Yours to Keep (Kowalski Family, #3)

They’d all gone back to his aunt and uncle’s after the fireworks, as expected. What wasn’t expected was Cat introducing Russell and his daughter Dani and her husband Roger to the Kowalskis, who then invited them along for post-fireworks decaf and dessert.

After the pies and cakes were demolished, Mike and Lisa had taken their boys home and the two babies, Lily and Brianna, were asleep, so the older generation decided on some card game nobody under forty knew how to play. So the under-forty crowd had retreated to the rec room in the basement, except Mitch, who’d said his goodbyes before he left the fireworks with the gorgeous blonde in the barely there sundress.

Joe had a perfect game to pass the time, he’d said. Kevin had smirked and agreed. And there were four couples, so it was perfect. Sean should have known better.

The reason having four couples was perfect, he found out too late, was because the game was a kind of demented adult version of The Newlywed Game. And now Joe and Kevin were laughing their asses off on the inside because Dani and Roger’s presence meant Sean and Emma had to keep up the pretense or Dani would tell her dad, who would in turn rat them out to Cat.

“What’s the first place you had sex?” Roger read from a card.

Dani hit the timer and six of them bent over their notepads, furiously scribbling down answers. Sean looked down at his blank page and decided to keep it simple. Hopefully Emma would do the same.

When the timer dinged, he tossed his pencil down. Joe and Keri scored the first point by both writing in the backseat of Joe’s 1979 Ford Granada. For Kevin and Beth it was the hotel where Joe and Keri’s wedding reception was held and Dani and Roger both wrote Dani’s dorm room.

Emma grimaced at Sean and then held up her notepad. “On a quilt, under the flowering dogwood.”

The other women made sweet awww noises, but Joe and Kevin were already snickering. That wasn’t keeping it simple. Under a flowering dogwood?

“We need your answer,” Roger said.

Sean held up his paper. “In a bed.”

His cousins’ snickers became full belly laughs, while Dani and Roger just looked a little confused.

“Oh,” Emma said. “You meant sex with each other?”

It was a nice save, but Sean had a gut feeling it was only going to go downhill from there. And since he and Emma would be lucky if they got out of there with their secret intact, never mind having a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, he might as well have some fun with it.

Then came Dani’s turn to read a question. “Who’s in charge in the bedroom?”

Much to the group’s amusement, none of them got a match and Sean didn’t think they would either as he held up his. “I am, since I carry the big stick.”

Emma read hers with a remarkably straight face. “Sean, because he has a magic penis.”

“Wow. Um…so Sean and Emma have a point,” Dani said as the men nearly pissed themselves laughing.

No way in hell was he leaving that unpunished and he winked at Emma when Kevin read the next question. “Where’s the kinkiest place you’ve had sex?”

The fact that Joe and Keri had done the dirty deed on the back of his ATV led to a few questions about the logistics of that, but then it was Emma’s turn. “In bed, because Sean has no imagination.”

Roger threw an embarrassed wince his way, but his cousins weren’t shy about laughing their asses off.

Sean just shrugged and held up his notepad. “In the car in the mall parking lot. Emma’s lying because she doesn’t want anybody to know being watched turns her on.”

Her jaw dropped, but she recovered quickly and gave him a sweet smile that didn’t jive with the you are so going to get it look in her eyes.

Beth asked the next question. “Women, where does your man secretly dream of having sex?”

Keri knew Joe wanted to have sex in the reportedly very haunted Stanley Hotel, from King’s The Shining. Dani claimed Roger wanted to do the deed on a Caribbean beach, but he said that was her fantasy and that his was to have sex in an igloo. No amount of heckling could get him to say why. And when it came to Kevin, even Sean knew he dreamed of getting laid on the pitcher’s mound at Fenway Park.

Then, God help him, it was Emma’s turn to show her answer. “In a Burger King bathroom.”

The room fell silent until Dani said, “Ew. Really?”

“No, not really,” Sean growled.

“Really,” Emma said over him. “He knows that’s the only way he can slip me a Whopper.”

As the room erupted in laughter, Sean knew humor was the only way they’d get through the evening with their secret intact, but he didn’t find that one very funny, himself.

It was the final answer that really did him in, though. The question: if your sex had a motto, what would it be?

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