Chapter 3
Declan
It’s been six whole weeks without sweet, confusing, and all too tempting Corinne’s soft hands on my back, her nails trailing across my scalp in the kind of way that, if I were a dog, I’d be kicking my leg over and over again.
Scratch that, pun intended, I am a dog. A dirty, nasty kind gone sniffing after what he can never have. The worst kind.
As much as I hated to see Kason go, like so many times beforehand, it’s good that he went back to work a week ago, so I don’t have to spend as much time in such close proximity to Corinne like I did when we hung out with him.
He’d have sensed something was wrong and pestered me to death until I spilled my secret—one of many.
I’m sorry, Boyd. I did my best to ignore your gorgeous daughter, and my best wasn’t good enough.
I knew I’d failed the moment I started strutting around my dead buddy’s house without my shirt.
Then, without my boxers. And then, after a time, without my thick sweatpants, swapping them out for the thinnest shorts I own, keeping one eye on Corinne at all times to see if she noticed…
all the same as I’d confusingly done when I lived with Kason.
“Hello, anyone home?” Angie or Angela or Angola huffs, snapping her long manicured fingers in the smoky, busy bar, the floor disturbingly sticky. “Are you even listening, or am I talking to a brick wall?”
I bob my head at the woman who’s the complete opposite of Corrine—a short-stack with a mane of strawberry blonde curls—before signaling to a passing waitress in the kind of tight denim short-shorts I’d love to see Corinne wearing.
“What can I get you, sugar?” the waitress asks, pulling her notepad from her apron pocket that’s stained with what I hope is ketchup and not blood. It could be either in this place. Who knows?
“First off, drop the ‘sugar’,” I say. “Second, another shot.”
Great, now I have another pissed off woman glaring at me, clenching her teeth before adopting a somewhat strained and contemptuous customer service smile. “What kind?”
“Don’t care,” I answer with a burp that I’m a second too late to cover.
“You’re disgusting.” Ang, I decide on calling her, pushes back her chair and slings her purse—are those cartoon anchovies sewn onto it?—over her shoulder. “Word of advice, asshole, take your next unlucky date to a place that isn’t as rotten as your personality.”
I salute her off with a pang for wasting her time and being such a lousy date.
I snort when I get a look at her expensive sneakers as she walks away, her ass not nearly as alluring as my sweet niece’s backside.
It was never going to work out between Ang and me, anyway, not with my obsession over Corinne spiraling out of control.
The waitress—might as well call her Ang, too—doesn’t bat an eye at my date’s insult of this fine establishment or hasty exit, probably used to it. She silently counts my five empty shot glasses littering the also sticky tabletop. “I don’t think so, su—sir.”
“Fine, then. A pint of whatever you have on tap,” I say, glaring right back at Second-Ang. I could have already downed another shot in the time it’s taken for her to judge me and find me lacking, my hair sweaty beneath my cowboy hat in the stifling heat of the bar.
“Sure,” she says with a scowl. Except she brings me a tall glass of water that I suspect was dunked in a toilet instead of filled from the tap behind the bar. She also slaps down my bill, having closed out my tab.
“What’s this?” I ask, tapping the automatic tip she’s tacked onto the total with the—dammit, what is it with this place?—sticky pen. “Thirty percent?”
“That’s called the Asshole Gratuity,” she says with a smirk. “Now, sign it.”
Fuck it. I scrawl my name. I’ve stayed away from the house long enough that Corinne should already be asleep, and I’m ready to get home.
I shouldn’t, since I’m only going to torture myself by refusing to masturbate to the memory of my niece’s soft skin and budding nipples, daydreaming of what else I could have done to her the last time I let her massage my back if she really were my wife.
The answer is everything, which is why I have to stay far away from her now.
Sorry again, Boyd.
Leaving my truck parked at the bar, crossing my fingers that it’ll still have all four tires when I return in the morning to pick it up, I order a ride.
* * *
I mutter a curse under my breath when I make it home.
Corinne is sprawled out on the couch on her back, wearing only a too-short T-shirt, one bare leg straight, her other knee bent and fallen open to the side.
My mood sinks even lower when I see she’s watched a full season of our show without me, and I move to pick up the remote to turn off the TV, but then think better of it.
The last thing she needs is to potentially wake up as my smelly ass transfers her to her room.
Heading into my bathroom, my mind is stuck on the thought of crawling on top of Corinne and slowly pulling her panties to the side so I can thrust into my wife while she’s asleep, leaving her to wake up with my cum buried deep inside her.
It’s a shameful dark fantasy I shared with Kason one late night spent hanging out in my room at our apartment, though, of course, Corinne hadn’t been on my radar at the time.
Kason and I had accidentally fallen asleep, as we’d done often enough, and I’d woken with my dick hard and grinding against his, surprised by how big his cock was, even at half-mast, while he was dreaming.
I had cum in my shorts within seconds while staring at my best friend’s beard and plush, parted lips, then flipped over and pretended I was still asleep when he started to stir.
Thank the heavens he never found out, because I don’t know how I would have explained to him what came over me. I can’t even explain it to myself.
Taking a cold shower does nothing to kill my boner, but at least it washes away most of my buzz and makes me hop out lightning quick so I don’t end up stroking myself.
I sigh and send up another apology to Boyd—it seems that’s all I do—when I make it back to the living room.
By the light of the TV, I can see well enough the soft and inviting roundness of Corinne’s lower belly since she’s thrown an arm up over her face in her sleep, her T-shirt riding higher on her thighs.
If I lost the last shred of my control and did crawl on top of her, would she even put up a fight? Or would she bat those long lashes at me and beg me to make her cum? Or better yet, would she pretend she was still asleep, as I’d done so long ago, and let me live out my dark fantasy?
Fuck. Before I know it, I’m leaning over her, one hand flat to the wall behind the couch with my face close enough to the V of my niece’s thighs to breathe in her feminine scent.
With my resolve crumbling, I shove my hand in my shorts, shivering when I begin stroking my dick.
If it weren’t for her sudden shift in her sleep, snapping me out of my insanity, there’s no telling what my depraved soul would have done when I was this close to cumming.
“Hmm?” Corinne startles when I slide my hands under her, lifting her off the couch.
I bite my tongue to hold back a moan at the caress of her naked skin against mine since I hadn’t pulled on a T-shirt like I most definitely should have.
“Shh, sugar. I’m just moving you to your bed.” Carrying her down the hall, I pause at my open bedroom door, thinking of how simple it would be to give in and take her into my room…which also happened to be her dad’s and her grandfather’s before that. The reminder keeps me moving.
“Uncle Declan?” she asks, squinting in the dark.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Uncle Declan. Uncle. It’s important I remember what that title represents, the boundaries that it should create between us, even if my cock refuses to care.
She smacks her lips when I step into her room, painted in creams and blues. “How was your date with Angelina?”
Ahh, so that was her name.
“She was wearing tennis shoes.” I lower Corinne onto her queen-sized mattress on the left side of the messy room, also dutifully ignoring her overflowing laundry hamper and the sexy, lacy red bra thrown on top.
Corinne puffs out a sleepy, singular laugh. “So she’s not ‘the one’.”
“No one is ‘the one’.” I can’t seem to make my muscles cooperate, willing myself to slide my hands out from under her, prolonging contact instead. “I told you, I’m too old and cranky to keep dating.”
“Don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she says, her voice raspy. “Not when you have a perfectly good wife waiting for you at home.”
“Corinne…” I say in warning.
“Yeah, yeah.” She does me the terrible favor of rolling over out of my arms and onto her side, gathering her fuzzy blue body pillow to her chest, propping her top leg over it, back to sleep in seconds.
I’m bowled over by the sight of the thin, tantalizing strip of black fabric splitting her full asscheeks. Of course, the first thing my sick mind whispers is that she’s in an even better position now if I wanted to take her in her sleep.
“If you were my wife, sugar,” I say in a deep but quiet rumble, “I’d replace this thong of yours with my cock, snuggled up inside my woman all night long. I’d fuck a baby into you, and you wouldn’t even know it until you woke up with my cum sticking to your thighs.”