He waited a beat, but even though he was a personal friend as well as the corporate attorney who was my right hand at Garrett Construction, I wasn’t planning on volunteering anything about the rabbit hole I’d fallen down since arriving in Asheville. I wasn’t even sure I fully understood it yet, although the conversation I’d fallen into with one of the “Daddies” had certainly been enlightening. Discussing it with Greg, though, who in all the years I’d known him had never even hinted at being anything but vanilla, wasn’t something I wanted to get into at the moment.
Except, wait. He’d known about the Cuffd event this weekend, and he’d called The Plazerra “special.”
Was he more informed about this lifestyle than I assumed?
Before I could ask, he launched into the hairy details of the building permit snafu one of my crews had run afoul of. Frankly, while itwasa time-sensitive issue—given that it was already Friday, the permit office would be closed all weekend, and we had tens of thousands of dollars of material being delivered to the jobsite on Monday—dealing with it was exactly the type of thing that I should have delegated years ago.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, pacing the hallway I was in as I worked through untangling the problem with Greg, with half my mind still on Rene and what could have made him shut down so much over breakfast.
Quiet and serious seemed to be Rene’s nature, but up in the hotel room, before we’d joined Sam and the rest of the event attendees at breakfast, he’d also been relaxed. More than relaxed, actually, but if I started thinking too deeply about how beautifully compliant he’d been as I’d guided him through getting ready for the day—and how obviously aroused submitting to my direction had made him—then I was going to need to take a little longer to join him back in the breakfast room.
“…a call from Bradley Jenson,” Greg was saying. “Edward, are you listening?”
“Of course,” I said, reaching down to adjust my now uncomfortably tight pants and vowing to keep my mind off the beautiful boy I wanted to get back to long enough to wrap up this call. “Wait, Bradley who?”
Greg chuckled. “Bradley Jenson,” he repeated. “One of The Plazerra’s managers?”
I frowned. “I thought we were talking about the Patel job.”
“We were,” Greg said dryly. “Or I should say,Iwas. But if you’re always going to ‘uh-huh,’ and ‘okay’ your way through rubber stamping my decisions, then how about we just agree that I deserve a raise and you deserve arealvacation, and you tell me what’s got you so distracted right now?”
“I’m not distracted,” I lied, moving off to the side as two men in cartoon-embossed crop tops passed me on their way out of the breakfast room, chattering to each other excitedly.
They were… cute. The way Sam was. I didn’t find anything about the childish demeanor of the “Littles” particularly enticing, but as I’d told Sam, I wasn’t one to judge or shame anyone for living life the way they wanted.
I also strongly suspected that if it had beenRenewho was giggling, wearing clothes a size too small, and talking about having a tea party, my interest would have suddenly been… engaged.
“Edward, you areincrediblydistracted,” Greg said as I peered back in the direction of the breakfast room, “which isn’t like you. What’s going on?”
The two Littles who had just passed me weren’t the only ones clearing out, and while I absolutely trusted Sam not to leave my boy to his own devices—the energetic redhead was nothing if not overprotective—I still didn’t want to risk Rene feeling abandoned.
I wanted to be there for him.Always.
I started heading back in that direction.
“Edward?” Greg prompted. “You are still at The Plazerra, aren’t you? Bradley Jenson wasn’t clear on why the meeting was postponed. Have you left Asheville?”
“No,” I said, stepping aside, into an alcove set up like a comfortable reading nook complete with an overflowing bookshelf, to get out of the way of a pack of… puppies? Or at least, men dressed like them. “I’m still here.”
“And are you going to tell me what you’re doing there, since it’s not meeting with management?” he asked, sounding amused.
“No,” I said, my eyes skimming the book spines in the nook. They were heavily LGBTQ-oriented, and if I wasn’t mistaken, more than a few of them—both fiction and non-fiction—had to do with the kink community. “But maybe I am a…littledistracted,” I murmured, conceding the point and then grinning at my own pun.
Not that Greg would catch it.
Then again, hadn’t I just been wondering how much he knew about the weekend’s activities here?
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m sure the hotel is packed with… interesting characters.”
Well, that answered that. He knew.
“Is it a kink-catering hotel?” I asked, cutting to the chase as I pulled out a paperback titledA Daddy’s Guidance. Fiction, unfortunately. I slipped it back onto the shelf. “Is that what you meant by the place being special?”
Greg hummed noncommittally, which wasn’t like him. One of the reasons we’d always gotten along was that he’d always been a straight shooter. But then another thought had me frowning in confusion.
“Why did you tell meBlairwouldn’t have wanted me to sell the place?” I asked, remembering Greg’s initial objection. “Blair and I weren’t like… this.”
Greg laughed. And not a dry chuckle or an amused snort, both of which I was used to hearing from the man, but a full-on belly laugh that, from the sound of it, probably had him wiping tears away from his eyes.
