Soldier Boy

  Soldier Boy

  A Standalone Romance Novel

  By Donna Alam

  Copyright © 2018 Donna Alam

  Published By: Donna Alam

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  The moral right of this author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the express permission of the author

  This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  © Donna Alam 2018

  Cover Design: Book Cover By Design

  Editing: Editing 4 Indies

  Image: Rafa G Catala

  Model: Adrián Pedraja Barrientos

  Contents

  Hard

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  About

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  In Like Flynn

  More By Donna

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About

  Ben Monroe.

  Soldier.

  Stud. Apparently.

  My best friend’s little brother.

  And a goldfish murderer.

  He was a blight on my childhood.

  A thorn in my side.

  I haven’t seen him in years,

  And now he needs a place to stay.

  This isn’t payback.

  It isn’t charity.

  Even if grown-up Ben has an ass built for touching,

  And a panty-dropping smile

  There’s nothing happening here

  Until I make the biggest mistake of my life

  Or maybe the best.

  Watch this space

  Chapter 1

  PENNY

  ‘I’m getting all the fucking I can take right now.’ Bent over, fingers wrapped around my ankles, dry and without lube, I don’t add even though the statement feels warranted.

  ‘Vibrators,’ Mel announces, ‘while they have their place, don’t count.’

  ‘No, you misunderstand.’ Most probably purposely. ‘What I mean to say is no one could fuck me over as well as my life is doing right now.’

  ‘I know you’re having a tough time,’ my friend answers in a sympathetic tone, ‘and you’re working more hours than seems humanly possible, but a night out could be fun. Remember that dirty four-letter word? And if it culminated in a little delicious revenge sex, well, all the better!’ As usual, Melody misses the point by a mile. ‘Come on, Nell. After a couple of Bloody Marys, your cooch would be singing a different song, I promise!’

  ‘Vaginas don’t sing,’ I reply, swapping the phone to my left ear. As an obstetrician, I feel qualified to say that categorically. ‘However, if you find yours ever does, please let me know, and I’ll book you a place in a talent show.’

  ‘Oh my God, could you imagine the look on the judges’ faces?’ Mel snorts inelegantly, and I find myself shaking my head, willing the tiredness or maybe just this ridiculous conversation away.

  ‘Strangely, I can’t. The same as I can’t imagine myself ever having a one-night stand. It’s just not me,’ I reply with a shrug she can’t see. ‘Besides, I don’t think I’m ready.’ I blow out a breath, long and hard. I mean, I should be ready. I’ve been single two months now. That’s two months following nine years of dating the same man and being engaged to him for one. ‘You know what I’ve realised?’ I ask, not waiting for her response. ‘Since the age of seventeen, I’ve had a boyfriend. I’ve never been without a man or a boy in my life.’

  ‘Well, you and Liam were childhood sweethearts.’

  ‘Exactly. And now I’m a woman—a woman who’s never lived by herself. A woman who’s never made decisions just because, just to suit herself.’

  ‘A woman who’s currently working a hundred hours a week to pay the mortgage her prick of an ex lumbered her with on a house that’s crumbling around her ears.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘A woman who needs to cut loose and have some fun,’ she continues, speaking louder as though to drown me out. ‘To show that complete knob that she’s over him. Unless, of course, she’s waiting for him to come back.’

  ‘Ha, funny,’ I retort without an ounce of humour. ‘You know the night he left, he told me he needed to find himself? Well, I didn’t realise he’d be doing it vaginally because the way I hear it, he’s had his fingers in more pussy than I have lately—and I’ve worked a lot of hours and seen a lot of hoo-ha.’ I feel like I’m a junior doctor again.

  ‘That’s because he’s a Grade A loser.’

  ‘You won’t hear me arguing. The fact is, the only thing I’m waiting for is the suitcase of cash he owes me for keeping this place from the clutches of the bank. I would even give him the cat.’

  My eyes slide left to the malevolent ball of fur lying at the other end of the sofa. I never wanted a cat. I’m not really a fan of pets, at least not since Mel’s horrible brother flushed my goldfish, Swim Shady, down the toilet when I was twelve. I mourned and vowed never to get attached again. Shame I didn’t adopt that same approach with men.

  ‘You’re sure that’s all you want from him?’

  ‘Yes. I’d prefer to do the exchange by courier so I wouldn’t have to offend my eyes by looking at him, but yes, definitely.’ The silence between us seems loaded with her doubt. ‘I don’t love him, Mel. Not anymore. And I don’t need a man.’

  ‘None of us need them. Want them occasionally? Yes. Sometimes even just for the night . . .’

  ‘And some of us not even for then. Come on, can you really see me leaving a bar with a stranger?’

  ‘I’d bloody well like to,’ she retorts.

  ‘I’ve never had a one-night stand!’

  ‘And I’ve never shagged David Gandy, but I would.’

  ‘Mel, please.’ Give up already.

  ‘Look, what I’m saying is there’s a first time for everything.’

  ‘But I’ve only ever had sex with Liam before,’ I answer quietly.

  ‘Penelope, darling,’ she begins, suddenly serious. ‘This is, I believe, what you Americans call a come to Jesus moment. Liam left you, so unless you’re planning on living in a cave for the rest of your life—’

  ‘That’s a hermit, not celibate.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a hermit you’d like to shag? No? There you go, then. As I was saying, unless you’re planning on celibacy, you will be, at the very least, doubling your numbers of sexual partners at some point. Regardless, come on, babe! I haven’t seen you in ages.’

  ‘We went for coffee last week.’

  ‘Twenty minutes. You were there twenty minutes, and you almost fell asleep in your latte. All you’ve done lately is work. Work, work, bloody work!’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s because the bank has this annoying rule that the mortgage has to be paid on time. Every month!’

  ‘I might be able to help you there,’ she
answers quickly, ‘but first, tell me you’ll come out with me this weekend.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, in the manner of someone worn down and not very happy about it.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘But nowhere ridiculously expensive.’ I can barely afford to feed myself, never mind find money for Soho prices.

  ‘As if we’ll be paying for our own drinks,’ she scoffs.

  ‘No, Mel. I mean it, no men.’

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘No men for me, at least. I’m sure Tim wouldn’t like it.’

  I sit straighter, earning myself another malevolent glare from the cat. So I flip him off.

  ‘How is Tim?’ I ask . . . because that’s what friends do. ‘Are you still enjoying playing happy families?’ Mel was recently having a new bathroom fitted at her place when the workmen discovered a leak from the ground floor. Hundred-year-old mains had been pumping water into the foundations of her bijou palace, which was a perfect excuse to move into her boyfriend’s apartment.

  ‘I prefer to think of it as allowing him to realise how much he loves having me around.’ As I begin to chuckle, the cat stretches disdainfully before thumping his bulk down from the couch, unamused at the disturbance. ‘And speaking of families . . .’

  Something about her tone puts me immediately on edge. Mel is rarely tentative. We’re opposites in lots of ways. I watch, she demands. I’m dark, she’s like a bright flame. I’m short, and she is statuesque. She’s bossy, and she has been since she’d turned up on my doorstep within a few days of my family moving to the UK. I was ten and moody and not very receptive as she’d announced, I’m Melody, your new best friend. As it turns out, she was right. She’s been organising me since then.

  Or trying to.

  ‘I have a little bit of a dilemma. But it’s one that you might be able to make use of.’

  ‘Okay . . .’ Suddenly, my Melody-senses are tingling. She’s up to something.

  ‘You remember how I suggested you rent out one of your spare rooms?’

  ‘Nope,’ I reply firmly. We’ve already had this discussion on more than one occasion. ‘I don’t want a housemate—a stranger living in my place.’ Medical school was bad enough. ‘I’d rather work seven days a week and live on ramen again.’

  ‘This is not a housemate. Well, not a housemate, per se. More like you doing me a huge favour while getting a little extra towards your mortgage. Also, not a stranger,’ she adds in that strange air again. But she had me at mortgage, and she probably knows it.

  ‘Go on,’ I reply warily.

  ‘I need you to let Ben stay with you.’

  ‘Ben? Your brother Ben? The same Ben who flushed my beloved goldfish down the pan?’

  ‘No, Ben, the man from Mars. Of course, I mean my brother Ben.’

  Honestly? I’d much rather open my home to an alien than Ben Monroe.

  Chapter 2

  PENNY

  ‘That’s not very nice,’ she says even though she’s laughing. And that’s about when I realise I’d said that out loud. But come on, Ben was a blight on my childhood!

  ‘Not very nice?’ I repeat, though in a different tone. ‘Maybe that’s what you should’ve said that time he peed in the hot tub, instead of laughing along with him.’ She was on the patio at this point, out of the offending liquid-ick.

  ‘When was that?’ Her words rumble down the line like a giggle.

  ‘Never have I ever peed in a hot tub,’ I say, repeating Ben’s line from the game we played long ago. It was a chilly autumn day, and we were submerged to our shoulders, the inflatable table bobbing between us, filled with sodas and chips rather than the beers we’d usually sneak when Mel’s parents—and Ben—weren’t around.

  ‘He was fourteen,’ she says, laughing still.

  ‘And old enough to know better.’ What kind of person even admits to that kind of stuff? I’ll tell you who—Ben Monroe. The kid was a law onto himself. It’s like his parents never set boundaries for their blond-haired, blue-eyed son. And as a consequence, he became a pain in my ass. At least, until I left home for college . . . only to never make it to the US after meeting Liam that summer and opting to stay in the UK.

  ‘Why can’t he stay at the barracks?’ He’d joined the Army after university, that much I do recall, but I haven’t seen him in years.

  ‘Would you want to live in the hospital on your vacation time?’

  She might have a point. ‘But I don’t even know him. Not these days.’

  ‘Of course, you know him.’ She scoffs. ‘Just because you haven’t seen him in a few years doesn’t mean you don’t know him.’

  ‘Why can’t he go stay at a hotel?’ Even I can hear how whiny that sounds. ‘Surely, he must have some friends he can hang with.’ Or maybe not because he was a vindictive shit. ‘Oh!’ I add suddenly, a thought occurring. ‘Your parents!’

  ‘I’m sure they would love him to go home, but he said he needs to stay close to the barracks. I think he said it’s in Regent’s Park. Im sure he’ll visit but he doesn’t want to stay with them. You know what Mum is like.’ Mel’s mom is lovely, though a little over the top. And I suppose Regent’s Park makes sense. It’s not too far away from where I live.

  ‘How long has he been away this time?’

  ‘Ten months,’ she answers quietly. ‘And he said he needed somewhere to stay to decompress. Needed,’ she reiterates. ‘And, well, I need you to do this for me because I said he could stay with me.’

  ‘And now your house is inhabitable,’ I answer flatly.

  ‘Exactly. And he doesn’t like Tim,’ she adds, halting my next suggestion that he stay at Tim’s place. ‘I don’t want to make things uncomfortable for him, not when he’s been living God knows where and doing God knows what all for his Queen and country.’

  ‘So you’d rather make things uncomfortable for me?’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘He’s practically a stranger, Mel. Someone I no longer know!’ Maybe she should put in a call to Buckingham Palace to see if Queen Lizzie can spare him a room.

  ‘That’s not true. The three of us were practically raised together. That sort of makes you his sister, too.’

  ‘I must’ve been the sister he didn’t like,’ I grumble in an undertone.

  ‘What are you talking about? He used to follow you around like a puppy.’

  ‘One prone to bite my ankles and piss on my shoes.’

  ‘You know, he often asks how you are when he calls.’

  ‘Really?’ I answer sceptically.

  ‘Of course. Why are you being so weird about this?’

  It might be the fact that Little Ben—as he was referred to in the neighbourhood in reference to his beanpole physique resembling Big Ben, the clock tower at Westminster—was just plain mean to me. I think I’m still scarred. Whether he was flushing my fish when I was twelve or pushing snails down the back of my shorts when I was sixteen or yelling in front of my first (and only) boyfriend that I had tube socks stuffed in my bra, he was a blight on my existence. And that kind of meanness doesn’t dilute with age.

  Oh, God. That awful nickname he used to call me by.

  And yes, okay, I was a late developer. Hence the socks.

  ‘Come on, Pen. He’s just spent months fighting for our liberties, and I’ve let him down. You don’t want to let him down, too, do you?’

  ‘You are a wicked, wicked person, Melody Monroe.’ She knows she’s got me because I, Penelope Abigail Ballantine, always do the right thing. Even when I don’t want to. It’s a curse, let me tell you.

  ‘You’re absolutely right. I am a wicked, wicked person. Possibly because my parents gave me a stripper’s name.’

  I roll my eyes so hard I can almost see the wall behind me. ‘Fine,’ I retort through gritted teeth. ‘He can stay here. But only for a little while.’

  Pissed all of a sudden, I lean forward and grab my crocheting from the wicker box on the coffee table and begin picking loose the threads of the scarf I’ve been attempting
to make for the past few months. So far, it hasn’t gotten much longer than a teddy bear-sized scarf. I don’t know how many times I’ve picked this project up and ended up putting it back down more frustrated than when I started. As a potential hobby, it kind of sucks.

  ‘Nell, you are a lifesaver! You won’t regret it.’

  ‘I’d better not,’ I grumble, annoyed with myself that I’ve allowed her to lumber me with an unwelcome guest. The woman missed her calling. Instead of buying high fashion for wealthy women, she should’ve gone to work for NATO or something.

  ‘Honestly, Ben is a different person these days,’ she adds, saccharine sweet. So maybe she does remember how awful he was to me. Probably because when he was picking on me, he was leaving her alone. I thought the older sibling got to torture younger siblings, not the other way around.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m about to let a strange man stay in my house,’ I grumble.

  ‘He’s not that strange. And it’ll be nice for you to have a little company.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing. Just . . . it’ll be nice to have a man around, won’t it?’

  ‘What’s with the weird laugh?’

  ‘He’s just, you know . . . my baby brother.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And . . . you don’t have a boyfriend.’

  It takes me a moment to decipher her meaningful tone but decipher it I do. ‘Are you asking me to have sex with Ben?’ I ask a little incredulously. ‘Or not to have sex with him? Is that what this whole one-night stand thing is about? Because that’s not gonna happen.’ Ever. Ben Monroe is not on my to-do list. He tortured me for years!

  ‘You never know what might happen when—’

  ‘Oh, so I’m a sex maniac now? Ben’s virtue is safe with me, I promise.’

  ‘I was mostly thinking about it the other way around.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Ben is, how can I put this . . . popular with the ladies?’

  ‘You mean he’s a man whore?’