Page 191 of Haunted

Sol kissed him, and it was a gentle, sweet kiss. “Right now you have to be emotionally exhausted. I knowIwould be after all that.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“So what I’m saying is, don’t try to think beyond what’s going on inside your head. Let all that emotion drain out.”

“But I wanted to—”

Sol stopped his words with a kiss. “Let’s cuddle up and sleep. Shut out the world for a while. There’s no place I need to be—how about you?”

A cuddle and a sleep sounded perfect.

“There’s no place I need to be, except right here.”

Chapter 45

Now and then Sol would invite a client to stay the night, simply to enjoy the sensation of holding a man in his arms, breathing him in, waking to find a warm body in his bed…

Waking up in the semi-darkness with Butch brought mixed emotions.

On a physical level, it felt good.Sofucking good, and they’d fallen asleep with their clothes on too. The thought that warm cuddles might lead to heat and sweat and cum quickened his heartbeat. They’d talked about it, they both wanted it, and the prospect of Butch fucking him made him hard as a rock.

What trickled through his mind was the knowledge they were connected, that this could be more than sex. Somewhere along the line, Sol’s emotions had become entangled, and that wasnotgood. Added to that was the burgeoning desire to guide Butch across the steppingstones into BDSM, because his instincts told him Butch’s interest was genuine.

I need to keep my feet on the ground here. Okay, he might want to know more. Sure, there’s a connection, emotional as well as physical.

What scared him was the feeling that this connection could develop into something more—something deeper.

Something that might last longer than his stay would allow.

Then Butch stirred in his arms, and Sol had to switch off his internal meandering.

“What time is it?”

Sol didn’t have a clue. Time seemed to have lost all meaning.

“I think we slept right through supper,” Butch murmured. “Lord, I can’t wait to hear the comments when I get back to the bunkhouse.”

Sol grabbed his phone from the nightstand and peered at it. There were three messages from Toby. “I think I’m in the same boat.” He grinned. “You could stay a little longer. You know,reallygive them something to talk about?” Darren, a Dom who was there with his two subs, wanted Sol to join him in a scene later that day, and they’d already discussed boundaries and the subs’ limits. And Stephen, the other single guest, had made noises about trying something new—he just hadn’t shared any ideas on what direction he wanted to take.

While the suggestion to have Butch stay had been playful, he realized something deeper lay at the root of it.

All Sol wanted to do right then was stay right where he was, and he couldn’t help feeling that was kind of dangerous.

Butch hadn’t slept that well in years, and he relished the warmth and the feelings of well-being that cocooned him. The exchange with Teague seemed like a distant memory, but then again, he’d been put through an emotional wringer not once, but twice since then.

Then he remembered why he’d been coming to see Sol in the first place.

“I’ve been doing some research,” he murmured.

Sol tilted his chin with his fingertips. “What kind of research?”

“If I said Safe, Sane, Consensual, would that be a clue?”

It was Sol’s turn to blink. “What else did you find?”

“So many things I wanna talk about. I had no idea there was so much to it.”

Sol smiled. “You just realized it’s not all whips and paddles, didn’t you?”

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