Mail Order Stepbrother

by Ward, Kira

  “I want this,” Tess said, her voice strong.

  “What about Jack?”

  She shook her head, her attention dropping to the infant sleeping comfortably now in her arms. “Jack is filing for divorce. He gave me an ultimatum last night, and I chose Eli.”

  Anger bloomed in the center of Melanie’s chest, but she simply nodded. “Well then, we’ll proceed as planned. The nurses will transfer Eli to pre-op. Then the anesthesiologist should drop by to discuss the medications he’ll be using during the procedure to keep Eli comfortable. And then I’ll stop by, make sure everything’s okay before we get started.”

  Tess nodded.

  Melanie squeezed her hand before letting go. “If you have any questions, just ask the nurses to page me.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Spence.”

  Melanie grabbed the iPad from where she’d dropped it in the seat of a chair and nodded as she glanced back at Tess. When she first learned that Jack was married, she imagined a mouse of a woman who had no idea that her husband was stepping out on her. But now… she couldn’t help but admire Tess for her strength. She wasn’t sure she could face the future Tess was staring at all on her own.

  Tess reminded Melanie a little of her mother. She suddenly had a deep desire to speak to her mom, but waited until she had checked on her other patients before she slipped into the nurses’ break room.

  “What’s the matter?” her mother said in way of greeting.

  “What makes you think something is wrong?”

  “Because you rarely ever call me just to talk.”

  Melanie wanted to deny it, but she knew it was true. She lived a busy life, had a busy career, and she didn’t make her mother a priority in her life.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s not right.”

  “What’s going on, Mel?”

  She reached up and dragged her fingers through her hair. “Nothing. Just a long day already.” She sighed, her thoughts jumping from Tess to Eli to the surgery that was coming up. “How’s the party planning coming?”

  “Beautifully. I got your package with the sailboats…they’re perfect, just what I wanted.”

  “Good. Did you go over the guest list I sent back to you? I added a couple of names.”

  “Yes. I can’t believe I forgot Kurt,” she said, mentioning the name of the man who ran the community center she volunteered at, the place where she met Burton. “Thank you for fixing that.”

  “No problem. What else can I do?”

  “Oh, darling, there’s not much else. Not until you get here, of course. Are you still coming early?”

  “I’ll try. Depends on how crazy things are with my patients that weekend.”

  “Please try. I miss you, darling. And I can really use your help. This is the first big thing I’m doing as Burton’s wife and I want to make sure everything is perfect.”

  More guilt.

  “I’ll do my best.” Melanie ran her fingers through her hair again, thinking about the cases she had coming up in the next few weeks, trying to decide if she could postpone any of them. And then she realized that now wasn’t the time. “I love you, mom,” she said quietly into the phone. “I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Then I’ll see you in a few weeks.

  ***

  Melanie walked into the surgery waiting room, the fresh scrubs she’d quickly pulled on rubbing uncomfortably against the back of her neck. She reached up to adjust them when Tess spotted her, her eyes filling with tears before a single word came out of Melanie’s mouth.

  “He’s fine,” she said, reaching for the smaller woman. “The surgery went very well. We repaired the hole and looked around to make sure there wasn’t anything else that didn’t show up on the tests. There were no surprises.”

  “He’s going to be okay?”

  “He is,” Melanie said, rubbing Tess’s arms. “You can go sit with him in a few minutes. They’re just getting him get settled in the NICU. There are going to be a lot of wires and tubes, like I explained earlier. But with any luck we should be able to remove those fairly quickly.”

  “Thank you.” Tess threw her arms around Melanie and hugged her tightly, her fresh tears wetting the shoulder of Melanie’s scrubs.

  Melanie didn’t really mind.

  ***

  “When you said you cooked, I imagined lots of cans and boxes.”

  Nash laughed as he lifted the lid of a pot bubbling on Melanie’s stove and stirred its contents. “And when you said you couldn’t make toast, I thought you were exaggerating.”

  Melanie tossed a piece of onion at him—a piece that was still a little too thick despite his patient tutorial on the art of dicing vegetables. She could wield a scalpel like an artist, but she apparently couldn’t do the same with a kitchen knife. Nash ducked the onion but then moved up behind her and pulled her hard against his chest, brushing his lips against her temple.

  He showed up at her door an hour ago, a bag of groceries in his hands and a smile. “You sounded hungry in your text,” he’d said.

  She wasn’t sure how one could sound hungry over a text, but she was happier than she should have been to see him.

  They sat down to eat a few minutes later, an amazing steak with this incredible risotto and a badly cut salad. She had to take credit for the salad, of course, but the rest was perfect…better than a restaurant meal.

  “Your mother must have been an awesome cook to teach you how to do this.”

  “My mother was awesome on many levels.” He picked up his wine glass and studied its depths for a second. “I was the baby, coming along at a time when my father’s career was pretty solid and she had time to stay at home, to spend some one on one time with me. So we were very close.”

  “You have older siblings?”

  “A sister. She’s six years older than me.”

  Melanie sat back and tucked her foot underneath her, getting comfortable for what she hoped would be a long, informative conversation. He didn’t often talk about himself.

  “I always wanted siblings.”

  “You didn’t miss anything.” He smiled despite the venom in his words. “My sister was like a second mother, always telling me what to do even when it wasn’t really necessary. She’s still doing it.”

  Melanie half nodded. “I get that. I’m still trying to convince my mother she doesn’t have to mother me anymore.”

  “Oh, they never stop.” Nash reached over and took her hand. “My mother would have adored you though.”

  “Would have?”

  A sadness came into his blue eyes, making them darker than the dim light in her tiny dining room had already done. “She died several years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “She’d been sick for a long time. It was almost a mercy when it finally happened. She was in so much pain…”

  Melanie nodded, thinking of the few patients she’d met during her internship who were suffering the final days of a terminal illness. She hadn’t understood the idea behind euthanasia until then.

  Nash lifted his wine glass again, contemplating it a second before he drained it. Then he reached for the bottle to pour them both some more. Melanie rubbed his arm and smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “Are you close to your dad?”

  Nash didn’t even look at her. “No.”

  There was a certain amount of finality to his statement, and it hurt Melanie to hear. She’d never known her father, because he died when she was so young. All her childhood she imagined what her life would have been like if he hadn’t died, if he had remained a part of their lives. Even now, even as an adult who understood the darker side of humanity, she still wondered what her life would have been like if he had lived. She imagined that even if he abandoned the family it would have been better than not having him at all.

  She couldn’t imagine why someone would willingly choose to not have their father as a part of their life.

  “Do you talk to him?”


  “Have to,” Nash said, setting the wine glass down and pushing his dinner plate away. “The company I run technically belongs to him. So I have to deal with him on the few occasions he chooses to check in on things.”

  “That’s sad.”

  Nash shrugged. “He’s fine. He just got remarried to some young woman my sister apparently approves of. In fact, she called me today and insisted that I come home to attend some party his new wife is throwing for him.”

  “Will you go?”

  “Didn’t go to the wedding. Probably won’t go to this, either.”

  “Why?”

  Nash got up and gathered the dirty dishes, walking them into her small galley kitchen.

  “Don’t really want to talk about it,” he finally said. “I didn’t come over here to confess my dark family history.”

  “I don’t mean to pry. I just want to know more about you.”

  He set the dishes in the sink and turned on the facet, rinsing the plates before dropping them into the dishwasher. She got up and slid up behind him, stilling his hands. “Don’t worry about the dishes. I’ll do them later.”

  He turned, his wet hands cold as he slipped them up underneath her thin t-shirt. “Do you really want to know how fucked up my relationship with my dad is? Or would you rather find something else to do?”

  “You don’t have to tell me everything. Just don’t shut down when it gets hard.”

  He pressed his lips to her forehead for a long second. “Maybe I just don’t want to scare you away. Not yet.”

  “I can’t imagine there’s anything in your past that could scare me away.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I just…there are things about my family I’d rather not dump on you until you’re sure you want to stick around.”

  That should have set off alarm bells in her head. Instead, it made her feel guilty. “There’s something I haven’t told you about me,” she said, stepping out of his arms. “It’s been an issue in the past, guys going out with me because of it and not because of me, so I purposely didn’t put it in my profile.”

  He grabbed her hip and pulled her back into his arms. “Let’s not talk anymore,” he said softly against her lips. And then he was kissing her in that way that made her belly flutter and her toes curl. In less than a minute, she forgot what she had been about to say. In a little more than a minute, she was leading the way into the bedroom.

  ***

  Melanie still had a smile on her lips the following morning as she parked her car in her assigned spot inside the hospital’s parking garage. She licked her lips and imagined she could still taste Nash there. He’d stayed till morning, sharing her shower and feeding her an amazing omelet he’d thrown together with the random items long forgotten in her refrigerator. She definitely never starve to death as long as he was in her life.

  And she wasn’t just thinking about food…

  She climbed out of the car and grabbed her bag, reaching inside for her cellphone. She was about to turn when a heavy hand landed painfully on her shoulder.

  “Why did you have to go and give her hope?”

  Melanie turned, stuffing her hand back into her bag in search of the bottle of pepper spray her mother gave her years ago when she first moved to Dallas. She couldn’t find it, her fingers desperately searching, as she tried to appear calm as she looked up into Jack’s face.

  “Eli’s doing quite well,” she said. “Have you been up to see him?”

  “We were doing just fine until you put your nose into things. She was fine with the idea of giving him up, giving him to someone who had the time and the money to deal with his problems. But then you had to go and agree to this surgery, to donating your services and all that bullshit—“

  “I only did what Tess asked for.”

  He shook his head, his angry eyes never leaving her face. “You complicated what should have been a simple situation. Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t want to put the kid through the surgery? Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t want to have to deal with the stress and the expense of caring for him when he goes home? Did you ever think of what was best for me, for my wife, and for our personal situation?”

  “Jack—“

  “You just had to butt in, take control, and save the day.” He stepped into her, his spittle flying over her face as he leaned close and said, “Doctors like you make me sick. You see these patients as a challenge, something to prove your worth. You never see the human factor.”

  He slammed his hand into the soft metal of her car door, inches from her side, and then walked away, gone as quickly as he had appeared.

  It was a long time before Melanie’s hands stopped shaking.

  Chapter 6

  Melanie squeezed Nash’s hand lightly before letting go.

  “Don’t forget—extra butter on the popcorn.”

  He smiled that smile that never failed to make her heart skip a beat. “Could I possibly forget that after you told me half a dozen times?”

  “Better not.”

  She walked away, aware that he was watching her cross the crowded theater lobby. She felt like a teenager on her first date. She supposed this was, technically, their second date even though they’d seen each other every night for the past seven days. But it was the first time they’d managed to peel themselves out of her apartment long enough to do anything that resembled a date-like activity.

  Not that she was complaining. She’d be perfectly happy to spend every night for the rest of her life in Nash’s arms.

  She used the restroom, pausing to wash her hands afterward. She scrubbed them like she was about to go into surgery, a habit she was sure she would never break. As she finished, she realized a little girl about four or five was watching her closely from the safety of her mother’s skirt.

  “Hi,” Melanie said, wiggling wet fingers at the small child.

  The child’s big blue eyes widened as she shoved a thumb in to her mouth and hid her face against her mother.

  “She’s shy,” the mother said, running an affectionate hand over her child’s head.

  “There are worse things to be than shy.”

  Melanie dried her hands and wiggled her fingers at the child one more time before she left. The little girl smiled around her thumb, and then hid her face again.

  Melanie loved kids. Always had. And she seemed to have a way with them.

  It was certainly nice to interact with a child that wasn’t suffering some debilitating heart condition, though.

  She found herself wondering as she walked back into the lobby if Nash was interested in children. It was something they had yet to talk about. Melanie wanted kids…that desire was part of the reason she had joined the dating site in the first place. She wanted a husband, a couple of kids, the whole white picket fence thing. But she realized that she had failed to ask Nash what he wanted.

  Maybe that was a conversation they should have before things progressed much further.

  She spotted him standing off to the side of the lobby, a tub of popcorn and a coke in his hands. She couldn’t help the excitement that bubbled in her chest, that made her want to run up and throw her arms around him. She was about to do just that when she realized he wasn’t alone.

  A woman, tall and redheaded, the kind of woman who looks professional enough to be a CEO of some technology giant, but pretty enough to be a model, was standing too close to Nash for their conversation to be random.

  “The projections are interesting,” the woman was saying, “but it will be interesting to see what the final report spells out.”

  Nash inclined his head slightly. There was a muscle jumping in his jaw, suggesting he was upset, but his tone was calm as he said, “I guess we’ll find out next month.”

  Melanie slid up next to Nash and touched his arm. He immediately straightened and she could feel the tension rolling off of him in waves.

  “Hello,” the woman said politely. “You must be Melanie.”

  “I am,” Melanie said, surprised to he
ar her name on this stranger’s lips. “And you are?”

  “Caroline. Mr. Coll—“

  “Our movie is about to start,” Nash interrupted. “We should probably get going.”

  “Of course.” Caroline stepped back, her expression filled with curiosity as she studied Melanie for a second longer. “Enjoy.”

  Nash walked off briskly, making Melanie nearly have to run to keep up. They walked into the half empty theater and chose seats toward the center, settling back just as the previews began. Melanie leaned close and asked, “Who was she?”

  Nash shook his head. “My assistant.”

  “Really? What are the chances of running into her here?”

  Nash shrugged, clearly not excited to talk about it. “She had some information for me that couldn’t wait.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  He pushed the tub of popcorn into her lap and pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, clearly done with the conversation. Melanie decided not to push him, but she was very curious about this woman who worked with Nash every day. It distracted her from the movie—which wasn’t that great, anyway—and had her searching every face they passed as they left the theater afterward.

  Of course, she didn’t see her again.

  Nash helped Melanie into his car and turned the car toward her apartment, his fingers drumming to a tune only he could hear as they drove silently through town.

  “Why won’t you talk about your work?” Melanie suddenly asked.

  Nash glanced at her. “It’s boring. You don’t want to hear about it.”

  “It matters to you. I want to know about everything that’s important in your life.”

  He glanced at her, his face a mask in the moving lights of the passing street lamps. “Why don’t you talk about your work?”

  Heat burst across Melanie’s cheeks as she sat back and stared out the windshield. He had a point. She had yet to tell him what she did for a living. She wasn’t even sure why she hadn’t told him. She was no longer afraid that it would be an issue—he certainly wasn’t the type to steal her prescription pad to self-medicate. And there had been opportunities. She simply hadn’t.