Stepbrother Romance: The Complete Box Set Read online

  STEPBROTHER ROMANCE: THE COMPLETE BOX SET

  ALMOST A BROTHER

  FIRST TIME

  IN THEIR ARMS

  by Diamond Durango

  Copyright 2015 by Diamond Durango

  Cover image courtesy depositphotos

  Cover by Emerald Durango

  Table of Contents

  ALMOST A BROTHER

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  FIRST TIME

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  IN THEIR ARMS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  ALMOST A BROTHER

  A Taboo Romance

  by Diamond Durango

  Copyright 2015 by Diamond Durango

  Chapter One

  “Not that one,” Kara said, leaning back in her chair to throw a casual glance to the guys sitting at the distant table. “The one in the blue shirt. A wise woman would avoid.”

  Nikki gave them a surreptitious scan. The bar was dead tonight, so an open, prolonged look was going to be noticed fast. There were four guys altogether, and the one in blue was by far the cutest of their group. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Lowering her voice and twisting her long blonde ponytail around her finger, Kara said, “Apron strings are still firmly attached to mommy. My coworker Jacqueline dated him for a few months. He’s sweet but totally helpless since his mother does everything for him. Every week she drives over to his house, which she and her husband bought for him, to clean it and do his laundry. She buys his clothes. She pays his bills. She fills up his refrigerator with meals she’s made so he doesn’t have to cook. She even goes to his job interviews to offer moral support when he’s twenty-five years old and has a degree in computers! He can’t make the simplest decision without talking to her first, and the last straw for Jacqueline was when his mom called her to talk about intimacy. She was horrified!”

  Nikki was horrified herself. “He was telling his mom about their sex life?”

  “In vivid detail. He co-slept with his parents until he was sixteen and they talk about literally everything. It’s creepy as hell. It doesn’t even register with him that there’s anything wrong, Jacqueline told me. He’s just a grown-up baby. Good-looking, smart, polite, but he’s a baby all the same. Take a pass unless you get off on that sort of thing. I sure as hell don’t. My man needs to be a man.”

  “What about the other ones? Do you know them?” Nikki wasn’t really interested, but she asked if only to keep the conversation going.

  “Yeah, I know them. They all work one floor up from me. Gay, gay, and married. You’re not going to get lucky tonight.”

  “I didn’t come here to get lucky anyway. William’s catching the red-eye and he’ll be arriving at my place in the morning.”

  Kara forgot the guys to gawk at her. “He’s staying with you? Does he . . . know?”

  “No.” Nikki flushed, sorry that she had ever confessed how she felt about her former stepbrother to Kara. “Of course he doesn’t know! When was I going to tell him? He’s been in a relationship for the past few years.”

  “But not anymore.”

  Nikki pushed the straw around in her margarita, which was almost gone. The ice cubes clinked against the glass. “Not anymore. He sounds so devastated on the phone every time we talk.”

  “Did he say why they broke up?”

  “Yes. Shelly was cheating on him the whole time they were together. He had no idea. She’d fly off to business conferences three or four times a year with a guy she works with and they’d have sex while she was there. She didn’t think it was a big deal since she used protection and it was just for a night or two. It’s not like they were going to run away and get married! Or did it at any other time!” Nikki widened her eyes and spoke defensively, like that was all very reasonable. Then she made a face. “She rounded up ninety-nine percent exclusive to one hundred and didn’t understand why William was upset about that one percent of the time she was screwing around on the side.”

  Incredulously, Kara said, “That’s nuts.”

  “They went to counseling sessions but it was pointless. She honestly doesn’t believe that what she did was all that wrong. Everyone fucks like bunnies at business conferences, according to her. The therapist asked if she would stop those conference affairs to mend her relationship. William said the pause broke his heart. She had to think about it. So he broke up with her.”

  “Can’t blame him,” Kara said through a yawn. It was getting late.

  Nikki caught the yawn from her. “But the craziest part was that then she got upset with William! To her ever-so-unique perspective, he’s being unreasonable.”

  “Are you going to tell him now?”

  “I don’t know. This might not be the best time.”

  “He won’t stay on the market long, Nikki. The good ones never do.”

  “Tell me about it.” Her phone vibrated with a text. Kara looked over in interest and Nikki said, “It’s not William. Just my mom with another picture of the Hawaiian sunset and Guy Number Four Zillion.”

  “How many times has she been divorced? Five? Six? More than that now? And that’s not even including all the relationships that didn’t make it to the wedding day. Your mom is a serial monogamist whore.”

  “Yes, she is.” Nikki’s mother was in her early fifties, but emotionally she was forever fifteen. Always discovering The One and riding high on the intoxicating hormones of new love, and then the shine wore off after a few months and she discovered The One yet again in some other man. This had happened so many times through the twenty-two years of Nikki’s life that she had stopped counting. Some of the guys had been nice, some were total assholes, but none ever stuck around for long. That had helped Nikki survive it when they moved in, especially if they came with a passel of brats that she was expected to babysit while her starry-eyed mother went out on dates or off on honeymoons. Then The One had been William’s father, and William was expected to babysit her since he was three years older. Nikki had been thirteen at the time, and seriously not amused.

  “I think you should tell him,” Kara said. “Just get it off your chest, and see if he’d like to get on your chest. It’d be kind of romantic, actually. He did save your life from that freak who broke in.” She took a last sip from her drink and got her purse. “Well, you might not have to be up at six, but I do.”

  When Nikki got home, she walked around the rooms sleepily to tidy. Her cat liked to reorganize her possessions, and he’d been very busy while she was out. Socks and T-shirts swiped from the laundry basket had been sprinkled everywhere: in the pantry, under the table, behind the armchair, left squarely in the middle of the hallway, and half a dozen other places. Buddy was a mighty sixteen pounds and she’d even caught him dragging her heavy winter coat around once.

  Now he was sleeping in an innocent, fluffy black lump on the sofa, one last sock tucked under his paw. “You’re so weird,” Nikki said, claiming it back and returning it to the laundry basket. What he thought he was doing, she’d never had any idea. She just picked up after him.

  Then she went to bed and lay there wide awake. William was on her mind. By the time he had walked into her life, she was completely uninterested
in getting to know him. Just another new brother to get in her way while their parents goosed each other in the kitchen and played footsie under the table. They’d gotten married in Las Vegas after a rushed courtship.

  Nikki had had so many brothers and sisters by that point that she couldn’t even remember all of them. Mona. Gianna. The twins with the stupid names, Clyde and Claude. Whiny Hannah who threw tantrums if she didn’t get chicken nuggets everyday . . . sniveling Brayden and then the next man had had a baby son named Ayden . . . she remembered faces without names, coming home from school to find a strange new kid eating a bowl of cereal at the television or stealing things from her bedroom. It was all so aggravating that she stayed with her friends as often as their parents allowed. Most of her friends’ parents were married, but those who were divorced certainly weren’t bringing home a new lover several times a year. Nikki knew what normal was through them, and her mother wasn’t in that category or anywhere near it.

  And then William had shown up. The two of them were war-weary veterans of their parents’ endless relationships. There was no point in getting to know each other when they’d be moving on soon enough. He was in high school and she was in junior high, and they had nothing in common anyway. But she’d noticed how cute he was, even slouched over his meal at the table while their parents giggled and called each other silly pet names. Tall and with an athletic build, William had thick brown hair and a dazzling smile that rarely appeared. He did his homework, listened to rock music in his room, went out to football practice and on dates with his stunning girlfriend, and kept to himself. Nikki did the same, though a brief encounter with that girlfriend had made her despondent about her looks. Thirteen had been a cruel age. She was still waiting on a growth spurt, skinny as a rail and with braces on her teeth, and when she’d asked her mother if she could wear a bra, Mom had replied that there really wasn’t any reason yet.

  There was a reason now. She’d lost the braces and gained several inches in height since then, plus curves. Her hair had gotten long, and she’d added pale streaks to her brunette locks. She looked good. Maybe she wasn’t a supermodel, but she didn’t have any reason to be shy.

  Well, she had one reason. She still had the scar from the drugged-up guy who had broken into their house, a pale, twisted ribbon along her upper arm from his knife. She’d thought that she was about to die, bleeding and backed into the corner as she fought, when William charged into the living room with a roar. He’d taken the guy down to the floor and knocked him unconscious with three furious blows. Nikki remembered that with crystal clarity, his fists falling and the guy’s head bouncing on the hardwood. Then William scooped up Nikki like a baby and ran out of the house with her, shouting for the neighbor to call 911 and with her blood saturating his shirt. He’d ridden in the ambulance with her and held her hand as the stitches were put in. Her mother hadn’t turned up for hours and Nikki hadn’t cared. William was there. That made her feel safe.

  She had never wanted any of her stepbrothers or stepsisters until then. They were just nuisances. But she’d loved William desperately since that day, and she had been devastated when their parents’ relationship inevitably fell apart. He and his father moved away, but she had kept in contact with him.

  Neither of her relationships in high school and college had worked out. She couldn’t help but compare the guys to William. In different ways, they fell short. Joey was such a shrinking violet, kind but timid, and when a jerk at a high school party had made some disgustingly lewd remarks to Nikki, he just suggested that they leave. Then there was Camden in college, who would have punched the lewd jerk’s lights out, but any time Nikki was sick or needed help with something, he disappeared.

  She couldn’t tell William. He still addressed his emails to her as little sister, for God’s sake! Not only that, he had just been betrayed horribly. It wasn’t the time to drop a bombshell that by the way, she loved him in more than a sisterly way.

  But she did. She wanted him. She just wished for a world in which he wanted her back.

  Chapter Two

  It was seven in the morning when there was a knock on the front door. Buddy leaped off the recliner where he had been giving himself a bath. Most cats would have been startled and run to hide under a bed; he ran instead to the door and got up on his hind legs to paw at it. “Rrrrrrowww?”

  Dressed in a cute pair of shorts and a T-shirt, Nikki opened the door to William. The cute boy had become a very handsome man. Her heart skipped a beat and she hugged him, backpack and all. “Hey.”

  He smelled good. “Hey,” he said, hugging her tightly. “Sorry to come in so early.”

  “It’s all right. I’ve got the day off from shuffling papers in my cubicle. Is this all you’ve brought? A backpack?”

  “I’ve got two suitcases in the rental car. Most of the furniture was hers. And the little that was mine . . . I’m not sure I want it.”

  She let him in. “What about your job?”

  “They’ve been looking for someone to transfer to this area anyway. I told them that I was interested. I can’t stay there.” He dropped his backpack and petted the cat, who was twining around his legs and meowing for attention. “Hi there, furry monster. God, the pictures you sent didn’t do him justice. He’s huge. How old is he?”

  “Two or so. He was a stray, so the pound was estimating.” She’d gone to the pound to get a kitten four months ago, but gigantic Buddy had stolen her heart. In the meet-and-greet room for prospective adoptions, he’d leaped onto her lap and wound his front legs around her neck in a purring cat hug. How could she say no to that?

  Happy that William had given him some love, Buddy ran off into the house. The two of them went to the kitchen. “You can stay as long as you need to,” Nikki said. “I usually rent out the spare bedroom, but I’m between people at the moment.”

  “I don’t want to impose,” William said. “My boss promised to get back to me next week. If the answer is yes, I’ll find a place around here.”

  She would love to have him living nearby. Taking a seat at the bar, she poured herself a bowl of cereal and pushed the box to him. “How’s your dad?”

  William got the same exasperated look that she always had when the topic was her mother. “Still living with that perfectly able yet somehow disabled woman and her two children, and they’re talking about trying for a baby.”

  Nikki gaped at him. “You’re kidding me.”

  “I wish I were, and I hope they don’t. He’s fifty-seven years old and has heart problems; she’s forty-one and completely ignores the kids she has while she scams the government for disability payments. I feel like I should warn her that he’s not going to stick around just because she has his child. But she’s such a numbskull herself that she wouldn’t ever believe me. And your mom?”

  “You’ll never believe it!” Nikki gave him a brilliant smile. “She’s met The One.”

  He answered her smile with a sarcastic one of his own. “That’s great!”

  “This one is from a Greek shipping family, and he has gobs of money. He’s still married, but he promises that he’s going to get a divorce very soon.” She rolled her eyes. “Mom still falls for that line. How many times has she heard it? But she’s sure that the next guy will be sincere.”

  Having poured himself a bowl of cereal, William said, “They’re broken, both of them. Going off to college was the best day of my life. I figured that I was done with all that. But then I guess I fell right back into it with Shelly.”

  “Those were her mistakes, not yours.”

  “But we’d been having problems for some time. I just thought we could work them out. I didn’t want to be like my dad. He and your mom are two peas in a pod. The second they smell a problem coming, they ditch. So I kept hoping that it would get better. And then I found out just how bad it truly was.” He swallowed a spoonful of cereal. Milk dribbled onto his chin.

  Before he could wipe it off, she swiped him clean with a napkin. It was an excuse to touch him.
“Who’s a big boy?” she cooed.

  “Brat.” He smiled again, two smiles in five minutes, and that had to be some kind of record for him. “When the plane landed, I had a bunch of texts from Shelly pleading for me to come back so we could try again.”

  Nikki hid her disappointment. “Do you want to try?”

  He shrugged. “A small part of me feels like I should. Everyone makes mistakes. And a much bigger part of me never wants to see her again. She said to the therapist that she’d just figured I was stepping out on the relationship as well. So what did it matter that she did? But I didn’t. I didn’t ever. I was happy, despite the problems, and I thought she was, too. What would you do?”

  “If I found out the guy I’d been with for years was playing pass-the-peen to some chick at work every time there was a business conference? I’d dump his ass. I could never trust him again. I don’t want to lay there alone in bed during the next conference wondering what he’s doing.”

  William finished his cereal and put the bowl in the sink. “That’s what I keep coming back to. What happens at the next conference? I’m not going to go with her to keep tabs on her. That’s insane. Yet I’m not going to be able to relax alone at home. And I don’t ever, ever want to have to go to my doctor again because I’m panicked I might have caught an STD from what I thought was a monogamous relationship. That was humiliating.”

  Startled, Nikki said, “I hadn’t even considered that. Are you . . .”

  “I’m fine. But I can’t believe she put me in that situation. She didn’t get that either in our sessions when I brought it up.”

  “It sounds like she didn’t get anything.”

  “No, she didn’t. It was like talking to a brick wall at times. And when she said that she was sorry, what she meant was that she was sorry I was upset. She wasn’t sorry about anything she’d done. She thinks that she should have the freedom to do whatever she wants. Well, she can have it. But she can’t be with me at the same time.” He rubbed at his eyes, which were red-rimmed from fatigue, and retrieved his backpack. “I have to crash. I couldn’t sleep at all on the flight. And I haven’t slept much the past week either.”