Stepbrother Romance: The Complete Box Set

by Diamond Durango

  Time passed quickly, which was how Aviana liked a job to be. At lunch she went to the cafeteria, welcomed to sit with the rest of the mail staff, and in the afternoon she confronted the mailroom’s supplies cabinet. It had truly been raided. Someone or more than one someone had made off with the sticky notes and boxes of pens while dumping an entire box of paperclips over the shelves and floor in the process. Rubber bands were mixed in. Empty shelves were labeled for what they had once contained in envelopes and labels and scissors. Making a list of everything that had to be refilled, Aviana straightened up the mess and reported to the elevator, where she rode up to the fourth floor with a cart. The woman who worked for the general supplies office saw the ID clipped to her pocket and waved her in. She passed a long time in pacing around the aisles to restock. No one else was there.

  Her cell phone was quiet. It would be extraordinarily easy for Milan to access another phone and resume his hang-up calls, but he hadn’t done that yet. There was a gate at the base of the driveway now, stretching to each end of the wall around the garden. Wyatt had gotten it up in record time and made an appointment to have a professional security system put in. He also had a security camera installed over the driveway. If anyone came up it, he would receive a phone call with a picture.

  But Milan hadn’t shown his face since the mall, and she had taken a circuitous drive to get to work each day. It would take fancy footwork on his part to gain admittance to the building. People were only allowed past the front desk with an ID, and a guard stood watch to make sure everyone else spoke to the receptionists about who they were, where they were going, and why. Another guard was stationed at the side door. Milan could only bother her if she went out to lunch, but with the cafeteria all of fifty feet away from the mailroom, she planned to eat there every day.

  Rolling the cart around another corner, she spotted the manila envelopes. They were on a shelf high over her head. Aviana pushed up onto her tiptoes to reach it, and Hollis came around the corner as she sank back onto her heels in defeat. “Need a lift?” he asked.

  She had barely seen him on Monday, and not at all over the weekend. “Be my guest.”

  Stepping up behind her, he stretched effortlessly for a box of the envelopes and brought them down. They fell into the cart with a thump, and arms went around Aviana’s waist. “How is the job?” Hollis said.

  A charge went through her. Her body still reacted strongly to him, despite the tangle of emotions in her heart. “I’m liking it a lot. Any reason you’re hugging me?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “Do you remember breaking up with me about five seconds after saying we were together?”

  “No. I remember you asking if we were done. I needed to think about it. Avvie, I don’t want to be done.”

  Oh, no. “Hollis,” she said in despair, turning to face him, “you didn’t tell me that you needed to think about it. You didn’t say anything.”

  With earnestness in his blue eyes, he said, “I’m saying it now. I don’t care if it upsets Wyatt. I want to be with you.”

  “Why?”

  His smile was wistful. “Didn’t you like being with me?”

  “I loved it. But that’s not how you do things. You play around and frolic off. So why are you wanting anything more than that with me?”

  “Because when I look at you, I feel tired.” He glanced away from her. Assuming that he didn’t mean it the way it was coming across, she waited. In a moment, he looked back at her. “It gets tiring. I don’t even feel it most of the time when I’m on a date. Dodging has become such a habit. But then I see you and . . . I’m sick of being this way. I want you to know me for who I am, not who I’m pretending to be. I want to be so much more than what I am. I just don’t know how to do it.” He looked perturbed with himself. “I don’t want to be that guy anymore. The one who never makes it to the six-month anniversary, let alone a year. I think I’m enjoying myself but really . . . it’s lonely.” He stroked her cheek. “I don’t know what I have to give. But if there’s anything, anything at all . . . the only time I’ve wanted to stretch for it is when I’m with you.”

  She put her hand on his chest. “Hollis . . .”

  “It was hard to hear what you said that night, about me being fun but Wyatt being safe. I didn’t give you two a second thought that time our parents didn’t come home from their honeymoon. All I thought about was myself. And yeah, I was just a teenager then. But while I was goofing around, you could have gotten hurt. It doesn’t make me feel good about myself now. That was why I wanted to get you a chance for this job. So you would know that . . . that you can depend on me, too.”

  “Hollis, stop.”

  He withdrew in surprise. “You don’t want to give us another try?”

  “I would. I would if I could. But I’m with Wyatt now.”

  He didn’t ask if it was a joke. The truth was in her anguished expression. “He was upset that night because he had come back to be honest about how he feels about me.”

  “He never told me he had feelings for you.”

  “I think all three of us have done a pretty good job for years at not talking about our feelings. I thought you had broken up with me, so . . .” Helplessly, she said, “I don’t want you to shut me out because I’m with him. I love when you actually talk to me. I want to know you.”

  “Are you happier with him than you were with me?”

  “No.” She felt exactly as she had when Hollis asked which one of the two she liked more as a child. “It’s not a question of who’s better. It’s different, completely different.”

  He was angry. But warring with the anger in his eyes was an ineffable sadness that raked her heart. Hollis had made himself vulnerable before her, and only to have her shoot him down. When she went to embrace him, he took a step back. “Can’t we still be friends?” she asked. “Is that too much?”

  He was quiet.

  “Please say something. Anything.”

  Sticking his hands in his pockets, Hollis said, “Remember that game we played as kids? When all three of us were pretending to be married or dating or something, and hanging out on the roof?”

  “I remember.”

  He walked away. “If only.”

  She wanted to go after him, but she didn’t. Too late. Wyatt hadn’t told her how he felt until she was with Hollis, and Hollis hadn’t told her that he wanted to stay together until she was with Wyatt. She couldn’t be with either of them without hurting the other, and to be the cause of their pain killed her.

  She did not know what to do. The rest of the work shift passed with her feeling dull and disinterested in her new tasks. Mercifully it ended, and Wyatt called her on the way home. “Are you checking behind you?”

  She had been, and taking the long way through sun-drenched streets full of poky traffic. “No sign of him.”

  “I have someone coming to the office to talk about Milan.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s no one you need to know. I had him do background work. Don’t wait for me for dinner. I’m going to send Hollis a text and ask him if he wants to sit in on this meeting.”

  Just hearing his name made her heart squeeze painfully. Wyatt received another call and had to go. When she neared home, she drove around the blocks to look for Milan.

  A man walking his dog. Two children playing catch on a lawn. A jogger with her ponytail swinging. There was no hulking, disheveled form lurking around. She pulled up to the new gate and tapped the control twice under her sun visor. The gate rolled open and she drove up to the house. The front door was still locked, the windows closed, but when she walked in, she could not stop herself from peering into every room. Once she was satisfied that she was alone, she put on her new swimsuit and jumped into the pool. Pulling hard, she only kicked with her right leg. The walking and standing at work had tired out the left. Her cell phone was beside the pool, easy to grab if necessary, but if he appeared while she was on the opposite end . . .

  She could
not relax, and soon dragged herself out to go inside. It was well after nine by the time Hollis and Wyatt drove up. Aviana was in her pajamas on the sofa, her leg propped up on a pillow and feeling better. She snapped off the television as they came in with bags of Chinese take-out. In the box, she thought about Hollis, who smiled and sat on the only open sofa cushion. Wyatt took the armchair. “How was the mailroom?” he asked.

  “Fine.” Aviana had more pressing concerns. “Will you tell me what that man told you?”

  “That was a shadow in the night,” Hollis said. “Where did you meet him, Wyatt?”

  “In a dark corner of the business world,” Wyatt said obliquely. “Yes, I’ll tell you. We have a lot to talk about, in fact.”

  Hollis passed a container of egg rolls to Aviana. She took them, though she was not particularly hungry, since they had come from him. “He’s weird,” Hollis said. “Milan, I mean. That was what everything boiled down to, and I could have told you that much without needing confirmation. Ninety percent of the information wasn’t relevant to anything.”

  “I’d still like to hear it,” Aviana said.

  “His parents are Ned and Virginia Dumello,” Wyatt said. “He’s a dentist, she’s a special ed teacher, and they invest well. Hardworking, upper middle class, not so much as a single parking ticket between the two of them. They have five children altogether. Their first and only biological child is a daughter. She’s an Ivy League graduate who is now in her mid-thirties and a prosecutor. Like her parents, a fine, upstanding citizen.”

  “Milan is adopted?”

  “They tried for years, but couldn’t get pregnant again. Eventually, they adopted a sibling set of three from the foster program. All boys. All grew up and went to college and have good jobs now. One runs his own plumbing business, one’s a teacher, and the last is a sports therapist. Records are clean; two are married and have children of their own.”

  “Is Milan a younger biological brother of theirs who got adopted later on?”

  “No, they don’t share blood. Several years after adopting those three boys, a cousin of Virginia’s got pregnant. Mia was nineteen, a high school dropout living at home, and she had substance abuse problems. In and out of jail for petty theft, DUI, public intoxication. After the baby came, she expected her parents to take care of him. This was Milan. They had no desire to be raising an infant while Mia partied and they fought about it for the first months of his life. Finally, she stormed out with him. When he was eight months old, she knocked on the Dumellos’ door unannounced and asked them to adopt the baby. She didn’t want him raised by strangers. They were shocked at how thin and filthy he was and agreed to take him in.” Wyatt paused to eat his food.

  Hollis took over the story. “Mia didn’t tell them much about the father at the time of the adoption, just that he ran off as soon as he heard there was a baby coming. It wasn’t until Milan had been having problems for some time that they sought Mia to ask for more information. She was difficult to locate; the intervening years hadn’t changed her. Still abusing drugs, and she’d lost another child to the foster care system. She admitted that she wasn’t sure who Milan’s father was. When she got knocked up with him, she was having sex with several men. Some of them were total whack-jobs. The Dumello family put Milan in therapy.”

  “What was he doing?”

  Wyatt resumed to let Hollis eat. “They described him as an odd child: obsessive and prone to bursts of rage over nonsensical things. It was hard to connect with him. Even as a baby, he would pull away. They considered autism but had him evaluated when he was three and that wasn’t it. So they figured he was just immature, and struggling to keep up with four older siblings who were brighter and more popular. It wasn’t until he was ten or eleven and things were getting worse instead of better that they began to push for more help for him. He resisted strongly. He was bullied in school, leading the family to move twice so he could get a fresh start with people who didn’t know him. The last move brought him to our hometown high school.”

  “Your shadow in the night is thorough,” Aviana said.

  “Indeed he is. After you and Milan graduated, his parents pushed him to get a job. His grades were too poor for college. The one job he had was at a fast food joint. He was fired within months for tardiness and acting strangely. Since then, he’s drifted. When he kept letting himself into his parents’ home to steal money, they changed the locks and told him no more. He went into a rage and threatened to beat them, and a neighbor called the police after he pushed his father down onto the lawn. The parents didn’t want to press charges. Milan disappeared from their lives after that. The older siblings want nothing to do with him, especially the two with wives and young children. They’re frightened of him and what he could do. The only one that has seen him is the sibling who became a sports therapist. He lives locally. But that was many months ago. Milan appeared on his doorstep and asked to sleep there for a night or two. The brother felt sorry for him and allowed it, but Milan stayed for weeks and did nothing but trash up the place and drink. He got kicked out, thieving money along the way, and the brother saw him once in a homeless encampment under the freeway. When my guy went over there to look, Milan was no longer there.”

  “He can’t have gotten to the mall without a car,” Aviana said. “Where in the hell is he getting money for a car and gas?”

  “He borrows the car from someone else, or else he’s stolen it,” Wyatt said.

  “And this is what he does with himself? Drinks and obsesses about being with me?”

  “He’s very disturbed mentally. Probably psychotic. Psychiatrists never agreed on an official diagnosis for him; what didn’t help was that Milan wouldn’t usually answer their questions. His parents tried to get him to take medication for the symptoms when he was a teenager, but he refused. He doesn’t want medication; he doesn’t want therapy. He believes he’s fine. My guy has had experience with stalkers in the past. Milan is convinced that you are his perfect match. You’re meant to be together. In his head, this is all very romantic.”

  “But those other men keep getting in the way,” Aviana said. “Trying to steal me away from him. Does his family know that he’s stalking me?”

  “No. That’s not unusual. Stalkers like him play their cards close to the chest. Given the type of people they are, I assume they would be horrified.”

  Deep in a container of shrimp in lobster sauce, Hollis said, “I don’t know what you got from all of that, Wyatt.”

  “What I got from all of that was how divorced from reality he is, and how dangerous that makes him. When she was kind in that class, that one fleeting moment spurred this delusion in his head that they had a deep and abiding bond between them. Aviana isn’t a person to him. She’s just an object in his fantasy.”

  The incident in the mall was troubling Aviana. “I wasn’t speaking to any man when I was shopping. Why was he so angry?”

  Wyatt looked at her thoughtfully. “He likes to control when and where you see him. He took great pains with that costume to make himself unrecognizable. But what happened? He got careless and came too close as you walked around the mall, and that blew his cover when you realized who he was. Then you didn’t run to him, like you must do in his fantasies. You ran away. You could have been running to another man, whatever man is currently keeping you away from him. He gave chase to reassert his fantasy that he is the only man in your life.”

  What would Milan have done had he caught her? Scream that she was a whore and replay one of his many break-ups with her, or insist that she come with him and drag her when she refused? The presence of other people had intimidated him from devolving into a fight around her college campus, but then he grabbed her in the dining hall in front of dozens of students. There was no way to predict his next move. “And how long is this going to go on?” she asked. “It’s been five years since this began. Five years in which I have never, ever given him any positive signals that I want him in return.”

  Hollis nudged he
r foot in sympathy as Wyatt said, “It could go on for a lot longer, Avvie. Stalkers can be very persistent. Milan has no relationship with his parents or siblings, and I doubt he has any friends. You’re his world.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “His imaginary world.”

  “It doesn’t matter if the signal he gets from you is positive or negative. In a way, it’s all positive. All of it feeds into his disturbance. You just have to insulate yourself. Make yourself as inaccessible as possible so he gets no signals whatsoever. I’m going to help with that. In time, his fixation may shift to someone else.”

  After polishing off the last of his meal, Hollis received a phone call and took it in the other room. It sounded like he was turning down a spur of the moment movie offer from a buddy. His eyes closed, Wyatt rested in the chair. “If you want to move, we’ll move,” he said. “Money is no object.”

  She didn’t want them to lose this beautiful house because of Milan. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Do that.”

  “I read an article online about a stalker who chased a woman all around the country for fifteen years. He was a former CEO or something like that. It only stopped when he was jailed.”

  “Milan doesn’t have the financial wherewithal like a CEO does to chase you around everywhere. He has only whatever he can beg or steal. Hollis and I can always transfer to the Chicago or the New York office. Even overseas.”

  “I won’t ask you to do that for me.”

  “Then I’ll just make the decision if it comes to that without consulting you, since all you’ll do is think of me before yourself.”