Stepbrother, My Love

by Stephanie Brother

  About the Author

  Stephanie Brother writes scintillating stories with step-siblings as their main romantic focus. She's always been curious about the forbidden, and this is her way of exploring such complex relationships that threaten to keep her couples apart. As she writes her way to her dream job, Ms. Brother hopes that her readers will enjoy the full emotional and romantic experience as much as she's enjoyed writing them.

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  © 2015 Stephanie Brother

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.

  Kindle Edition

  Stepbrother, My Love

  By

  Stephanie Brother

  Part I.

  What did one wear when meeting a billionaire?

  Whatever it was, Jenny Albright thought to herself, she was clearly not cutting it.

  She hadn’t intended to meet reclusive Billionaire Liam McAllister today, and her gray pencil skirt, crisp white button-down shirt, and sensible black pumps were not what she would have picked.

  Well, she amended to herself, perhaps I would have picked them if I hadn’t been chasing kids all day.

  Her gray skirt now sported a mixture of coffee stains (hers), and spaghetti sauce (the kids), her button-down sported a spray of blue ink (hers), and magic markers (the kids), and the black pumps were caked with mud and had a sole that was threatening to break free from the rest of the shoe.

  Damn it.

  There was no getting around it though. She was a hot mess.

  She had tried to talk Owen, her boss, out of making her go meet with Mr. McAllister.

  “Surely there is someone better qualified,” she had argued.

  “No,” Owen had said, “No one knows this project better than you do. And besides,” he added in an offhand manner that Jenny hadn’t thought to question, “He asked for you specifically.”

  Specifically? A billionaire had asked for her specifically?

  That seemed more than dubious and Jenny strongly suspected the more likely story was that Owen had suggested she go in his place.

  Owen hated asking people for money.

  “Well,” Jenny murmured to herself, her cold breath fogging up the window in her old beater of a car, “I’m not really found of asking people for money either.”

  One million dollars.

  That’s how much money they needed.

  One million dollars.

  It was an insane sum to her, and it was an astronomical sum to the sleepy little New Hampshire town she lived in. Deep Haven was a special place—the definition of picture-postcard New England quaint, with a town green, a white-steepled church, and a main street lined with locally owned shops-- but the affluent little town also served the social services needs of many other smaller villages in the rural state.

  The special education program Jenny ran at Deep Haven Middle School— one she had almost singlehandedly rebuilt from the ground up several years ago—had long outgrown its building and its resources. At this point Jenny was making things work with spit, bubblegum, and a prayer. The boiler was about to blow in the 100 year-old building and winter was only a few weeks away. That was only the most pressing issue on a long list of needs her little school had, and there hadn’t been money in the budget to rehabilitate the outdated building in more than thirty years.

  Private donations, Owen had told her, were their only hope in getting anything changed in the near future. And saying that, he had presented her a list the tax roll of Deep Haven’s most affluent citizens.

  Get Writing, he had ordered her, telling her to solicit the wealthier town members for support.

  A few donations had come in. One hundred dollars here, two hundred there… but nothing close to the amount they would need to be able to transition their program into a new building.

  The thought of her special needs kids spending another winter in a building where the heat regularly dipped below 60 degrees and the hot water cut in and out during the day made her irrationally angry.

  Budget cuts, she’d been told by the superintendent with a shrug. The main school building needed upgrades too, and the “traditional” students (or so the superintendent had called them, euphemistically), were more numerous. It wasn’t personal, he’d said, just a numbers game.

  Well, she thought with a steely resolve as she drove her rusted old junker up the narrow mountain dirt road, it was personal to her. And she would get those donations or she would die trying.

  Just as she had that thought, a deer jumped out from the thick forest of trees lining the side of the mountain path and almost ran her off the under-serviced trail.

  Shit!!!

  She almost lost complete control of the car, but Jenny managed to straighten herself in time, keeping herself on the road.

  POP!

  “Oh, SHIT.” This time, she cursed out loud. She knew that sound. That was the sound of a tire blowing out. She knew that sound because that would be her third blown out tire this year…. And…

  OH SHIT.

  She hadn’t replaced the spare tire.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  She was always reminding her students not to procrastinate, and there she was… having procrastinated herself into a situation where she was going to be up the mountain without a way down.

  Jenny tapped her GPS and noticed that she was only about a quarter of a mile from her destination.

  Liam McAllister’s vacation lodge.

  Garondah, the locals called the mountain ledge, some bastardization of a local Native American place name, but it had stuck. One of the first families of Deep Haven had claimed the land and subsequent generations had built and expanded upon the remote compound. Jenny knew of it—hell, all of Deep Haven knew of it—but Jenny didn’t know anyone who had actually ever been up there unless they were workmen or maids.

  The estate had been vacant for a good 5 years when Billionaire Liam McAllister bought it, and it had been juicy gossip for months. Who was he? What did he look like?

  As the owner of a trillion dollar pharmaceutical and chemical company, the young tycoon was notoriously reclusive, and very little was known about him. He shunned all media and press, preferring to let his public affairs office do the talking for him.

  Jenny pulled open the rusted door of her Ford sedan and didn’t bother locking the door when she kicked it closed behind her. She almost hoped someone would steal the lump of junk so that at least she could claim some insurance money from it.

  The cold November wind whipped around her and she hugged her light jacket around her. She hadn’t anticipated this weather when she’d set out today, and as she looked up at the ominous gray sky, Jenny had a dread sense of foreboding. She could almost smell the snow coming their way. Oh, it wasn’t on the forecast, but all the locals had learned never to trust the forecast anyway. The weather channels in this remote part of New Hampshire only ever gave the Boston forecast, and up in the mountains the weather could change quickly.

  Jenny grabbed her sensible leather briefcase from the backseat, the case that held her precious grant proposal, and she started trudging up the mountain. As she set out she realized two things. The first was that a while walking quarter of a mile hadn’t seemed bad… t
hat was, until she had started trudging up it almost completely vertically.

  The second was that sensible pumps at a sensible price from Payless Shoes did not hold up well to the mud and rocks of a New Hampshire mountainside… especially when one heel was already starting to come off anyway.

  Shiiiiit.

  ***

  Part II.

  Liam McAllister considered himself a patient man, a forgiving man, a kind man. But he was also a man for whom time was money.

  And, He thought to himself with a strong hint of disapproval, if someone was asking for money, they had better be on time.

  No.

  Not just someone.

  Not just anyone.

  Jenny.

  Jenny Albright, his childhood crush, and the source of many forbidden teenaged fantasies in his younger years. Because she was…

  His stepsister.

  Liam wondered what he would say to her when he saw her again. In fact, he’d been working on his “I’m so surprised to see you too!” face for quite some time. He’d also been preparing several different speeches, telling her how much he had looked forward to seeing her again, how much he had to tell her, how often he had masturbated to the memory of her….

  Ok. Not that last part.

  Definitely not that last part.

  It had been 15 years since last he’d seen her. Fifteen years since their parents’ four-year marriage fell apart after Jenny’s dad cheated on his mom.

  Liam and Pam had moved to California when he was 16, and when she had remarried Gregory McAllister, Liam had been adopted and taken his new stepfather’s name.

  Liam been shy, the new kid in school, the son of a west-coast hippie who was constantly on the move, constantly in a new relationship, and he was never making any friends. The fact that he had been short, skinny, covered in pimples, wore glasses three sizes too big, and had a terrible stutter hadn’t helped either. To say he had been picked on would have been an understatement, and so he learned to keep quiet and keep his head down whenever he started at a new school

  What was the point of trying to make friends when his mother inevitably moved on only a couple years anyway? No, better to keep to himself, he always thought.

  And that had been his plan. That was, until he had met his new stepsister.

  He’d been 12 when they met, and she was 15. She had approached him with a with a giant bear hug and squealed, “So I guess you’re my new brother! I’ve always wanted a brother!”

  A goddess. That’s what she was to his teenage self— a goddess. Well developed and curvy, with shimmering friendly eyes, and long shining hair almost to her small waist. He had been left speechless at the sight of her, but that was ok. With his stutter he never liked to say much, and Jenny was always good at doing enough talking for the both of them. He smiled at the memory— a memory that had kept him awake many nights in his youth as he remembers what it had felt like to be nestled up against her soft breasts.

  Their parents had met online, and Pam had moved Liam all the way across the country for the third time in his life to move in with a new family. At least this time he had a sister who served as his friend, confidant, and protector. Their parents’ marriage had been rocky from the start, and Jenny and Liam would often find themselves huddled together in a bedroom trying to block out the sounds of their arguments.

  One night in particular stood out to him. They had both reached for a video game controller at the same time their hands had accidentally touched. The spark was palpable and Jenny’s hand had lingered on his. She had looked into his eyes and smiled at him instead of being repulsed, and his puppy-love crush had instantaneously developed into full-blown adoration.

  Jenny at 15 had been perfection—at least, she was perfection to him. She was brainy, and smart, and funny. She was kind and thoughtful and always willing to lend a helping hand by helping with his homework or inviting him to sit at her table at lunch in the cafeteria. She had been an early bloomer, Liam recalled, with curves in all the right places. And if the other boys found her a bit too plump for their liking? Well, that was their loss he figured.

  He had loved the roundness of her backside when he watched her walk down the hall in her skimpy pjs, he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of the slope and bounce of her breasts as she played volleyball on the varsity team. He loved watching her graceful movements when she played the flute in the marching band. He recalled her honey-blond hair hung almost to her waist in soft waves and framed a heart-shaped face with large chocolate brown eyes. She had been blessed as a teenager with blemish-free skin, that much he had remembered with some jealousy, noting his own pockmarked face.

  The truth was, he thought rather wryly, she probably could have been the ugliest troll on earth, and he would have still thought her an angel from heaven if only because she was the sole person he could recall having ever been kind to him as a teenager. But she wasn’t a troll, she was beautiful in a subtle and quiet way—not showy like the cheerleaders and prom queens.

  To say that Jenny was out of his league though would have been like saying a poor kid from a hippie commune could somehow make it big and become a billionaire.

  Liam smiled to himself.

  He had somehow made it big.

  He had somehow become a billionaire.

  And, even though she might not be aware of it, he owed a lot to Jenny Albright. Her encouragement when he struggled in calculus class had made him want to do well, to pursue higher levels of math and science in an effort to impress her with his grades.

  That passion had stayed with him even after he had moved away. At 18 his own experimentation had yielded a new way to process sugar that cut the calories in half. At 20 he had patented that idea and started his own distribution company. At 25 he had made the Forbes fortune 500 list and his sugar substitute was now found in everything from soft-drinks, to cereal, to diet foods. But at 31 he had realized that for all he had accomplished, he still lacked one thing—someone to share his success with.

  Oh, he had dated… yes, as soon as he’d made his first million women had suddenly found him irresistible.

  Well, he had to admit that a few other changes had helped in that regard as well. In the last 15 years he’d grown almost 10 inches and now stood at 6’5. His shoulders had widened and his frame had put on almost a hundred pounds of muscle thanks to a daily workout regime. His skin had cleared up naturally, and his annoying stutter had almost been completely taken care of through expensive elocution lessons— it only came out when he had to give speeches now— something he avoided at all costs. And, finally, contact lenses had done away with the cheap, huge and hideous frames he’d been forced to wear most of his life.

  And so, he had dated. At one point, shortly after making his first ten million dollars, he’d gone on a dating spree—and he’d found so many of the women he met empty, and shallow, and those relationships had left him feeling even lonelier than before.

  When Owen Murphy had called his secretary, asking for a meeting about a donation, Liam hadn’t been interested at all. The last thing he needed were more reminders of that painful high school year. He hadn’t even been up to the Garondah estate since he’d purchased it at auction several years back. The only reason he’d even bought the damned property was because it was in the only town he had ever lived in where he had ever felt truly at home. And that was all thanks to Jenny— only Jenny.

  And then he’d learned that Miss Albright was the promising young teacher that Mr. Murphy had wanted him to meet and his tune changed quickly.

  Send her up.

  And Owen had.

  And so, there Liam was… pacing the floor, waiting for Jenny… just as he had waited for her so many times before.

  A knock came at the door. Eagerly Liam swung the door open, being hit as he did so with an arctic cold blast of air.

  In front of him stood…

  …One of the most dishevled women he had eve

  ***

  Part III.


  In front of Jenny stood…

  … One of the most handsome men she had ever seen.

  She was instantly aware of her bedraggled appearance in the face of such masculine beauty. She reached up a hand and smoothed her hair which stood out at odd angles. Her mascara was smudged and running down her face, and for the rest of it… well. She thought it best not to think of it. All she could do at this point was power though.

  She stuck out her hand, setting her shoulders back, and inhaling deeply said, “Hi, I’m Jennifer Albright, I’m here to meet Mr. McAllister.”

  The gorgeous man in front of her blinked. Twice.

  He was tall, his dark hair swept back from his face, and he stared at her quizzically with piercing blue eyes, his brows furrowed. He had to be a servant of some sort— maybe there to plow the driveway or shovel the walks? His button down flannel shirt and casual jeans clung to his muscled frame.

  “Jenny?”

  “Er— Sure… I mean, some people call me that. Is Mr. McAllister here? I know I’m a bit late…”

  She looked past him into the large, high-ceilinged, wood-paneled hall, wondering if she might catch a glimpse of his reclusive employer.

  Liam was watching her, wondering if he could glimpse the young girl he’d known so well underneath all the caked on mud and dirt and mess. He closed the door behind her and reached for her coat, which she shrugged off hurriedly. As he hung it up the realization struck him…

  …She didn’t know who he was.

  “Did I miss him?” She continued, “Please tell me I didn’t miss him…”

  “Um… yes, unfortunately Mr. McAllister had to leave…”

  “Ohh… Noooo.” Jenny sighed, her shoulders slumping. Liam almost felt sorry for her.

  Almost.

  He was getting rather annoyed that she didn’t seem to recognize him at all.

  “Jenny…?”

  “Yes?” She looked up at him, her wide eyes staring, seeming to take him in at last.

  “Jenny, don’t you recognize me?”

  Her lashes fluttered as she continued staring, and then she gasped. “No! It can’t be!? Billy! Is that you?!”