Free STEPBROTHER ROMANCE: My Stepbrother the Seaman (A Caribbean Cruise Romance) (A Steamy Forbidden Contemporary Holiday Romance Short Story) by Grace Valentine

Prologue
                 
                  The woman lying in the hospital bed was still so beautiful, even with all of the weight and hair that she had lost. Hannah Silva was too young to be dying, but when life gives death a gift, age isn’t a concern that goes through his mind. Hannah had known that from the youngest years of her life when her family cat gave birth to a dead kitten. That tiny grey and white kitten had never even had a chance to breathe life. Death is the most unbiased of all beings. He only sees the life that dwells within, and Hannah was beaming with it. She was the kind of woman to go rock climbing without any gear or go sky diving on a whim. She lived every moment to the fullest, and for some reason that made it even harder for Mitch to watch as his wife was taken from him, her book of life had so few pages, but each and every one of them were completely full from top to bottom. Hannah looked at her husband with her striking blue eyes. They looked at him with an undying and eternal love that death could never steal. Hannah’s son didn’t understand the light in her eyes. At the tender age of four, he only could understand that his mommy was sick. Mitch had spent so many months trying to convince Hannah that they needed a baby in their lives. When she finally accepted, Mitch’s heart was so intensely in love that it almost hurt. They were blessed almost immediately with baby Sabin. He was such a beautiful baby boy. He had his mother’s eyes and his father’s nose. They found the tumors that same day. On Sabin’s day of birth, when Hannah tried to nurse her new son, the pain was indescribable. All mother’s go through pain when trying to breast feed their children, because after all, there is nothing that isn’t painful about new motherhood, but this was different.
                  Mitch thought back on the day that the light in his wife’s eyes flickered away with agony. That was two long years ago. She left the world in silence, with a morphine drip. There was no blood, there was no screaming and there was no pain when Hannah was taken. Mitch had a new light in his eyes. It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t brighter or darker, and it just simply was. That light came in the form of his new wife and his new stepdaughter. He had found love again, a love that brought him from out of the dark and bottomless pit of depression. His son, on the other hand, wasn’t taking to his new family as well as Mitch had hoped. The young boy threw temper tantrums and refused to listen to anyone. He would scream for his mother at night, waking up all of Mitch’s demons along with him. Mitch was hoping today would be different. He sat watching his son and his step daughter from the next room, keeping a keen eye out for distress.
                  Sabin Silva looked at his new stepsister with a fuming and unquenchable hate. Colette Winters had long curly blonde hair that hung in pigtails to frame her baby face. The pigtails were held tightly to her head with perfectly tied ribbons that the six year old wanted to tear out of his sister’s head. He knew that if he had, the two year old would scream and cry, only to get attention from his father or her mother; it would land Sabin in timeout.  He wasn’t about to allow that to happen again. The boy opted to hit the little girl in the jaw with his firetruck. She still screamed with her big bright blue eyes flooding as blood gushed from the large open wound on her chin. Fear rose in Sabin as his father ran into the room right behind Colette’s mother Rachel. Sabin’s father picked him up by his tiny arm and smacked his butt which would be sore for days. It’s was Sabin’s turn to cry. His father picked him up as Colette was taken by her mother to be comforted. Sabin was brought into his room and his father sat him down on his bed. He sat next to him and held the crying Sabin in his arms and rocked him.
    “I miss her too