Shenanigans, p.1
Shenanigans, page 1
Shenanigans
Sarina Bowen
Tuxbury Publishing LLC
Copyright © 2022 by Sarina Bowen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For my Jenn and Natasha. Thank you for all that you do!
Contents
1. I’m Not Wearing Pants
2. Playing the Rich Asshole
3. Waffles on the Private Jet
4. If a Unicorn Sneezed
5. Posh Industrial
6. Eggplant Jokes
7. Skittish Kitten
8. Mrs. Cornelius Drake the Third
9. Drinking From the Cup of Bad Decisions
10. My Accidental Husband is Super Hot
11. Of All the Boneheaded Stunts
12. Meet the Parents
13. Think Again
14. Night, Kitten
15. A Bad Boy Like Neil
16. You Have to Stroke it
17. We’re Sold Out
18. Pint-Sized Tormentor
19. Ten Out of Ten
20. Eyes Up Here
21. Drunk Logic
22. Big Plans. So Big.
23. All My Worst Ideas
24. I Want To Spoil You
25. Really High Production Values
26. Like Ships Passing In the Night
27. Date Night
28. Cayenne
29. I Can Explain
30. Like Boxers in a Ring
31. Practicing My I’m Sorry Speech
32. Put it on Neil’s Tab
33. It’s Not Always Your Turn
34. A Sober Offering
35. Just an Ordinary Friday
36. Look it Up
37. The Guy In Your Corner
38. I Didn’t Know I was Having a Party
39. Some Quality Work
40. Really Awkward Holidays
41. World Class Apology
42. The One With All the Baggage
43. Epilogue
Also by Sarina Bowen
Acknowledgments
One
I’m Not Wearing Pants
Charli
It’s a beeping alarm that pierces through my hangover to wake me up.
At first, I fight it. I’m lying on my back in a plush bed that’s way too comfortable to be my own. This isn’t necessarily a problem. I’m a professional hockey player, and we spend a lot of nights in hotels.
Not nice hotels, though. It’s the silky, high-thread-count sheets that provide the first clue that something is very wrong.
Also, I’m topless. And I have a hangover headache. But those two things happen occasionally, and neither one is too worrisome.
The alarm, though. It isn’t mine, and it isn’t my road-trip roommate Samantha’s. Whose room is this?
I’d open my eyes to check, but it’s awfully bright, and I’m so sleepy. I drift off for another moment.
Eventually, though, another mechanical beep pulls me back to the surface. This noise is familiar. It’s the sound that Neil—Cornelius Harmon Drake III—makes when he’s testing his blood sugar.
Wait. I’m in a bed with Neil Drake?
And I’m topless, too?
Shit.
My eyes spring open. The first thing I see is… the ceiling. It’s really far away and very decorative. There’s a line of goddamn gold leaf running around the border of the room. It’s further confirmation that Drake is in this bed with me. He’s the richest person I’ll ever meet.
My head throbs in protest, and my mouth is dry. Hello, hangover.
“What the fuck happened here last night?” Drake mumbles from a few feet away. “Why am I not wearing my pants?”
“I am!” This comes out all raspy, as if I smoked a pack of cigarettes. I’m not a smoker, though. Then again, all bets are off this morning.
“You’re wearing my pants?” Drake asks.
“No,” I clarify, relieved to discover that my bottom half isn’t as naked as the top half. “If we’re taking inventory, I’d like to report that I’m wearing underwear and pantyhose. And also…” What is that thing near my foot? With my toe, I drag it upward until I can reach it. I pull one high-heeled shoe out from under the bedclothes.
We both snort at the same time. Apparently, I got in bed wearing my hose and at least one shoe. No shirt, though, which is going to be awkward in a moment when I get up.
Still, it’s a relief. We got wasted in Vegas, but at least we didn’t get wasted and screw each other. So whatever damage control we’re doing right now, it can’t be that bad.
I finally get up the courage to look over at Neil Drake, just about the same time he gets the courage to look at me. His hazel eyes widen. Mine do too.
He looks like he’s been to war. He’s still wearing his bowtie, but the tuxedo shirt underneath is open and missing half its buttons. His thick hair is all askew, like sex hair, even though I’ve established that no sex happened.
Well, no banging happened. But those missing buttons are ringing some bells with me. I think maybe I—
“Oh shit,” I whisper. I’m pretty sure I ripped those buttons off myself. Although I hadn’t been able to get that bowtie off him.
“What the hell happened here last night?” he asks in a harsh whisper. His expression is so confused.
“Um…” Think, Charli. “We did some drinking after the awards ceremony. And after your fight with Iris.”
“My fight with Iris,” he echoes. His eyes squeeze closed with remorse.
The fight had been pretty ugly. Lots of shouting. I’d been eavesdropping from the living room, silently cheering Neil on whenever he landed a verbal blow.
Not that it’s any of my business, but I can’t stand his on-again-off-again girlfriend. They’ve been off for a while, but I think she came to Vegas to try to change that.
It hadn’t worked. When she’d finally screeched her goodbyes and had stormed out of this hotel suite, I’d smiled at the sight of her skinny ass as it departed.
“You got pretty drunk after that,” I say to my tousle-haired companion. “Is your, um, blood sugar okay?”
Neil is diabetic. Before him, I’d never met anyone who has to monitor his own body chemistry to remain alive.
It almost makes him seem less like a carefree rich dude and more like a real person.
Almost. But not quite.
“I need to eat,” he says. “Although we’re supposed to be downstairs in, like, seventeen minutes.”
“Seventeen?” I screech.
“Yeah, I like to sleep as late as I can.”
Ugh. I sit up so fast that I feel nauseated.
Also, I’m still topless. Neil is now staring at my breasts.
“Oops.” I grab them in two hands.
“Wow,” he says, his eyes glazing over lustfully.
“Come on, now. You’ve seen tits before.” I can play this off as a joke, right? We’ll be laughing about this in a week. Remember that time you flashed me your tits before we almost missed the team jet?
But it’s too soon.
“Charli,” he croaks, his eyes still glued to my hands cupping my breasts.
“What?”
“I’ve seen those tits before. They look super familiar. Because we fooled around last night.” He scrubs a hand over his face, somehow without breaking the stare-off he’s having with my tits. “Hot damn.”
“Whoa whoa whoa. First of all, tits are tits.” This is a lie. As someone who’s also fond of tits, I’m oversimplifying things. But now is not the moment for brutal honesty. “Besides, I don’t remember it like that,” I say carefully. “Maybe your memory could also fuck off right about now.”
“That might be tricky. It might be hard to forget playing with those. They’re pretty spectacular.”
I grab the sheet and yank it up to cover me. “Hey! Is mind bleach a thing? Because I think you need some.”
He grins suddenly. “My head is killing me right now. Like someone put an ax through it. But this is going to be so funny later, isn’t it? I think I drooled all over your chest last night like a Saint Bernard.”
“Stop! This isn’t funny! What about Iris?” Honestly, Iris can die slowly in a pit of Las Vegas quicksand. (Is that a thing? It should be.) But if Neil feels guilty, then maybe he’ll put our drunken encounter out of his stupidly handsome head.
Instead, he shrugs. “I told her we’re never getting back together, right? That’s why you and I got drunk. God, never sleep in a bowtie, though.” He reaches up and unclips it.
I blink. “You wear a clip-on tie? You? With your Tom Ford tux?”
“The tux is Armani.” He drops the tie onto the crisp white comforter. “The clip-on is something I bought just to irritate my uncle. But it’s awfully handy. Saves time.”
I just stare at the thing for a moment, because I’m having a bit of a flashback to last night. I’d been tugging on that bowtie to try to get it off him. Then I’d gotten frustrated and yanked the two halves of his shirt apart.
Then? I’d leaned down and licked his sixpack…
Holy, holy crap. I licked Neil Drake. And I liked it.
“You look like you just saw the devil.” He snickers. “We were obviously in a weird, self-destructive mood. I never get drunk. And you never—” He stops talking suddenly. His mouth falls open in shock.
“I never what?” There’s a lot of ways that sentence could end, and none of them are good. I’ve always been careful to never let on that Neil is the most attractive man I’ve ever met. I’ve never torn his shirt off, either. Or shown him my breasts.
His face is seriously confused. “Charli… you told me before that you don’t fool around with men.”
Oh. That’s mostly true, especially lately. But really? That’s what he finds so shocking here?
“But last night you… and I…” He swallows hard. “We were going to…” Then he lifts up the covers and looks down at his body.
His naked body. I can’t see it right this second, but I saw it last night.
“I’m not wearing pants,” he says again. “We were going to—” He’s like a stuck record now.
“Okay, look.” I clap my hands. “Time is wasting. Can we just get out of here, and worry about this later? Can I have the shower?”
“S-sure,” he stammers. He’s still looking at his dick, as if checking to see if it’s still there.
“Close your eyes, please,” I say primly.
Shockingly, he obeys me. He flops back onto the pillow and squeezes his eyes shut.
I dart out of bed and make a run for the bathroom.
Two
Playing the Rich Asshole
Neil
I’m going to die of embarrassment. Or die of this headache.
Or both at the same time.
It’s not the nakedness or the drunkenness that’s killing me. I look good naked, and I rarely get drunk, because it makes my diabetes harder to manage.
And it’s not the clip-on tie. I wear what I want. Fuck the haters.
But the details from last night are starting to cut through the fog in my brain. Charli’s breasts woke me up for good. Those spectacular breasts that I’ve spent the last year and a half trying not to ogle.
Last night she let me, though. No, she actually encouraged me by whipping off her dress.
And I’d pounced. I’d been sloppy drunk for the first time in years. After we’d rolled around a little, I took off my pants while she tried to remove my tie and my shirt.
She’d been only partially successful. But eventually she gave up and kissed her way down my body.
I’d been in heaven, having guiltily jacked off to this very fantasy quite a few times. Then she’d—and I swear this actually happened, it wasn’t a fever dream—put her mouth on me. Everything had been pure bliss.
But I’m a greedy bastard. I’d wanted more. So I’d grabbed a condom off the bedside table and tried to put it on, but…
I let out a loud groan of despair. Because unless I’m remembering a nightmare, I’d suddenly been afflicted with whiskey dick at just the wrong moment.
God, how embarrassing. I will never live this down.
Or maybe I will. Charli asked me to forget that it ever happened. And suddenly I’m on board with this plan.
Nothing happened. Not one thing. Not the whiskey dick or the blowjob. Okay, it’s going to hurt me to give up the memory of my hand threaded through Charli’s red hair as she—
Whew. My cock stirs at the mental image.
But no. I can’t keep that in the spank bank if I don’t want to remember what happened afterwards. So I have to delete the whole mental file, no? The breasts and the stumbling into the elevator. We’d been laughing like nutters. I’m pretty sure an elderly couple had exited the elevator early just to escape our howls.
“We gotta celebrate,” Charli had said. And I’d agreed. We’d been celebrating our…
Whoa.
Hold up. That memory can’t be right. Can it?
I leap out of the bed and cross the room, looking for evidence. Not that it’s difficult to find. My belongings have been tossed helter-skelter on the desk in the way of a hotel drunk. And right there, beside the key card for this suite, is a certificate with a decorative gold border looping around the edges of the page.
A marriage certificate. With my name on it. And Charli’s.
Holy fuck.
“Holy fuck,” Charli calls from the bathroom. “What is this thing in my hair?”
I can’t answer her, because I’ve lost all capacity for speech. Is there any chance this certificate is fake? Who’d marry a drunk person to another drunk person?
There’s a crumpled receipt on the desk that answers the question pretty handily. It’s from the TruLove Vegas Wedding Chapel, and the charge is for over twelve thousand dollars. It’s itemized, because—as I learned in childhood—when you fuck up your life, there’s usually somebody there to make sure you know the details of your self-destruction.
Wedding music: $57.50
Ceremony: $250
Flowers: $75
I glance around the room and find a bouquet of white roses on the floor near the bedroom door. So that charge tracks.
Deluxe Multi-stone Engagement Ring: $11,000
“Seriously,” she calls. “What is this thing? Neil? It’s heavy. Like jewelry. Help!”
At the sound of Charli’s distress, I snap out of my stupor and cross to the master bathroom. When I open the door, I find that she’s wrapped her body in a towel before summoning me. But I can still see cleavage.
I yank my eyes upward. “What’s the matter?” My voice is outwardly calm, but inwardly I’m wondering if I can take care of this little marriage thing before Charli finds out. Or I investigate it, at least. So I know for sure if we’re really—
Yeah, I can’t even think it. Too crazy.
I concentrate on the problem at hand. Charli clutches a section of her hair, where there’s an object imbedded in her red waves. It’s in an awkward spot at the back of her head. No wonder she can’t untangle it herself.
I reach up with shaking fingers and clear the loosest strands away from what turns out to be an eleven-thousand-dollar, multi-stone engagement ring. And by “multi-stone” they meant multiple different stones. It’s like a rainbow parade in jewelry form.
“Holy fuck,” I whisper. Somehow this makes it real in a way that words on a receipt don’t seem to capture.
“What?” she snaps. “Did you just realize you’re naked from the waist down?”
“That is the least of our problems,” I mutter. “Just don’t look at my dongle.”
“Oh, sure. The same way you didn’t just stare at my breasts? Fine. Is it out yet? OUCH!”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pull so hard. But the last bit of hair was stuck between two stones.”
“Two stones? Of what?”
“Nothing.” I palm the ring, still in full-on panic mode.
“Neil, show me what was stuck in my hair.”
“No.” I put my hand behind my back with all the finesse of a kindergartener who’s stolen a cookie.
“Cornelius!” The pitch of her voice is high and scared. “Show me. Because it felt like a...” She swallows hard.
“A what?”
“A ring. A damn ring. And I don’t wear rings. Except I think maybe…” She takes a deep breath. “What did we do?”
I pull my hand out and slowly open it. We both look down, and then we both take identical sharp breaths.
“Wow,” she says.
“I know,” I grunt.
“That’s hideous.”
“I guess you get what you pay for. It was only eleven large.”
“Eleven…dollars?” she asks, her voice climbing in pitch. “Please say that’s what you meant.”
“Nah. Eleven thousand. We’re in the tackiest city ever built.”
“Oh my God,” Charli gasps. “What a waste of—” The sentence ends abruptly. “Shit. The ring isn’t the real problem, is it?”
