Chapter 4
Corinne
“Hey! You want to make out? Take it outside,” an employee dressed in all black says as he squeezes past us, carrying a heavy caddy of clean pint glasses.
Uncle Declan immediately pushes off the wall and tucks his top back into his jeans. “Come on. Let’s get out of here,” he says, grabbing my hand.
“To make out?” I ask with a hopeful, girlish lift of my voice.
“To sleep. Separately. Because you’re my niece,” he says over his shoulder, as if he needs the reminder, too.
He drags me past the line dancers toward the exit of barn wood doors manned by a bouncer who looks like he could crack a skull as easily as an egg for breakfast. Like Uncle Declan and Uncle Kason.
I had slipped the bouncer my number when I arrived, because why not? If Uncle Declan wants to pretend he isn’t interested in me, then why shouldn’t I do the same?
I dig my boots in and shake Uncle Declan’s hand off. “Then I’m not going. I came out to have fun. But if you want to leave, fine by me.” I turn on my heel, weaving back through the crowd toward the bar so I can order a drink.
The handsome, older cowboy finishing a tumbler of dark brown alcohol at the bar swaggers closer to ask, “Can I buy you a drink, beautiful?”
See? This is how it should be. The cowboy is two or three inches shorter than me, yet he doesn’t look the least bit like my five-foot-ten height will bruise his ego.
“She’s taken,” Uncle Declan says, sliding in between me and the cowboy before I can even open my mouth to say yes, please.
“No, I’m not.” I slip around to the cowboy’s other side. “A shot of tequila, please,” I tell the bartender with black space buns and large, silver glitter gauges in her earlobes, then give the cowboy a smile. “I’m Corinne. Thanks for the drink…”
“Steve,” he says, shaking my hand, his palm oddly smooth. When Uncle Declan makes an impatient, annoyed noise, Steve asks, “Who’s this joker?”
“My uncle,” I emphasize, narrowing my eyes at Uncle Declan.
The skin between Steve’s brows creases, even as he lowers his hand to the dip in my back. Though he looks closer to fifty, there’s not a hint of gray in his thick crop of black hair or trimmed beard.
Uncle Declan circles Steve’s wrist and flings it away. “Get your hand off my wife.”
“You married your uncle?” Steve asks me, his mouth twisted with disgust. “That’s some seriously sick shit.” But then he leans into Uncle Declan with a sleazy waggle of his thick brows. “Though if any of my nieces looked like that…” He whistles with appreciation as he stares at my chest.
Uncle Declan cocks his elbow, ready to slam his fist into Steve’s face, and I catch his arm in the nick of time.
“Get lost,” I tell Steve. As soon as he’s gone, trying his luck with another lady, I quickly down the shot the bartender sets in front of me when she reappears.
When I lift the new tumbler of bourbon Steve had ordered, Uncle Declan takes it out of my hand and sets it down hard on the bartop, pushing it away. “You’ve had your fun. Now, can we please go home?”
“To sleep?”
“Yes,” he says in an of course manner.
“Then, no thanks. I want to dance.” I drop a ten-dollar bill in the tip jar, then scoot away from Uncle Declan to join the line dancers. I get in maybe five steps before the song fades into a much slower tune meant for dancing with a partner. “Dangit.”
Uncle Declan approaches, rubbing one hand over the other, ready to bargain. “If I dance one song with you, then will you come home?”
Swaying my hips, I tell him, “Make it four, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
“Two,” he says flatly.
I lift my chin. “Five.”
He points his finger at me. “That’s not how negotiating works.”
“I don’t care. Now it’s six. Take it or leave it.”
“Fine,” he says grumpily.
“You just bought yourself another song, mister.”
He groans. “Fine, seven songs. But now I need a drink.” He laces his fingers between mine, and I happily follow him, giddy to have gotten my way. We both sling back a shot of tequila at the bar before taking our place on the dance floor.
At first, Uncle Declan is stiff, barely shuffling his boots, but two songs and another shot later, he’s finally getting into it, no longer keeping me literally at arm’s length.
By the fifth song, we’re both sweaty, and he spins me around with our hands linked above my head, finishing with my back to his chest. His hot breath and mustache flutter across my neck when he sweeps my hair to the side, giving my overheated skin goosebumps.
“Just like that, sugar,” he rumbles as I roll my hips from side to side. We’re still dancing, same as the rest of the crowd—nothing too lewd—but each movement I make is slow and exaggerated so I can grind my ass against the distinctive, hard bulge behind his zipper.
All is going exceedingly well by the sixth song—Uncle Declan’s arms are now wrapped around me, his fingers pushed under the hem of my T-shirt at my waist, his cowboy hat granting us privacy as his lips trail across my jaw while he leads me around the dance floor—until two guys, who look like their jobs are to drink for a living, swing at each other, both knocked on their asses.
Then their friends jump into the action, and it quickly devolves into an all-out brawl.
“Time to go,” Uncle Declan says, and I don’t resist when he pushes me ahead of him out of the bar into the balmy night, bringing an abrupt end to what had been one of the best nights of my adult life. “Did you drive?”
I shake my head, having paid for a ride since I knew I would be drinking.
Though Uncle Declan had cut himself off and switched to water after the second shot, he still pulls up his ride-share app, and we wait on the sidewalk facing the street, watching the deputies speed down the road and swarm the bar to break up the fight.
Uncle Declan lets go of my hand, quick to put a few feet between us, when our driver arrives at the curb with their hazard lights flashing in a nondescript gray sedan that neither of us recognizes. The driver, however, we both do.
“Thought that was you,” Uncle Kason says through his rolled-down window, shooting Uncle Declan a questioning look before he gives me a warm smile. “Hey, there, honey.”
I’d be genuinely happy to see him if it weren’t for how uncomfortable Uncle Declan is now, turning cold on me.
“Hey, Uncle Kason.” I give him a short wave instead of running to him and throwing myself into his strong arms as I normally would. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”
He nods. “Just got back this morning and crashed. Slept damn near fifteen hours.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I ask, hurt since it’s rare that he doesn’t let us know when he’s coming home, so what’s changed? Was it the spankings? My cheeks heat at the memory of him tugging down my shorts and what other secret games we might have played if Arjun hadn’t come home.
“Well, it was supposed to be a surprise,” Uncle Kason says, and I hope he’s telling the truth. That he isn’t keeping his distance from me, too, as if I have some kind of contagious, infectious disease.
“Sorry to ruin it,” I say with a pout.
Uncle Kason says, “You couldn’t ruin anything if you tried, hon.”
Uncle Declan clears his throat and opens the back passenger door. Instead of following me into the back seat, where I settle in the middle, he plops down in the front, resting his cowboy hat in the middle of his lap.
Uncle Kason slides a look to Uncle Declan while waiting for us to buckle our seat belts. “Thought I was picking up you and a date when the app said the ride was for two.”
“And I thought some lady named Saanvi was supposed to be our driver,” Uncle Declan grumbles.
Uncle Kason sucks his teeth. “My roommate’s cousin caught a stomach bug, but I knew she could use the extra money for school, so I took the job for her.”
“Isn’t that against company policy or something?” I ask. If he’d been anyone else, I never would have gotten in the car and would have reported the account.
“Sure.” Uncle Kason shrugs his broad shoulders, casual enough if we didn’t know him any better, even as he eyes me in the rearview mirror after pulling back into moving traffic. “How ya doing, kid?”
Yup. It was the spankings, and now he’s putting more distance between us by calling me a kid. “Good,” I say shortly.
He waits for more, and when I don’t speak up, he asks, “So, y’all were out at one in the morning…just the two of you?”
Does he sound jealous? If he’d told us he was in town, we could have asked him to join us at the bar before the fight broke out. Dancing between both of my uncles, one pressed to my back and the other against my chest, would have been…an experience. A dream come true. A pipe dream, unfortunately.
“No,” Uncle Declan says quickly, shifting in his seat with unease. “We ran into each other after our dates left—separately, we had separate dates. We weren’t on a date with each other.”
I let out a silent groan at Uncle Declan’s totally obvious discomfort dripping with guilt and watch the landscape change from the city to the outskirts of town, kudzu vines choking the woods that grow denser as we travel farther away to our secluded property.
If this Saanvi person had been our driver, I wonder if I would have had the chance to extend the pretend date-night by dancing our last song on Uncle Declan’s lap in the back seat. I sure would have tried.
Uncle Kason taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Remind me how old you are, Corinne?”
Unlike Uncle Declan, I’m too tired, tipsy, and heartsore to deal with Uncle Kason and his—correct—suspicions. “As if you don’t know. I’m twenty-one. Not a kid.”
“Still too young to be out this late at some shitty bar when you should be tucked into bed where we know you’re safe. Ain’t that right, Declan?” He reaches across the console like he’s going to squeeze Uncle Declan’s thigh, but drops his hand after letting it hover in the air for a brief moment.