Forbidden Prescription: A Stepbrother Romance (9 page)

“
W
hat the fuck
is going on?” Isabella hissed.

“Language,” her mother scolded. “I should ask you the same. Sit down, both of you, before you start a scene.”

“This is your daughter?” James’s dad asked.

“Of course it is!”

“Cynthia, sweetie,” he said carefully. “I’d like to introduce you to my son, James. He’s the one I was telling you lived in town.”

Her mouth fell into a perfect O. “No, what are the chances?”

Isabella scoffed. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

“My name is Charles,” he said to Isabella, trying to salvage the situation. “And son, this is my wife, Cynthia.”

James put on a brave face. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs.—" He screwed up his face. “I suppose it’s Mrs. Johnson, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “I’ve heard a lot about you, James. Both from your father and my daughter.”

A waitress returned with a fresh drink for Isabella. She finished it in three long gulps and loudly set it back on the table.

“I supposed you couldn’t put two and two together when the descriptions of your new stepson and your daughter’s boyfriend matched,” she spat.

“Calm down, Isabella,” her mother said. “There’s no need to spoil our dinner.”

She looked to James for backup. He looked utterly repulsed.

“Why didn’t you say you were in town?” he asked his father.

“You’re always so busy, and I didn’t know about this meeting until yesterday. I thought I’d give you a call on Sunday while you were home. I’m sorry for the confusion.”

James took a deep breath. “It’s not your fault. If I had made it to your wedding, or even visited home more often, this never would have happened in the first place.”

Isabella was a little less forgiving. “This is so messed up. I think I’m going to just call a cab.”

“No,” her mother and James said together.

“I see you a few times a year, and you’re thinking about leaving?” her mom asked. “Charles has been wanting to meet you for a long time.”

“Fine, I’ll stay.”

When the waiter arrived, Isabella ordered yet another drink and a salad. She didn’t have an appetite, nor did she want to sit in the restaurant sober. In most instances, her mom would have said something about her excessive drinking, but given the circumstances, she let it slide.

“So, tell me about the wedding,” James said, trying to keep it together.

“It was really nice,” his dad said. “We rented a boat and a crew and sailed to the Bahamas. We were married on a little island and spent our wedding night in a little cabin right on the ocean.”

“It was positively divine,” Cynthia gushed. “We were planning a larger wedding at first, but we’d already done that a few times before.” She giggled. “When we heard that neither of you kids could attend, we decided to have the wedding just with the two of us. It was really romantic.”

“Wow,” James said. “Isabella and I could have met months before. And at our parents’ wedding, no less.”

“James,” his father said. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were seeing anyone?”

“We were trying to keep our relationship under wraps.”

Isabella jumped in. “I recently started my internship at the hospital. It was sort of a mistake how we got involved in the first place. A lapse of judgment on my part.”

James crinkled his brow. He wasn’t used to Isabella being so nasty to him.

“Don’t take all the credit, Iz,” he said. “It was probably against my better judgment, too, to sleep with an underling.”

Isabella gasped. “Underling?”

“Sorry, maybe that was a poor choice of words. You get the picture, though.”

“May I excuse myself for a moment?” Isabella asked the table.

“Are you coming back?” her mom asked.

“Yes, I’m just going to the restroom for a moment.”

Isabella didn’t wait for a response before striding away from the table. She found an empty stall, closed the toilet lid, and sat down, burying her face in her hands.

For the first time in her life, Isabella was in a great relationship, and now, it was more than likely over. She couldn’t possibly date her stepbrother. It felt so disgusting to think that every time they made love, she was with her brother.

She’d had plenty of stepsiblings in the past. They were never close because they didn’t spend much time together. But if she had gotten to know any of her stepbrothers, she would never even dream of hooking up with them. They weren’t blood relatives, but they were still siblings. That counted for something.

She thought about what others would say if they knew about their relation. If they had a child, their family tree would be twisted, like vines crisscrossing every which way. People like Isabella didn’t engage in incestual relations. That was for poor, uneducated people and royal families. Someone in her profession and of her social standing had no business getting freaky with her stepbrother.

She tried to steel herself, wishing she had more of the little pills she took earlier in the day. The vodka helped to dull the shock, but it was making her feel queasy.

Exiting the stall, she splashed cold water on her face and blotted herself dry with a paper towel. She looked at her sorry self in the mirror. This dinner was far worse than she could have ever imagined. Family gatherings just got infinitely more awkward.

She walked back to the table and noticed smiles on Cynthia’s and Charles’s faces. They were absolutely enthralled with whatever James was talking about.

“What did I miss?” she asked.

“James was just telling us about his work,” her mom answered. “Darling, he’s quite the catch.”

James smiled. Isabella frowned.

“I suppose he was, wasn’t he?”

“He reminds me a lot of his father,” she continued. “Brilliant, charming, handsome, and kind. Girls like us can’t help but fall in love with them.”

“Girls like us? We’re hardly alike.”

“I don’t know about that,” Charles said. “You’re both gorgeous women who know exactly what you want.”

“I don’t know if my mother always knows what she wants. She has been married, oh, how many times now?”

“You’re not revealing any scandals there,” her mom said dryly. “Charles has been married a few times himself. But this is it,” she said, grabbing his hand. “We’re in this until the end.”

Isabella and James’s parents gave each other a quick peck on the lips. They winced.

“I’m very happy for you,” James said. “I hope to find that kind of love one day.”

“You haven’t told him you love him?” her mother asked.

“Of course not!”

“Isabella, he’s not going to wait around forever for a woman who is afraid to show her feelings.”

“I’m married to my job,” she retorted.

“Yes, but your job will not be there for you at night. Your job certainly won’t give us grandkids.”

“Ugh,” Isabella groaned.

“When you find love, you go with it, no matter what.” Cynthia looked at her husband. “Don’t let some silly spat get in the way of your relationship. You’ll only regret it.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Mom. You’re not sleeping with your brother.”

James’s jaw clenched. He was doing everything in his power to stay calm and level-headed.

The table’s conversation carried on without Isabella as she sulked and ate her salad. She wanted to be at home in her own bed, far away from her new family.

Her rational side felt bad that she was having a crisis during what was supposed to be a nice evening out for her mother to show off her new husband. Charles was a good guy, but she just wasn’t in the mood to get to know him.

Maybe in a few years, enough time would pass where she could be around her new stepfamily and be able to laugh about it all. First, that would mean that her mom would have to stay married to the guy for a while. Second, it would mean that she and James would have to find a way to remain cordial around each other.

At the end of the dinner, Isabella put on a brave face and gave her mother a hug goodbye. She even gave Charles a quick hug. When Isabella embraced her mother, her mom whispered in her ear, “We’ll talk soon.” It sounded like more like a threat than a comforting sentiment.

“I’m going to call a cab,” Isabella said when she and James got outside.

“There’s no need. I’ll take you home.”

“I think it’s best if I left.”

“Isabella.” His voice was stern. He squared his shoulders with hers. “Get in the car. You don’t have any cash left, anyway. You spent it at the bar, remember?”

Once again, he was right. She walked behind him through the parking lot. The first five minutes, they rode in complete silence.

If James didn’t want to talk, Isabella certainly didn’t. What was there to say, anyway?

“This is just too weird, Isabella,” James said quietly. “We’re stepsiblings. I can’t believe I had sex with my sister.”

“It would be different if we started hooking up before our parents got married, but they got together first. Maybe I was stupid to want to keep it a secret.”

“Well, it’s not like we’re blood related. Like, we’re not twins separated at birth.”

“I guess.”

He sighed. “So, what does this mean for us?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not sure if you noticed, but you were really mean to me during dinner—in front of my dad.”

“You weren’t the kindest yourself,” she retorted.

“You’re right. And I’m sorry about that, but that dinner was a mind fuck, and I was freaking out.”

“Me too.”

He sighed again, searching for the right words. “This isn’t over, is it?”

She looked away from him. She couldn’t stand to look at him when he looked so sad.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it was crazy thinking that this would work in the first place. I mean, things were almost too good up to now. Neither of us have a lot of time for each other, and I don’t know where we’d end up. I know that you want to settle down soon, and I just can’t promise you that I can too. I don’t want to waste your time.”

“I do want to settle down. There are things that I’ve known I’ve wanted all my life. I wanted to be a surgeon with a wife and kids, maybe even a dog. I wanted to live in a big, beautiful house and give my family everything they could ever want.”

“I don’t think I can fit in with that dream,” Isabella said.

“Then maybe it’s best if we end things before they get worse,” he said.

“I think you’re right.”

They sat in the car in front of Isabella’s apartment. No one wanted to give the final blow to their relationship.

“What about work?” he asked.

“We continue on like we were before we started hooking up. I’ll hardly see you anyway. We go back to normal.”

“So this is it?” He said it more like a statement than a question.

“Yeah, I think so.” She slowly reached for the door handle and opened the door.

“Isabella,” he called to her as she left the car. “What we had really meant a lot to me. I just wanted to make sure you knew that.”

“It was fun while it lasted.”

Isabella walked up to her apartment, put on her pajamas, and washed her face. Then, she crawled into bed and cried until there were no tears left.

I
f Isabella knew
that making out with the hot attending in a moment of passion would cause so much unhappiness, she would have never allowed herself within ten feet of the man.

Her weekends were now free, giving her time to brush up on surgical techniques, even moonlight at some other healthcare providers. It was a fairly common practice amongst young doctors, but she didn’t do it for the money. Instead, it gave her more time to practice and less time to sit idly by and think about James.

She understood why they couldn’t be together. Besides the obvious hang-up of dating one’s stepbrother, she knew that he wanted very specific things from life, things that she wasn’t sure she was willing to provide.

Work was more awkward than ever. Isabella started taking the stairs because she knew that James used the elevator, even if it meant that she showed up for a surgery soaked with sweat. She avoided the doctor’s lounge at all costs and changed her clothes in vacant rooms. Even when she was on-call, if she had time to sleep, she opted to stay awake. Not only would she be safe from an accidental encounter with James, but she wouldn’t have to deal with the memories of that place.

James avoided Isabella in equal measure. He fiddled with the schedule whenever necessary to ensure that he didn’t have to interact with Isabella. He traded shifts with doctors, even if it meant working for two days in a row without going home.

There were a few rare instances where they were forced to work together. Dr. Jensen presented at a conference, and James couldn’t get out of working with the interns. Instead of quizzing and joking around with the interns, he randomly handed out charts without looking at whom he was giving them to.

“What’s his deal today?” Jordan asked Isabella. She shrugged in return.

When it was necessary for the two of them to speak, conversations were short, cordial, and work related. To an outsider, it would appear that they were work acquaintances, nothing more, nothing less.

Isabella wondered if James was moving on and seeing other women. Rationally, she couldn’t argue if he were. He was a single man looking for a long-term relationship. The thought of him sharing his home—his bed—with another woman made her nauseated, though.

Isabella and James would be forced to work alongside each other for years. She didn’t know if she could stand by and watch as he found love, married, and had children, while she was still single and lonely.

Truth be told, she still had feelings for him. She still craved his touch and his companionship, but then she would immediately be filled with a sense of longing, because she knew she could never have it again.

One day, he tossed her a chart, leaving her to care for one of his patients. He told the interns to page him if they needed any assistance and then disappeared. This was usually standard procedure, but Isabella was handed a particularly challenging case.

The patient was a young patient with a genetic disorder that Isabella had never even heard of. She went to find a reference on the disease when the patient coded.

She yelled for the nurses and paged James immediately. She was his patient, so he would know how to treat her. Isabella asked the nurses for help, but they didn’t know enough about the patient’s condition either.

Usually James was quick and would take off running when an intern paged him. He had a high sense of responsibility for them and didn’t want them to kill any patients on his watch.

Isabella had to make a decision for the patient, and soon. She was scared, though. Injecting the wrong drug could kill her in an instant. She quickly flipped through the chart, looking for some clues as to what she would do.

“We need a decision, Dr. Carter,” the nurse said.

“Just continue with resuscitation until Dr. Johnson arrives.”

Isabella looked around. There was no sign of James. She took a deep breath. He should have been here by now.

“Okay, let’s administer 1.5 milligrams of lidocaine.”

A nurse rushed off to get the drug. Isabella looked through the chart one last time.

Just as she was about to inject the patient, James finally arrived.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“She coded and I didn’t know what to give her. I’m administering 1.5 milligrams of lidocaine.”

“And destroy her already failing liver?” he shouted. “Someone get me some epinephrine.”

He carefully injected the drug into the patient and took hold of the defibrillation paddles. After a few tries, a normal heartbeat was restored.

“Thanks for almost killing my patient,” he sneered at Isabella.

“Thanks for ignoring my page,” she fired back.

He looked around the room. There were too many people around to get into a shouting match.

“Come with me,” he said gruffly, quickly walking out of the room and through the halls. Eventually, he stopped in an empty stairwell.

“I leave you alone for one moment, and you’re about to destroy the result of a very important surgery I was in on,” he hissed. “Were you doing it on purpose?”

She gasped at his accusation. She would never do anything to hurt a patient.

“Why did you wait so long to get there?” she cried. “There were no notes in the chart, and I did what I thought was best.”

“Your best almost killed my patient. You show poor judgment.”

“I suppose you’re right. I did date you, after all.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Exactly what it sounds like. Obviously, being with you was a massive mistake.”

“So much for being professional at work.”

“I was, until you came in and started accusing me of sabotage. I would never intentionally hurt anyone.”

“No?” he muttered. “I’m not so sure.”

He walked back into the hallway, slamming the door behind him.

Isabella’s throat felt tight. She could hardly breathe. She walked back toward her patient’s room, taking short, shallow breaths.

“Hey, what’s up?” Jordan asked, spotting her across the hall.

Isabella walked faster, trying to avoid her friend. She didn’t feel like talking.

“Are you okay?” Jordan asked as she got closer.

“Yeah,” Isabella managed to squeak out before tears started pouring from her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Jordan asked, surprised at her display of emotion.

“Not now,” Isabella said, quickly wiping tears from her face before anyone else could see.

“Meet me after work for drinks?” Jordan asked.

Isabella nodded.

When they got off work, they walked to the closest bar, just a few blocks away from the hospital. The cold wind stung Isabella’s face like James’s words had earlier in the day.

Jordan ordered a pitcher of beer, and they sat at a back table, hidden from view of the jolly regulars. Isabella poured herself a glass and drank over half of it before she started talking.

“Do you want to tell me what’s been going on with you?” Jordan asked. “You have been acting weird the last couple of weeks. You’re not your usual self.”

“I don’t know how to talk about it,” she said, her voice wavering. “I’ve been keeping it a secret for so long.”

Jordan’s eyes widened. “Spill.”

“First, I have to give you some context for everything that’s happened recently.”

Isabella told her all about her relationship with her mother, and how a steady stream of husbands changed her view on monogamy. Jordan listened intently, genuinely interested in what Isabella had to say.

“Long story short,” she concluded, “I was never really interested in relationships, because I had yet to see one that worked out. Then I met James.”

Jordan’s eyes bulged. “James? Like, Attending James?”

“That’s the one,” Isabella said glumly.

“How did you manage to land him?”

“It started with an accidental make-out session. I was high off a big procedure, and he was there. Then we started hooking up around the hospital. It was amazing. Eventually, it wasn’t enough for him. He starting buying me gifts and leaving little notes in my locker. Eventually, I gave in and went on a date with him.”

“This is the cutest thing I’ve ever heard,” Jordan gushed. “How was the date?”

“It was really good, actually. After that, we continued hanging out on the weekends. I’d go to his place to just hang out and make dinner, stuff like that. We were just like any couple.”

“Are you not together?”

Isabella shook her head. “This is where things get really weird. One day, my mom comes out of the woodwork, and she wants me to go to dinner with her so I could meet her new husband. I bring James along because, well, he’s my boyfriend and he wanted to meet my mom. It was a disaster.”

She dropped her head in her hands, steadying herself.

“What happened?”

Isabella looked up at her friend. “As it turns out,” she said slowly, “my mom married his dad.”

“What?” Jordan yelped, sending scowls from other patrons their way.

“Yep. He’s my stepbrother.”

“Damn, that’s some soap opera type shit right there,” Jordan said.

“I’m glad you can find it amusing, because the past few weeks have been hell.”

“It’s not like you’re actually related though. It’s kind of a weird coincidence, but if you two want to be together, it shouldn’t stop you.”

“It’s not just that,” Isabella said. “He wants marriage and children. I don’t.”

“Never?”

“Not right now. I have a career to worry about. I hate the idea of marriage in the first place, and we can’t both have our careers with kids in the picture.”

“Yeah, I understand. You’ve worked too hard to get where you are to throw it away.”

“I wish I never got involved with him in the first place.”

“Really?” Jordan asked skeptically. “You don’t have feelings for him anymore?”

Isabella shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, I do,” she admitted. “It just hurts too much to see him around when I know it will never work.”

“It’s clear that he’s upset too. I know that he’s been pining after you from day one. I bet you anything that he was in love with you. I’m sure he still is, too.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Have you ever tried to compromise about the future of your relationship?”

“Not really. It never seemed pertinent.”

“Do you think that maybe you should sit down and have a long talk about how you left things? Maybe you’d find that you’d rather be together than apart.”

“I think that chance is gone,” Isabella said. “We’ve gotten into some bad fights since. We’ve said some nasty stuff to each other. I don’t think there’s any coming back from that.”

Jordan drained the pitcher and stood up. “It might be worth a try.”

They walked out of the bar and went back to the parking lot at the hospital.

“You’re a strong girl. You’ll figure something out,” Jordan said as they parted ways.

“Thanks. I hope so.”

Isabella knew that moping around wasn’t going to help anything. She vowed to herself that she was going to move on. If she could be with James, there was certainly someone else out there for her. In the meantime, celibacy would only help her on her way to becoming a top surgeon.