by Sienna Blake
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My Brother’s Girl:
An Irish Kiss Novel
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Sienna Blake
My Brother’s Girl: a novel / by Sienna Blake. – 1st Ed.
First Edition: April 2020
Copyright 2020 Sienna Blake
Cover art copyright 2020 Cosmic Letterz. All Rights Reserved Sienna Blake. Stock images: depositphotos
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This is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Contents
Your free copy of the Bound duet
Kayleigh
Kayleigh
Darren
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Kayleigh
Darren
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Darren
Kayleigh
Kayleigh
Darren
Darren
Kayleigh
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Darren
Kayleigh
Darren
Kayleigh
Epilogue
Dear Reader
Excerpt of The Irish Lottery
Excerpt of Three Irish Brothers
Books by Sienna Blake
About Sienna
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Kayleigh
All the girls at Dooley’s knew to avoid the mistletoe hanging from the low doorway between the kitchen and the bar.
Balancing a tray laden with thirteen empty wobbling pint glasses and holding a stack of grease-covered baskets that stank of frozen fish, we would all press ourselves as tightly as possible against the door frame so the shrivelled red berries overhead didn’t graze the tips of our plastic elf ears. From inside his crammed, cluttered office that smelled of whiskey-sweat and salt and vinegar crisps, Andy would stick out his balding head, lick his crumb-covered lips as we passed by with hurried steps and say, “Almost got you that time, love. Almost got myself a kiss.”
It was quite safe to say that bartending at the sleaziest bar in Cork and working for the sleaziest boss in history was not exactly what I would call my “dream job”. I didn’t draw stick figures of bleary-eyed men, farting and scratching their asses at a bar, back when I wrote Kayleigh with a backwards “K” and couldn’t even fathom how to spell Scott. When teachers asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I didn’t recall ever responding by saying, “Why be an astronaut or artist or anthropologist when one could be a harassed human bottle opener?”
But it paid the bills…sort of.
I tried to ignore the image of stacked white envelopes marked with red overdue stamps waiting for me on my kitchen table once my shift ended. “Jingle Bell Rock” blasted over the cheap stereo system. I tugged up the top of the seemingly child-sized elf costume Andy insisted the all-female staff wear through all of December and most of the time into January. The two men I served Guinness to didn’t even try to pretend they weren’t drooling over my tinsel-lined cleavage.
Tell them to fuck off, I told myself. Tell them that I whispered in Santa’s ear to give them coal and they know right where to shove it.
“Who’s next?” was all I said, to which seven debit cards waved frantically in the twinkling red and green lights.
Before I could lean over the bar to get the first drink order shouted in my ear, Tina called my name as she lugged a fresh bucket of ice around the bar.
“Boss wants to see you,” she said, adjusting her elf ears and wiping her forehead.
“Me?” I glanced around her jingle bell-covered miniskirt as she dumped the ice, catching a glimpse of a beer belly reclined in a torn and faded leather chair in the glow of a porn-filled computer screen. I shivered despite the fact that the windows in the stuffy bar dripped with condensation, making the street lamps outside nothing more than a hazy glow. “Why?”
“What’s that?” Tina leaned in to shout into my ear as Mariah belted out what she wanted for Christmas.
“Why does he want to see me?” I shouted right back, voice already hoarse, and it was only a few minutes past midnight.
Tina shrugged and wiped her hands off on her red felt skirt. “Didn’t say.”
After an empathetic pat on the shoulder, Tina scooped up an empty tray and disappeared into the sweaty, drunken crowd. I rubbed at my eyes, only remembering the red sparkly eyeshadow Andy made part of the dress code when it came off on my fingers. “How else am I supposed to make you girls look festive if you refuse to smile like I’m always telling you to?” he’d said while scratching at his balls.
A series of boo’s resounded down the bar from the impatient customers when I turned to leave. Hey, it was either make them happy or my boss, and my boss paid my bills…sort of. Squishing myself up against the doorframe, I went to evade the infamous mistletoe only to find it suddenly absent from the rusty nail driven between one of many graffitied penises and a faded sticker for the local rugby team. After glancing once more over my shoulder back at the spot where the mistletoe should be, I knocked on the door to Andy’s office, now just barely cracked. It had been open only moments before.
“Andy?” I called. “Tina said you wanted to see me?” I strained to hear over the drunken chorus of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”, not daring to lean my ear closer to the door that would surely glow like a Christmas star under a black light. “Andy?” I called. “Hello?”
“Kayleigh?” Andy finally responded.
“Yeah,” I said, shifting from toe to toe on my uncomfortable heels bedecked with tinsel. “Do you need something? We’re kind of packed out here.”
“Come inside.”
I stared up at a constellation of dried gum on the low ceiling. “Just tell me,” I tried. “I’ve got to go serve.”
“It’s about your bonus.”
I frowned. “My bonus?”
I
thought I heard a little giggle, the kind eight-year-old boys make when they learn you can spell BOOBS on your calculator. “Your Christmas bonus.”
Fuck. I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t want to see Andy’s pasty, hairy gut spilling out from beneath his two-sizes-too-small pit-stained t-shirt. I didn’t want to smell his breath or watch him lick his lips or count the number of times his eyes darted to my tits.
I also didn’t want to disobey my boss. I didn’t want to make a stir. I didn’t want to start a confrontation.
And I definitely didn’t want to have to ask Santa for rent money this Christmas.
With a sigh, I pushed open the office door and slipped inside. The lights were off and Andy was in his chair facing away from me at his computer. Three flickering candles illuminated the overflowing filing cabinets and stacks of invoices littering the dirty floor.
Lifting an eyebrow, I asked, “Are you sure a fire in here is up to code?”
Andy ignored my question. “Close the door, my little Kayleigh-bells.”
I wanted to tell him I hated when he called me that. I wanted to tell him it was demeaning and unprofessional and inappropriate beyond belief. I wanted to tell him there was no fucking way in hell I was closing that door.
But my mother taught me keeping the peace was always more important, so I nudged the door closed with my heel.
Taking one step closer, I started, “Andy, look, we’re slammed tonight and I really should be getting back to—holy fuck!”
The beat-up office chair swivelled around. I was subjected to a sight that would take me years of therapy to get over (even if I could afford it). Andy sat there with the missing mistletoe held between his teeth, butt-ass naked, save a Santa’s hat perched tentatively over his crotch.
I was too stunned to do anything except stand there and stare at the white puff atop Santa’s hat, a symbol of my childhood innocence, hanging between Andy’s meaty, hairy thighs.
Andy said something I couldn’t make out.
“Huh?” Why couldn’t I look away? It was like a car crash on the side of the highway. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. What the actual fuck?
Andy repeated what he’d said. But with the mistletoe wedged in his mouth it came out garbled and entirely incomprehensible. When he saw that I still clearly hadn’t heard, he growled irritably and pulled out the mistletoe. “You know the rules, my little Kayleigh-bells.” Andy quickly replaced the mistletoe between his lips and gave me what I think was supposed to be a seductive face. It just looked like he was constipated, which he probably was in fact.
“What rules?” I asked, dragging my eyes to meet his.
Again he garbled around the mistletoe.
“Huh?”
His irritation grew as he pulled the stem out of his mouth and said, “You have to kiss beneath the mistletoe. Beneath, my little Kayleigh-bells.”
To emphasis his point even further, Andy wiggled his hips at me, dangerously shaking Santa’s hat.
“Beneath,” he managed to say around the mistletoe.
“Yeah, yeah,” I quickly said to stop his gyrating as the hat slipped down an inch or two. “I got it, I got it. But An—”
“Call me ‘Daddy’.”
“Holy shite,” I muttered while holding up a hand to block Andy’s crotch from view. “What I was going to say was that I’m really busy right now, you know, out there with the bar.”
Andy scooted the chair closer to me even as I inched back toward the closed door.
“I’m the boss, my little Kayleigh-bells,” he said. “The other girls can handle it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’ve seen the way you’ve been looking at me.” Andy had pulled the mistletoe from his mouth and swirled the mouldy berries over his nipples.
“Um, Andy—”
“Daddy.”
“Don’t you think this is may be just a little bit inappropriate?” I said with a tiny shrug, my fingers fidgeting with the hem of my skirt.
A flash of anger immediately distorted Andy’s features, and his already red cheeks deepened to a purple. I reached back for the door handle. Andy stretched his hand forward and grabbed my wrist.
“You’re not going to make a stink about this are you, my little Kayleigh-bells?” he said, his voice no longer seductive, but threatening. “Because what you just said? That’s upsetting me. Do you want to upset me?”
Do you want to upset him, Kay? Is that what you want? You want him to leave?
I shook the distant echo of my mother’s voice from my head and forced a playful smile on my red lips.
I shook my head and said in the sweetest voice I could manage given the present situation, “No, no, I just meant… Is it appropriate to do this without whipped cream?”
Andy’s eyes, unfocused probably from the half-empty bottle of Jameson next to his sticky keyboard, narrowed before he laughed.
“Right you are, my little Kayleigh-bells.” He winked up at me and I thought I might vomit. Nope, I did. Right there in the back of my throat. “Right you are.”
“I’ll go get some,” I said. It was hard to keep my voice from shaking.
Andy lifted my hand to his lips and pressed a stinking, slobbering kiss to the back of my hand. A dog’s mouth would have been cleaner.
“Don’t keep Daddy Nic waiting long,” he called after me as I slipped out of the office and resisted the urge to slam the door shut behind me.
I ignored Tina shouting after me for more pint glasses and hurried past the tiny kitchen filled with pounding hip hop and clattering pots and pans. My fingers shook and tears pricked at my eyes as I climbed the narrow, twisting staircase half filled with boxes of Guinness, and headed toward the alley exit.
I shoved the back door open, startling a couple smoking behind the trash bins. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I just knew I couldn’t go back into that office. I couldn’t confront Andy.
So I was running, running somewhere. Somewhere where I didn’t have to fight.
Out on the sidewalk, I glanced around for where I parked my car as the crowd parted irritably on either side of me. A light snow fell and I shivered in my skimpy costume, feeling my heels unsteady on the treacherous ice. My snow boots and coat were back inside the bar, but I knew there was no way I would go back in for them. That would mean coming face to face with Andy again. I would rather risk a broken ankle and hypothermia than that.
Wreaths hung from the lamp posts. Lights strung across the road swung gently in the evening breeze. I spotted my car parked across the street. Glancing nervously back toward the alley exit, I pushed the “cross” button and shivered as I bounced up and down, praying Andy’s bare ass got stuck to the leather seat of his office chair.
The traffic signal above the street took forever to cast a red streak across the slick road. The door to Dooley’s opened and I feared it was Andy, but it was just a big guy stumbling out after a night of drinking to cross the road. The pedestrian light flashed and I followed after the guy to cross when I heard the distinct screech of brakes not braking.
My eyes quickly found the pair of careening headlights as a car slid uncontrollably toward the crosswalk. Without thinking, I reached out, snagged the back of the man’s coat, who seemed not to notice the car, and yanked him back and safely out of the way. Torn off balance, he slipped to the icy asphalt and in the process pulled me on top of him so I was staring down into his eyes.
“You saved me,” he gasped.
I laughed nervously from a mix of adrenaline and awkwardness.
“I guess I did.”
The man stared up at me in amazement and then said, “I love you.”
I blinked. “Wait, wha—”
Kayleigh
His lips were on mine before I could process what was happening, and then it was my first year of college all over again in a warm, dreamy haze: peppermint Schnapps and sticky sweet chocolate syrup and a mountain of whipped cream from an aerosol can all mixed together like an eternal Ch
ristmas on my tongue. My eyes fluttered closed despite my surprise, because this stranger kissed me with the passion of a soldier reunited with his lover after years of never knowing if he would ever return home alive from war. One hand clutching the small of my back and the other cupping my left elf ear, the nameless man kissed me like he might never stop.
I was gasping for air when I finally managed to pull away, my lips still buzzing with the sting of alcohol. A hot, fast blush swept across my cheeks when the man with startling green eyes and lashes thicker than mine shook his head and whispered, “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen in my whole entire life.”
“Oh, I don’t kn—”
“You’re an angel,” he insisted, eyes bouncing around my face like he couldn’t decide where to look. “You’re my angel.”
Pushing myself up proved difficult with this stranger’s strong, muscular arms still wrapped around me, but I managed to squirm off of him and plop right back down on my ass on the ice. The man scrambled to sit up with the exuberance of a child rushing down the stairs on Christmas morning to see what Santa left him. He reached for my hands and squeezed.
“You’re my guardian angel,” he insisted.
Concerned onlookers and a wave of excited whispers that spread like the plague were moving toward us. I wrangled a hand free and pointed at my ear.
“No, no, I’m not a guardian angel.” I smiled nervously as people circled us in the street and pointed eagerly at the stranger in front of me. “See? Elf.”
The man burst out into laughter at my lame joke. He held on tight when I tried to pull my hand away to get up, up and away.
“You’re funny, too! Gorgeous and funny.” He pumped his fists, my arms flailing with his like we’d just won some world championship. “I knew, I just knew my soulmate would be funny.”
His words startled me more than the out-of-control car, more than his very unexpected kiss, and perhaps, just perhaps, even more than Andy’s entirely unwanted Christmas present.
“Wait, did you just say—”