Page 10 of Three Wickedly Bad Neighbors and a Very Grumpy Girl

“Yeah? What would that third option be?”

“I just say I’m sorry, and I leave.”

“No. Not an option.”

“What’s it going to be, sweetheart? A dance or a spanking?”

I fold my arms and glare them to death. They don’t die. Ugh.

?Chapter Eight

Avery

The truth is, I can’t dance. Forget having two left feet; when I dance, it looks like I have three left feet. It’s horrible. I’m so uncoordinated that I resemble what chalk on a blackboard sounds like.

I should be arrested for my bad dance moves. Music should ban me from listening to it, lest I decide to get into the groove and start jiggling my body. If I joined a circus, I would have my own act called Hark, Hark, Come See the World’s Worst Dancer, and I would sell out performances every single night.

I’m so bad that my bones—my very bones—try to disassociate themselves from my body. Like, oh, my leg is here, but there goes my tibia in the opposite direction. I’m so bad that I—

Oh my goodness. I should totally dance for them. I’m so bad they actually deserve to witness the monstrosity of my body attempting to break a move. They deserve to have their eyes scorched and their brain cells fried. Not even bleach will help them.

“Fine. I’ll dance. Put on the music. Five minutes. That’s it. And then we’re done.”

“Deal,” Gray says as Sullivan queues up a popular dance song. I start to swing my hips.

“Wait, wait, wait. We need to sit down for this,” Gray calls as they all take a seat, their eyes glued to me. I can’t help but feel a smirk growing wider on my face, and then I truly start dancing.

Except I’m also blood red in the face. Normally, I don’t care what people think of me; I’m too busy following the rules to worry about anything else. But I wish I were like one of those tall girls I’d scared away from their party, who were basically goddesses that could move gracefully while dancing. But I could never be like them. I’m me. Take it or leave it.

I do some hideous thing with my arms in the air while trying to shimmy my hips, and it’s horrendous, confirmed by the expressions on their faces and the wide grins they exchange. Four more minutes to go.

“Nope,” Sullivan says as I struggle to keep up with the rhythm of the song and fail because I have no rhythm.

He gets up from his chair, closes the distance between us, and sweeps me off my feet. He then tosses me over his shoulder as if I weigh nothing.

“What are you doing? Put me down, you imbecile!”

“We wanted to be entertained, not scarred for life,” Porter says, chuckling at my expense. Sullivan sets me on my feet near a desk, only for Gray to grab both my wrists, pulling me forward so I’m now bent over the desk.

“What are you doing? You gave me a choice, and I chose to dance as a way of apologizing. It’s not my fault you didn’t check with me first to see if I could, in fact, dance. Were you not entertained? You were,” I say, answering for them. “So unhand me this instant and let me go.”

“No, no. We plan to get our money’s worth out of your apology, sweetheart.”

“Wait, are you going to spank me?”

“Why else do you think you’re bent over a desk with your wrists secured to the legs?” Just as Gray’s words leave his mouth, Porter and Sullivan quickly and deftly bind my wrists with the curtain ties. The curtain ties. I jerk away with all my might but remain in place.

Okay, this is crazy. They are crazy. I’m sure I would die at the touch of Sullivan and Gray’s hands on my skin as they pull my reasonably tight dress up and over my butt, leaving me in my very sensible, comfort-first, full-coverage white cotton panties.

The cool breeze wafting over my bare thighs does nothing to alleviate the furnace my body has become.

How on earth did I get here? Am I dreaming? And if I am, hmm, what the heck, Avery Stephens? This is not the kind of dream I should be having. Except this is real. There is no way I could so vividly combine the fragrances of three completely different men into one and still be able to tell who is who. That is ridiculous. I just met them, for goodness' sake.

“This is cheating. You can’t have it both ways. You gave me two options. I chose one of them—”

The rest of my sentence gets sucked back into my throat and then escapes from my mouth as just a squeak of a gasp. Shock reverberates through every part of me. Every cell in my body, which I’m sure has been dormant for the last twenty-five years, comes to life in a raging symphony of astonishment.

Someone just spanked me. A man, six-foot-three, with dangerous gray eyes fringed with enviably thick eyelashes, a chiseled jawline, muscles for days, and a palm the size of my entire butt just set fire to my skin.

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