Free My Stepbrother's Arrangement (A Stepbrother Romance) by Juliette Jaye

couldn’t. I knew it was a secret Kaleb and I had to keep for ourselves. After all, that was the rule. We had set it. And we had set it for a reason. What we were doing was so wrong , we couldn’t tell anyone. And that meant I couldn’t tell my best friend.
     
    “I’m just kind of starting work at my stepdad’s company,” I replied. “I started on Friday. A weird day to start. But I got the news from Yale, I didn’t get in.”
     
    The smile fell off Annie’s face as she immediately turned sympathetic.
     
    “Oh my God, Livvie, I’m so sorry,” she told me, reaching across and taking my hands in hers. “I know how much you wanted to get in, and I can’t believe that with your application, you didn’t!”
     
    “Thanks, Annie,” I replied. “I appreciate it.”
     
    “So what’s the plan now?” she asked, and I shrugged again.
     
    “I don’t know. You know, it’s funny. I did have a second and third and fourth choice, but a part of me never really believed I wouldn’t get into Yale. So now it’s kind of all new. But I think it’s going to be Stanford or Harvard.”
     
    “Ooooh, come to Stanford, we can be roommates and hang out and still be best friends forever together!” Annie exclaimed, clapping her hands together.
     
    “I’m not going to lie, you going there is like at least 90% of the reason I want to.  Otherwise I think I’d be Harvard all the way.”
     
    “Yessss, good girl!” Annie exclaimed. “Anyway, how’s the job going? How’s actually being paid for your work?”
     
    I had to laugh at that. “Well it is pretty awesome. Even if it is just minimum wage, and just so I wouldn’t have to label it as an unpaid internship on my resume. But yeah, it’s ok. Kaleb didn’t go to work at all on Friday, and I don’t really have any work to do, so I got Kaleb to email me what his dad sent him and I’ve just been doing kind of my own report.”
     
    Annie grinned. “You know, I think you’re the only person on the planet who gets a job without really having anything to do and then goes ahead and does the entire thing a team of five people are supposed to work on all by herself.”
     
    “I am not!” I protested. “You would have done the exact same thing.”
     
    Just then our food arrived, and we both dug into our breakfasts. It still counts as breakfast even when it’s after noon, right?
     
    “So tell me about the hospital,” I asked her. “And the rest of your summer.”
     
    “Well, the hospital is awesome. It’s good fun and I’m learning a lot. There isn’t really anything hard to do since I’m not actually qualified to do anything, the most actual work I do is sometimes the nurses will let me wrap a bandage, or apply a bandaid to an owie, that sort of thing. But it’s good, because I get to see things like bedside manner, how to deal with patients and their loved ones, and I get a lot of experience looking at charts and stuff. Most of the parents are great about letting me see their kids’ charts when I explain that I’m going to medical school. So I love it. Other than that, I’m not up to much. Though I did meet a guy!”
     
    “Wow, color me not surprised at all! Dish!” I ordered, slightly ashamed that the first thing I thought was I bet the sex isn’t nearly as good as with Kaleb .
     
    “There’s not that much to dish about. His little sister was in the hospital with a broken arm, and he brought her in. He was babysitting and she talked him into letting her go onto the top part of the jungle gym. The sister told him that mommy always lets her, so he figured it’d be fine, until she fell of the high monkey bars and landed right on her arm. I calmed him down since he was so worried that his mom was going to kill him, and then after he asked me out for a drink to thank me, and I agreed, and we’ve been seeing each other a bit ever since.”
     
    “Nice, what’s his name?”
     
    “Shaun. Turns out he’s pretty nice. I mean, it’s nothing