by Ward, Kira
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
About This Book
Mail Order Stepbrother
End
Mail Order Stepbrother
By Kira Ward
Copyright © 2015 Kira Ward
All rights reserved.
[email protected]
http://www.amazon.com/author/kiraward
Warning: This book contains mature themes and detailed depictions of sexual encounters.
All characters involved in sexual encounters are at least 18 years of age and not blood related. All persons and events are fictional, and any similarities to real places and events are purely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
Melanie Spence studied the screen of her phone, swiping through web pages and trying to ignore the engine noises of the plane that was currently hurtling her through the sky at God only knew what speed. She hated to fly, avoided it with a passion. The only reason she was on this plane now was because her mother had just gotten married.
Like that wasn’t mind boggling enough.
Her mother—quiet, patient, professional—acting like a lovelorn teenager. That was something Melanie wasn’t sure she would ever recover from.
A few months prior, her mother called and told Melanie that she was seeing someone. It was just an offhand remark, like an afterthought. All of Melanie’s life, it had been just her and her mother. Her father died when Melanie was only two, and her mother, who hadn’t been married to him, found herself in a bad spot. She was barely out of high school, one of those girls who went from her father’s house to her husband’s—well, in this case, her college professor/boyfriend’s house—and then she was suddenly alone with a toddler to care for.
Somehow her mother managed to finish college and get her PhD in psychology. She specialized in working with troubled teens, volunteering at a local community center when she wasn’t seeing patients at her downtown San Diego office. It was there, at the community center, that she met a man, a philanthropist who wanted to donate a little money to the kids.
Just a week ago, she called so excited that she could hardly catch her breath.
She was getting married.
“You’re joking, right?” was Melanie’s first words after the announcement.
But it wasn’t a joke. And the philanthropist she was marrying? Burton Collins.
The Burton Collins.
One of the most recognized names in the world, Burton Collins began his career by starting one of the most successful financial institutions this country had ever seen, BurCo. And when he got bored with that, he started a chain of department stores called Marchand…now one of the most popular clothing stores in the world. And when he got bored with that? He went to Hollywood and produced a dozen blockbuster films.
There was nothing this man touched that didn’t turn to gold. And when his wife died ten years ago, he became the most sought after bachelor in the country, perhaps in the world. And, somehow, he chose Melanie’s mother.
What were the chances?
It was a whirlwind. Melanie flew to San Diego with the intention of talking her mother out of the whole thing. It seemed like nonsense. Here was her mother, a woman who hardly dated through Melanie’s youth, a woman who was settled in her life, happy to let her work fill whatever holes her lack of personal relationships might have left in her life. And suddenly she was getting married? It seemed bizarre. Insane.
And then Melanie saw her mother with Burton.
There was no doubt in her mind that they were crazy about each other. When they were in the same room together, her mother’s eyes were constantly tracking Burton’s movements. And when they were close to each other, they were always touching. Little brushes of their fingers against a hand, a thigh, and stolen kisses when they thought no one was watching.
And the way Burton looked at her mother? Every woman wanted a man to look at her with that much devotion.
“Sickening, isn’t it?” Alyssa, Burton’s daughter, from his first marriage, seemed to understand exactly how Melanie felt before exchanging a single word. They were both concerned about the whirlwind romance, but shared the same respect for what truly appeared to be a love match.
Too bad Burton’s son didn’t feel the same way. He hadn’t even bothered to show up to the wedding.
“Burt blames Daddy for mom’s death,” Alyssa explained to Melanie the night before the wedding. “He forgets, of course, that mother was a raging alcoholic who made Daddy miserable for fifteen of their thirty years of marriage.”
Melanie sighed as she flipped through another set of webpages. She was happy for her mother, really she was. But there was this small part of her that was raging like a small child in the back of her mind. Her mother was married. She found love. She had a future, a companion with whom to spend the rest of her life. She would never be alone, never have to worry about what would happen to her when she grew too old to care for herself.
It wasn’t fair.
Melanie had always put love on the back burner. She had a string of lovers in college and medical school, but her career was always her priority. She had always assumed there would be time for love, for marriage, for a family… sometime later. But now that she was ready, her mother had found her prince, but all Melanie was kissing were frogs.
The last guy Melanie went out with was an accountant that she was set up with by one of her college roommates. He spent the whole night talking about the new tax laws and all the things people tend to do wrong on their tax returns. It took all she had not to fall asleep with her face in her plate of shrimp scampi. And then he had the nerve to tell her roommate that Melanie bored him…that she wouldn’t speak, that she chose the most expensive item on the menu, and that she wouldn’t give him a simple kiss on the cheek when he dropped her off at her apartment.
She was so angry that she refused to accept any more blind dates from her friends, severely limiting the pool of potential mates.
She overheard a patient’s mother mention a dating service on the internet that seemed interesting. Not that Melanie had—or thought she would ever—consider such a service. How embarrassing would it be to have to explain to friends and acquaintances that she allowed some computer nerd’s algorithm to pick her dates for her?
But when you’re desperate…
She typed the name of the service into Google search and hesitated when it appeared in her phone’s browser window. Was it a stupid move? Was she letting her mother’s newfound happiness push her into doing something she would regret? What if this thing didn’t work like promised? What if it connected her to some loser who somehow found out she was a doctor and chose to use her? Some guys out there liked to seek out doctors for their own personal needs. How many guys had Melanie dated who asked her about odd spots on their skin, or called her for every sneeze and sore throat? Or that one guy she caught searching through her desk drawers for her prescription pad…
When she finally clicked the link to the website, her phone’s screen was immediately filled with promises. A test written by psychologists guaranteed a perfect match. Once a match was made, the participants had the choice to contact the other person. No personal information was ever given out by the service; if someone wanted to meet a match in the real world, it was up to them to exchange real world information.
Melanie liked that idea. She would be in control. She could talk to these people without them knowing anything more than what she was willing to reveal over the system’s private messaging system. That meant she didn’t even have to offer her real name, let alone give her profession.
But, again, it also meant the men she was matched with had the same options. Was that a risk she was willing to take?
Melanie sat back and looked out the window. All she could see were clouds, a perfect metaphor for her life at the moment. Cloudy. Unknowable. What did her future look like? Was she destined to spend the rest of her life alone, to be that pediatric surgeon who never had a child of her own? Or was there a Mr. Right just around the next corner, and she simply had to be aware enough, patient enough, to find him?
Was this stupid, embarrassing dating service really the answer?
And then she thought about something her mother said right before the wedding. “You never know what might happen until you try.”
***
The questionnaire required by the dating service was extremely comprehensive. Melanie worked on it a little at a time, answering questions while veg’ing out on reality television late at night. Some of the questions made a lot of sense, such as “Did you go to college?”, but others made little or no sense. One question wanted to know the title of the last book she read. And another asked if her parents were married or divorced, like that had anything to do with the kind of man she might chose to spend her life with. Besides, how was she supposed to answer that? Her parents never married, but they might have if her father hadn’t had the bad luck of meeting a drunk driver on the road one late night. But there was no guarantee they would have stayed together. He was, after all, married to someone else when her mother got pregnant.
But she continued to work at it, finally finishing it nearly a week after she began. She was kind of expecting to have a dozen matches appear in her profile the moment she hit the send button, but instead she received an email informing her it could take up to three weeks to find a match.
Three weeks? That’s what she was paying all this money for?
Melanie set it aside and forgot about it. It was a stupid idea, anyway.
Chapter 2
“You have to follow every word to the letter. You understand?” Melanie asked in her sternest voice.
Her patient, a five year old with a congenital heart valve prolapse, nodded gravely.
“You have to take your medication every morning, no complaining.”
The girl nodded again.
“And you have to rest when your mother tells you to.”
Another nod.
“And, finally, you have to eat at least one scoop of chocolate ice cream before bed every night.”
The girl’s eyes widened and she began to giggle. “Really?”
“Really.” Melanie held up her hand in a gesture of sincerity. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Thank you, Dr. Spence,” the girl’s mother said as she followed Melanie out the door of her daughter’s hospital room.
Melanie touched her arm lightly. “You’re daughter’s going to be fine. Like I said before, we’ll probably have to go in and replace the valve again when she’s a teen, but until then, she should be able to do just about anything a child her age does.”
The mother’s eyes filled with tears. Melanie just smiled and walked away, pausing at the nurse’s desk to drop off the iPad used to update patient charts.
“Looks like you made another friend,” Tanya, the head nurse on the pediatric floor, said.
Melanie glanced back and saw the five year old wave at her as she was wheeled to the elevator by an orderly. Her mother waved too, a bright smile on her tear streaked face.
“It’s easy to make friends when everything goes the way it’s supposed to.” She turned back to the iPad and inputted the last of her notes on the appropriate lines.
“You going to Dr. Willis’ party tonight?”
Melanie handed the chart to Tanya and shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you think it’s going to be like the last one?”
Tanya laughed. “You mean, do I think Dr. Thomas and that nurse from the CCU are going to end up in another compromising position in Willis’ back bedroom? I don’t think so…but maybe someone else…”
Melanie smiled. “It was quite a scene. I almost wish I hadn’t missed it.”
“You should come. I hear that hunk from radiology is going to be there.”
Melanie’s eyebrows rose. There was a new guy in the radiology department, a technician who was built kind of like Chris Hemsworth, from the blond hair to the bulging muscles. All the nurses were talking about him to the point that Melanie finally went down to catch a glimpse of him herself. And she had to admit, he was really easy on the eyes.
“Maybe.”
She headed down to the doctor’s lounge, pulling her cellphone out of her back pocket to check her emails. There was another text from her mother with a picture of the amazing view off the bow of the yacht she and Burton were spending their honeymoon aboard.
Was it wrong to be jealous of her own mother?
She stepped onto the elevator and clicked on her email service. Almost immediately she saw an email from the dating service. It made her blush, just seeing the name there, and she quickly scrolled down so that the alert was hidden on the screen, replaced by routine emails—notices from her billing service, a couple of emails from her colleagues, one from the lab informing her that a patient’s blood work was done—in case one of the others on the elevator happened to look over her shoulder and see it there.
Once alone in the doctor’s lounge, she thought about deleting it without reading it. But the subject line caught her attention: Congratulations! You have received five matches.
Five? She didn’t know what the average was, but five didn’t seem like that many.
In the end, Melanie opened the email and read through it. It didn’t tell much, just gave the first names, ages, and locations of the five matches:
Kyle, 40, Denver.
Tony, 38, Houston.
Sonny, 42, Austin.
Nash, 35, Dallas.
Ron, 30, Grand Prairie.
Only the last two were geographically close enough to make sense. They were also the two closest to her ideal age range. To be fair, she had told the system that she would be willing to date anyone between 30 and 45, but she really would prefer someone closer to her own age. And close to the Dallas area so that she wouldn’t have to travel long distances for dates. She would also like…
Was she really considering this?
She stared at those names, these potential lovers, and shook her head. What was she thinking? There was no way some algorithm could find her a lifelong mate. It was a joke, really, a desperate act by a desperate woman.
She turned off the phone and dropped it into the bottom of her bag. What she really needed was to go out once in a while and take a chance on a real connection instead of sitting around hoping that Mr. Right would fall in her lap. What she needed was to go to Willis’ party that night.
***
Melanie walked into the party through the open front door to find that it was already in full swing. People she had worked with for years were letting their hair down—quite literally in a few cases—drinking and laughing and dancing like they were reliving their college days. Such a difference from the stress of their daily lives. She couldn’t remember the last time she had relaxed that way. She wasn’t sure she was even capable of it anymore.
She made her way through the crowd, waving a vague hello to people who called out her name, and sidled up to the bar—or, more accurately, the space against the wall that had a board balanced on cinderblocks in front of it.
“A screwdriver, please.”
The bartender made it as deftly as Melanie had sewn that five year old’s new valve into place a few days before, setting it before her in half the time she might have taken with it, settling a napkin under it with a little bit of a flourish.
“There you go, pretty lady.”
Melanie looked up, focusing on his face for the first time. He was tall, broad shouldered, and blond, the kind of guy she tended to gravitate toward. And he had a beautiful smile. She picked up the glass and made a sort of saluti
ng gesture. “Thanks.”
“You can’t possibly be here alone.”
“Unfortunately, I am.”
“That’s a crime.”
“Are you flirting with me?” She looked up again, a soft smile slipping over her lips. “It’s been so long…”
“I doubt that.”
“The last guy who flirted with me was a construction worker whose leg had been severed in an accident. And that was during the last week of my residency, too many years ago to say.”
He shook his head as he leaned toward her over the bar. “I don’t believe that. I think you’re just not paying attention.”
“Maybe.”
Melanie sipped at her drink as she surveyed the room. Tanya was dancing with her husband, an amazing looking lawyer that rumor said she met when he visited his niece on the pediatric floor. And Kylie, one of the pediatric interns, dancing with a doctor from orthopedics. She recognized a couple of the surgical techs and two phlebotomists who did great jobs with her patients. Everyone seemed to be having a good time.
How does one do that again?
And then she saw the hunk from radiology on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall as he quietly observed what was going on around him. When his eyes met Melanie’s, he smiled. Was it stupid that that little gesture made her heart skip a beat? Was it even stupider for her to decide to go over there and see if that smile meant anything more than, “Hi, some doctor I work with…”?
She finished her drink and set the glass on the makeshift bar, smiling gratefully at the bartender. He winked and offered an encouraging nod. Well, if things went really bad, at least she had the bartender in her corner.
“Hey, Mel!” Tanya called.
Melanie smiled, making the nurse smile as well by moving her hips in a little shimmy as she made her way across the dance floor. Tanya whistled, and that made Melanie laugh. And then she was suddenly in the hunk’s arms, his warm palm pressed against the low edge of her backless dress.
