some crying in the men’s bathroom yesterday.”

  I tried not to smile. “That was probably Carson; he gets a little emotional when he doesn’t get over a hundred likes in the first hour of his Instagram post. Yesterday it was only thirty. An all-time low for him.”

  Wallace shook his head. “What’s Instagram?”

  “It’s a social media site where you can post pictures of your life and people can like it.”

  “How do they like it?”

  “By clicking on a little heart.”

  Wallace’s eyes narrowed. “Guys do this too?”

  “Yep. It’s a whole a new world.”

  “What was the picture of?”

  “His lunch.” I grinned.

  “Are you yanking my chain?”

  I laughed. “I’m afraid not. Carson fancies himself an amateur chef and photographer. He spent hours making a dish made with SpaghettiOs, not to mention all the time staging it in the break room. The low stats were a real blow to his fragile ego.”

  Wallace crinkled his brow, not sure what to say. “Well . . . huh. Maybe . . . I got nothing.”

  “I think I might need a raise after this year’s batch of interns.”

  Wallace leaned against the door frame and gave me a contemplative smile. “If you can keep the tears out of the men’s bathroom, I’ll think about it.”

  “No problem, I’ll tell Carson to use the women’s next time.”

  Wallace chuckled. “Deal.”

  “Wow. You should visit my office more often.”

  He stepped inside. “I probably should come by more often, but you’re always on top of things.”

  “I do try.”

  “You do a good job. I’m proud of you.”

  “Thank you.” I thought that was it. Wallace was a man who usually cut to the chase and skedaddled. This time, though, he shifted his feet and gave me a good look over.

  “How are you doing, kiddo?” He hadn’t called me that in ages. Never at work. I believe the last time was at Mom’s funeral.

  I didn’t answer right away as I was confused by his tone and his thoughtful stare. “I’m doing good. Are you okay?”

  “Right as rain. Speaking of which, we could probably use some.”

  Now he wanted to talk about the weather? This was not like him at all. Now I was concerned. “How’s Bev doing?”

  Wallace cracked a smile for his wife. “She keeps me on my toes and out of most trouble.”

  I knew he was a little bit of a troublemaker like my father, Anders, from the stories Wallace would tell of their hunting and camping trips. Lots of drinking and late nights from the sounds of it. Even Dad had joined in with them. It was hard for me to imagine Dad being anything but serious. He was probably the one to go to bed early. I always thought he and Mom balanced each other out.

  “Tell her hello for me.”

  “I will.” He shuffled his feet but stayed in my doorway.

  “Is there anything else you wanted to discuss?”

  Wallace sauntered into my office. His salt and peppered scruffy face was pinking up a bit. If he hadn’t just agreed to give me a raise, I almost would have thought he was going to fire me. But he did something else most unexpected when he picked up the picture of Sawyer and me riding in a hot air balloon together. We were smiling at each other as if to say what are we getting ourselves into? That was a fun day last month during Edenvale’s annual hot air balloon festival. We couldn’t get anyone else to go up with us, which was fine by me.

  The exhilarating views of the mountains and nearby peach orchards weren’t half as mesmerizing as when Sawyer had held my hand. I admit I’d had a moment where I panicked when an unexpected gust of wind jostled us. Heights normally didn’t bother me, but when there was nothing between you and the earth, it gave a whole new meaning to free falling. Sawyer held my hand for the entire excursion while we talked about his plans for opening his own practice one day instead of working for Hobbs Eye Center. He had a five-year plan, which included living in his crappy apartment and driving his old truck until it died so he could save as much money as possible. I liked a man with a plan who wasn’t afraid to work hard. I also loved the feel of his strong hand. It was the perfect amount of smoothness and our hands fit comfortably together. It didn’t hurt that it gave me those tingles Mom had talked about. Or maybe it hurt more than I wanted to admit.

  Wallace cleared his throat, making me jump and get out of my head.

  “You know, kiddo, you are more than an employee to me.”

  I smiled up at him. “I know.”

  “If there is anything you want to talk about you could come to me. Or if you needed me to talk to someone for you, I would be happy to.”

  I tilted my head. “Okay . . . I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Wallace smiled down at the photo. “You two are an attractive couple. It’s about time some guy finally wised up and—”

  I pushed myself back in my rolling chair. “Whoa, there. I think you’re mistaken about the kind of relationship Sawyer and I have.”

  He turned the picture around so I could see it. “I know it’s a little strange that you’re otherwise related, but it’s not by blood, so no harm done.”

  I shook my head. “Wallace, we’re only friends.” Every time I said it, I got this sucker-punched feeling in the pit of my soul.

  Wallace’s brown eyes squinted into slits. “Bev and I’ve seen you together, and this picture,” he pointed to the two of us, “says it all.”

  “Says all what?”

  “It says Anders would have wanted me to have a chat with him about how he expects his daughter to be treated.”

  My body deflated in my chair. “I promise you that won’t be necessary.”

  Wallace gently placed the picture back on my desk. “Funny thing about promises. You should never make them until you know all the facts.”

  Unfortunately, I knew all the facts. And the biggest fact was Sawyer would never be mine.

  Chapter Four

  Summer weekends were my favorite, especially when it involved soccer. I was thrilled when Edenvale’s Recreation League added a shortened summer season this year. It was basically conditioning for the fa
ll, which was fantastic. My girls were excited because they were determined to win the fall championship. It meant new strategies and trying new field positions. They had been practicing hard and I was proud to call them my Pink Ladies. I smiled every time I thought of the name they had chosen this season. As weird as it sounded, I could always hear Mom giggle when I said it or when I put on my pink jersey. Pink was not my color, yet it followed me everywhere.

  Our game was at eleven, but we met at the soccer fields at ten to warm up and make sure everyone had the proper gear. Inevitably, shin guards or cleats were forgotten every game. Parents would have to hustle home to retrieve forgotten items. I couldn’t ever get upset at the girls, being chronically forgetful myself. To try and be a good example, I kept a crate in my Jeep filled with all my coaching gear, including things like my clipboard and our practice and gameday plans. So I may have already forgotten the crate this morning. The jog back to my Jeep was good for me.

  My only complaint this season was with my assistant coach, Gwendolyn, or as I thought of her, the annoying warm body. To follow the rules, each team had to have two coaches always present. She was the only person who volunteered. All I could say for her was that she was present, at least physically. Most of the time, Gwendolyn, who gave me a lecture the first time we met that at no point was I ever to call her Gwen, was on her phone or filing her nails, even painting them on occasion. She brought a lounge chair and umbrella to each practice and game. It mortified Poppy, her daughter, who played on the team. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, but I would have paid some parents under the table to take Gwendolyn’s place.

  Speaking of my partner in crime, she showed up in the tiniest white shorts and a halter top, wearing sunglasses bigger than her face. Her newest husband trailed behind her carrying all her gear. Poppy was running ahead of them, hoping not to be associated with them. I could feel her pain.

  Gwendolyn was upon us, in heels I might add. “I brought everyone a treat today,” she sing-songed unnaturally high. “Set down the cooler, Mario,” she ordered her new, younger Latin lover husband. He did so with a loud thunk before stretching his back.