I Slept With My Fiancé's Hot Uncle novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Call
Nigel butt-dials Keeva mid-affair with her best friend, she records it, drops her ring in her glass and goes upstairs with a stranger. Nigel texts, Big day tomorrow.
My fiancé called me in the middle of sex.
He didn't know he'd called.
I was alone at the end of a hotel bar, nursing a club soda, when his name lit up my phone.
I answered on the first ring.
All I heard was rustling sheets and breathing, and then a woman's laugh.
"Nigel, stop. What if Keeva finds out?"
That was Brooke.
I have known that laugh since we were fifteen and split a bag of gas station candy on her bedroom floor.
"Keeva?" Nigel said, and he laughed. "She's out cold by ten. She'd sleep through a fire."
I pressed the record button on the call screen.
Then I covered my mouth, because I was smiling and I didn't want the bartender to see it.
My engagement lunch was in twelve hours.
For two months I had been hunting for a way out of this marriage, and every door I tried was locked.
My father owed Nigel's father two million dollars.
Russell Pickering had made it plain that the debt stayed in the family only if I did too.
"Promise me it ends at the wedding," Brooke whispered. "I can't share you with her forever."
"It ends the day I get my hands on the Coombs lots," Nigel said. "Two years, tops. Come here."
The line went on for another minute, and I let it.
Every word of it was mine now.
Then the call dropped.
I set the phone face down on the bar.
My hand was steady, which surprised me.
"Long call," a man said.
He was two stools down, and I had not noticed him sit.
He was somewhere near forty, dark hair going gray at the temples, in a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.
A glass of whiskey sat in front of him, full, with a folded cream card pinned face down under it.
"It was the best call I've had all year," I said.
"You looked like you were being told a joke."
"I was. It was about me."
He turned his stool toward me.
He didn't ask what it was. He waited.
So I said it, flat, to a stranger, because I had no one else awake at midnight who wouldn't take it back to my father.
"My fiancé and my best friend. Right now. He phoned me by accident and I listened."
"Are you going to cry?"
"I came down here to cry," I said. "Then I realized I'm not sad. I'm free. Almost."
"Almost?"
"I can't walk away without a way to prove it. Now I have a recording. I still have a lunch tomorrow with two hundred of his relatives."
He looked at my left hand.
The ring was a square diamond that Russell had chosen for me.
I slid it off and dropped it into my club soda.
It sank with a small, clean sound.
The man laughed, low and surprised.
"That's a good place for it," he said.
"What are you drinking?" I asked. "You haven't touched it."
"I'm waiting for someone I don't want to see."
"Same," I said. "Mine just walks around in my phone."
He picked up the whiskey for the first time and set it down again.
"I'm Costa," he said.
"Keeva."
I said it out loud and it felt like mine again.
For two years, I had been Nigel's Keeva, Russell's future daughter-in-law, my father's good girl.
I was twenty-seven, and nobody had asked me what I wanted in so long that I had to stop and think.
I wanted one night that belonged to me.
I wanted to walk into that lunch tomorrow knowing I had done one thing nobody at that table had arranged.
Costa was watching my face.
"You're deciding something," he said.
"Yes."
"Can I help?"
"You have a room here?"
He didn't look away.
"Fourth floor."
"Then I'd like to go up."
He was quiet for one second.
"You've had a bad night," he said. "I'm not going to be the second bad idea."
"I had club soda," I said. "I'm sober, I'm furious, and I'm asking you. Tell me you don't want to."
His jaw moved.
"I didn't say that."
So I stood up, picked my phone off the bar, and left the ring where it lay.
He put cash under the whiskey and the card and followed me to the elevators.
The doors closed on the two of us.
He pressed four, and then he didn't press anything else.
He just stood there, close enough that I could smell soap and cedar, waiting for me to be the one who moved.
I took his collar in my hand and kissed him.
He kissed me back hard, and he made a low sound in his throat.
His hands came up into my hair, and my back met the mirrored wall, and every thought I had about Nigel went quiet.
My phone buzzed against my hip.
I pulled it out with Costa's mouth still on my neck.
It was a message from Nigel.
Can't wait to see you tomorrow, baby. Get some sleep. Big day.
I looked at it for a moment.
Then I turned the phone off, and the elevator opened on four.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend