Through With Love [Suncoast Society] (Siren Publishing Sensations ManLove)

  

  Suncoast Society

  Through With Love

  Kent is through with love and convinced one man can never satisfy him—or his “monster.” He takes his pleasure from the sexy parties he throws for his friends, watching in silent envy as one after another pairs off and finds love. Meanwhile, an endless string of guys parade through his own bed, while his heart remains completely walled off.

  Tim and Paul accidentally fell together, but it was lust at first sight with love soon to follow. They both enjoy their sexy after-hours funtime. When Kent stumbles onto their games, it adds a delicious bonus to their business relationship and redefines the phrase “strange bedfellows.”

  Except what starts as fun soon turns into more for Tim and Paul. They know Kent is scared of commitment and has shadows in his past. So does Tim. Can Paul show both men this could be forever, and can they win not only Kent’s trust, but his heart, before it’s too late?

  Genre: Alternative (M/M, Gay), BDSM, Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre

  Length: 51,052 words

  THROUGH WITH LOVE

  Suncoast Society

  Tymber Dalton

  

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  THROUGH WITH LOVE

  Copyright © 2018 by Tymber Dalton

  ISBN: 978-1-64243-153-7

  First Publication: April 2018

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2018 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

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  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  DEDICATION

  To Hubby and Sir.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tymber Dalton is the wild-child alter-ego of author Lesli Richardson. She lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”) and too many pets. Active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC award winner and part-time Viking shield-maiden in training loves to shoot skeet and play D&D with her friends. She’s also the bestselling author of over one hundred and thirty books, including The Reluctant Dom, The Denim Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Suncoast Society series, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, the Coffeeshop Coven series, the Good Will Ghost Hunting series, the Drunk Monkeys series, and many more.

  She loves to hear from readers! Please feel free to drop by her website and sign up for her newsletter to keep abreast of the latest news, snarkage, and releases. You can also find all of her Siren-BookStrand releases under all four of her pen names on her author page on the BookStrand site.

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Boyd was first and briefly introduced in Steady Rain. Kent, Tim, and Paul were introduced in, and Boyd and Caleb were featured in, Indifference of Heaven. Boyd and Caleb’s story continues in Like the Seasons.

  This book starts five years before those books do, and the timeline overlaps them. Some events in this book are seen from other characters’ points of view in Indifference of Heaven. That book should definitely be read first so you have the whole story.

  There will be more stories in the future about all of these characters.

  Some characters in this book appear in or are featured in previous books in the Suncoast Society series. While most of the books in the Suncoast Society series are standalone works which may be read independently of each other, the recommended reading order to avoid spoilers and to not miss any backstory information is as follows:

  1. Safe Harbor

  2. Domme by Default

  3. Cardinal’s Rule

  4. The Reluctant Dom

  5. The Denim Dom

  6. Pinch Me

  7. Broken Toy

  8. A Clean Sweep

  9. A Roll of the Dice

  10. His Canvas

  11. A Lovely Shade of Ouch

  12. Crafty Bastards

  13. A Merry Little Kinkmas

  14. Sapiosexual

  15. A Very Kinky Valentine’s Day

  16. Things Made Right

  17. Click

  18. Spank or Treat

  19. A Turn of the Screwed

  20. Chains

  21. Kinko de Mayo

  22. Broken Arrow

  23. Out of the Spotlight

  24. Friends Like These

  25. Vicious Carousel

  26. Hot Sauce

  27. Open Doors

  28. One Ring

  29. Vulnerable

  30. The Strength of the Pack

  31. Initiative

  32. Impact

  33. Liability

  34. Switchy

  35. Rhymes With Orange

  36. Beware Falling Ice

  37. Beware Falling Rocks

  38. Dangerous Curves Ahead

  39. Two Against Nature

  40. Home at Last

  41. A Kinkmas Carol

  42. Ask DNA

  43. Time Out of Mind

  44. Happy Valenkink’s Day

  45. Splendid Isolation

  46. Similar to Rain

  47. Happy Spank Patrick’s Day

  48. Fire in the Hole

  49. Pretzel Logic

  50. This Moody Bastard

  51. Walk Between the Raindrops

  52. Rub Me Raw

  53. Any World That I’m Welcome To

  54. Heartache Spoken Here

  55. Roll With the Punches

  56. See You Sometime

  57. Borderline

  58. A Case of You

  59. Reconsider Me

  60. Never Too Late for Love

  61. Blues Beach

  62. Happy Spanksgiving

  63. Our Gravity

  64. Friends in Common

  65. Almost Gothic

  66. Empty-Handed Heart

  67. Steady Rain

  68. Indifference of Heaven

  69. Like the Seasons

  70. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

  71. Through With Love

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THROUGH WITH LOVE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chap
ter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  THROUGH WITH LOVE

  Suncoast Society

  TYMBER DALTON

  Copyright © 2018

  Chapter One

  Five years ago

  Paul looked up at the knock on his open office door to find Tim Sandberg standing there.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Sauer, you asked to speak with me this afternoon?”

  Paul had to think for a moment. He’d been deep in code mode and had totally lost track of time. “Oh, right. Sorry. Come on in and close the door, please.”

  It wasn’t too difficult to drag his mind into the present. Not when face-to-face with his newest hire, a guy who seemed to effortlessly eat, drink, breathe, and bleed code.

  Not to mention a guy whose intense brown gaze always seemed to harden Paul’s cock without even trying.

  Which was something Paul could never admit to the man. For starters, he didn’t know if Tim was gay or not.

  Secondly—hellooo, employee.

  “Is something wrong, sir?”

  Paul felt damn glad he was sitting down so Tim couldn’t see the chub popping in his pants. He’d like their positions to be reversed for sure, with him calling Tim Sir.

  “Not with or for you, but yes, something’s wrong.”

  A little of Tim’s tension eased as he smoothly slid into one of the two chairs in front of Paul’s desk. “What’s going on?”

  Paul sat back and steepled his fingers in front of him. “I need your honest assessment of Mike’s coding skills.”

  “Mike Terrace?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a nice guy.”

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  Tim sighed. “I heard about his sister.”

  “I know about his personal life. This situation predates that by quite a while.”

  He gave Tim credit for trying, for obviously taking pains on how to phrase what he wanted to say without torpedoing Mike. A lesser man might use the opportunity to take well-deserved potshots at the guy in an attempt to climb the organizational ladder, especially since Tim was the newest programmer in the company, hired only six months earlier.

  But Mike was a nice guy. A damned nice guy.

  Which was part of the reason Mike was now creating a massive fricking pain in Paul’s ass.

  Paul had hesitated to put the guy on notice before now, knowing how shitty the guy’s personal life was going. His sister had been attacked by her soon-to-be-ex-husband and put in the hospital, developed a blood clot in her brain, and died after languishing for several weeks. So now there was an ongoing criminal trial for Mike and his family to endure.

  Paul had opted to “counsel” Mike a couple of times, without noting anything in his personnel file about it, hoping to nudge the guy in the right direction.

  Every time it’d helped a little, but only for a week or two, at most, before he reverted back to his previous habits.

  But Mike was a damned nice guy.

  Except his coding skills weren’t up to par to start with. He’d been the weakest member on his dev team ever since being hired in, and Paul really regretted hiring the guy in the first place.

  Especially since their latest project was running behind and plagued by problem after problem. Mike wasn’t causing those delays and problems, but he damn sure wasn’t helping solve them, either.

  Paul hated firing people. It was the least favorite part of his job. It’d be infinitely easier if Mike was an asshole and hadn’t been working for him for over two years now.

  And wasn’t such a nice guy, someone everyone in the office loved and felt sorry for.

  A guy with a horrific load of shitty-ass personal problems that were in no way Mike’s fault.

  A guy who was so nice it’d reached the point that his coworkers were actually trying to help pull Mike’s share of the load and cover for him, because he was such a damned nice guy.

  Hence why Paul had approached Tim to discuss this. Tim was the newest member of their team, and Paul hoped that meant he’d get the most unvarnished answer from him.

  Paul waited him out.

  “Mike’s…weak in some areas,” Tim finally said. “His knowledge isn’t up to par in others. If you give him a job to do, assign a specific task, he can usually do it. Except he struggles with troubleshooting his own problems, or other peoples’ code, so that’s a massive weakness. The average person, I’d say recommend some additional training for them, but…”

  Tim didn’t have to finish. His assessment matched Paul’s own observations about the guy.

  Paul tipped his head to the side. “If Mike wasn’t on the team, and someone else was, the project would likely benefit?”

  Tim nodded. “I wish I didn’t have to admit that. He’s just so fricking—”

  “Nice,” Paul finished for him. “He’s a nice fricking guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think about Anderson? Or do you know enough about him?”

  “He’s sharp, man. What he doesn’t know, he quickly picks up. He’s a self-starter, and he’s a decent team player. Great at troubleshooting. Sees things almost in 3-D when he’s looking at code.”

  Paul picked up a pen and started playing with it. “This is between you and me right now. I’m going to pull Mike in for a talk and transfer him over to Anderson’s team. I think their project is more Mike’s speed for the time being. Then I’m going to swap Anderson for him onto your team.”

  Tim frowned. “Then Mike will be their problem.”

  “For now.”

  “For now?”

  “He won’t be the team leader on that project. That project is also a lot less stressful, and they’re way earlier in their dev cycle than your team. That means a time cushion before his weaknesses start negatively impacting the team. I’m going to tell Mike that I need him to take more time for his family since it’s hampering his job performance. Especially since your project’s team has to kick it into overdrive and start pulling some long hours to get caught up. He definitely won’t be in line for a promotion any time soon, and he’ll probably realize that.”

  “I didn’t think he was team leader now. It was my impression that we don’t have one.”

  “You don’t, and that’s part of the problem. I didn’t reassign one after Ruth left last year, because I wanted to see what happened, how the team dynamics shook out after she left. I’d hoped Mike would use the opportunity to step up. But you’re about to get a new project team leader.”

  “Anderson?”

  Paul shook his head. “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Unless you don’t want it.”

  The deep furrows in Tim’s brow told Paul how conflicted he felt. “I do, but—”

  “Mike’s a nice fricking guy, yes.”

  Tim slumped back in his chair. “Yeah.”

  “Is that a yes? Because the project is floundering and we can’t afford more setbacks. You’ve had some great ideas. You’re a self-starter. I think I need to give you the authority to take over and corral this before we end up losing money and the client because of it. Frankly, I don’t want anyone else on the team as leader. That’s another reason why I didn’t assign one after Ruth left, because I wanted to see if anyone stood out. You have. So is that a yes?”

  “That’s a yes.”

  Relief filled Paul. “I won’t make you do the dirty work, don’t worry. I’ll talk to Mike. My hope is that he’ll take the hint and call a headhunter to put out lines and, hopefully soon, put in his notice. I’ll give him a great recommendation when he moves on, and h
e’ll be someone else’s headache. Then I can hopefully replace him with someone better.”

  “This sounds like you’re moving me into a position of trust.”

  “I sort of am. I like the way you interact with people. I like how you have the ability to gently guide people in the right direction without being an asshole, but you can also be firm and friendly at the same time. Those are great qualities. I can’t personally babysit the team and run that dev project when I have a company to run and other projects going. I need someone who can take charge and make that project succeed.”

  The next thirty minutes were a discussion of where Paul wanted the project to go, a revised dev timeline, immediate problems that needed to be addressed in different ways than they currently were, and related issues. By the time Tim left his office, Paul felt a lot better over his decision to give him a promotion, of sorts.

  Although it didn’t leave him feeling any better about what had to happen with Mike.

  * * * *

  By the end of the day, Paul had his talk with Mike and with Anderson and got that ball rolling. He could tell Mike wasn’t exactly happy about the changes, but seemed to recognize that it was in his best interest to go with it, for now.

  Paul thought he was the last one in the office and was getting ready to pack his stuff to head home when Tim appeared in his doorway.

  “Do you have a few minutes to talk, Mr. Sauer?”

  “Sure. You can call me Paul, you know. Almost everyone else does.”

  Tim smiled. “Sorry, just how I was raised. And we’re the last ones here,” he said as he walked in. He carried a yellow legal pad and pen. “I wanted to talk some more about the project…”

  Two hours later, Paul had ordered them pizza and they were still talking. Tim had ideas that made Paul regret not making this shift way sooner, but he hadn’t wanted to put Tim in charge of the team immediately upon hiring him and risk upsetting his other employees.