Suncoast Society
Hot Sauce
When Vanessa Riddick’s beloved older brother, Tony, aka Basco, dies unexpectedly, finding his journal leads to more discoveries…like his secret life and friendships in the local BDSM community. Vanessa’s world revolved around work and her brother, so she gravitates to his friends, who welcome her with open hearts.
Reed and Lyle were friends and play-partners with Basco and wondered what happened to him, why he’d suddenly dropped off the radar. As they get to know his little sister, they realize their interest in her is more than trying to keep the spirit of their friend alive.
They are falling for her.
Vanessa has lived her life in a career-driven stranglehold, and now the loss of her brother has sent her into an emotional tailspin. One thing’s for certain—she can’t keep going the way she is. And she’s beginning to wonder if Reed and Lyle might be the answer to her finally having the life she’s longed for.
Genre: BDSM, Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre
Length: 70,138 words
HOT SAUCE
Suncoast Society
Tymber Dalton
SIREN SENSATIONS
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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IMPRINT: Siren Sensations
HOT SAUCE
Copyright © 2015 by Tymber Dalton
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-489-1
First E-book Publication: June 2015
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2015 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.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
If you have purchased this copy of Hot Sauce by Tymber Dalton from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.
Regarding E-book Piracy
This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.
The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.
This is Tymber Dalton’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Tymber Dalton’s right to earn a living from her work.
Amanda Hilton, Publisher
www.SirenPublishing.com
www.BookStrand.com
DEDICATION
For Sir. And for our eldest cat, BW, who wanted a writing assistant credit for this book, despite Gidget’s vociferous protests to the contrary.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While all 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 is as follows:
1. Safe Harbor
2. Cardinal’s Rule
3. Domme by Default
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
Many of the characters in this book appear in previous books in the Suncoast Society series. All titles available from Siren-BookStrand.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Author's Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter 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
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
About the Author
HOT SAUCE
Suncoast Society
TYMBER DALTON
Copyright © 2015
Chapter One
Vanessa Riddick found his diary under his bed, tucked away in one of those cloth-covered box organizer drawers, like what you’d find stashed in an IKEA cube shelf. She wouldn’t show it to anyone, especially their parents.
They were in enough pain.
She made the discovery late Tuesday, one day after her brother’s funeral on Monday, and four days following his death late Friday night. She finally opened his bedroom door and stepped inside, determined to start the long and emotional process of going through his things. Leaving the room a dormant shrine to her older brother wouldn’t be healthy for anyone.
Especially her.
She also didn’t want to share the task, not even with her parents. She’d gently rebuffed them, and friends, who’d offered to come over and do things like sort through his clothes for her.
It was a task she wanted to do—needed to do. By herself.
When she was ready.
Besides, she knew he wouldn’t want anyone else in his room, anyway. He was very private.
She’d respected that privacy during his life, and would do her best to honor it in death as well.
After her parents had left to fly back to Seattle, where they lived, and on her way home from driving them up to Tampa International, she’d stopped by a grocery store. There, she’d bought herself several bottles of moscato wine—Tony’s favorite—and decided to spend most of the next three days of her personal leave from work, and the weekend following it, tanked to the gills.
No, not the healthiest way to spend it, sure, but it wasn’t like she was driving now that her pear-shaped butt was safely home and she had a freezer full of food brought by friends and distant family.
Her parents had gently hinted that maybe they should stay longer, for her, but in all honesty she didn’t want that, as cold as it sounded.
She wanted—needed—to be alone and start to process things. Since Saturday, her life had been a non-stop blur of activity during which she didn’t even have a chance to catch her breath. Both her parents worked for a software company out in Seattle, had tons of friends, an active social life. Yes, they were grieving. And yes, she was planning on traveling out to stay with them at some point, but she also knew they weren’t exactly flush with cash and couldn’t afford to spend weeks in Florida coddling their adult daughter.
Not to mention for now…for right now, she needed to be alone. If nothing else, to finally begin accepting how alone she really was. Having her parents hanging around and delaying her inevitable good-bye with them would only prolong the agony for her. She knew they needed her, and yes, she felt more than a little like a horrible daughter for it, but for the sake of her sanity she needed them to get on with their lives. She also desperately needed her remaining time off spent getting her game face firmly back in place for work.
With the first large drinking glass full of wine and ice cubes in her hand, she sat on the floor next to his bed. His dog, Carlo, laid down next to her with his head resting on her leg. The cocker spaniel mixed-breed mutt looked as morose as she felt.
She stroked his head. “Guess it’s just you and me now, buddy.”
His tail thumped once, unenthusiastically.
She sighed. “Yeah, I know. I miss him, too.”
Tony had easily gained custody of the dog because the dog had hated Tony’s ex-wife, Kelly. When Carlo immediately fell in love with Vanessa, it had pissed Kelly off to no end at the time, much to Vanessa’s secret pleasure.
She stared down at the dog, her last remaining breathing tie to her brother. Since Tony’s death, Carlo had barely let her out of his sight while she was home, and he’d slept on her bed every night, much as he had Tony’s bed.
Guess I need to get this done.
After taking a deep breath to steel herself, and setting her glass aside, she reached under the bed.
Starting there felt safest to her. She didn’t want to face his dresser drawers full of neatly folded shirts and briefs. She didn’t want to stare into the gaping maw of his closet, arranged far more neatly than any retail store display.
It’d been all she could do not to break down sobbing that morning when she’d gone to fish clean underwear out of the dryer and realized that some of his clothes had gotten mixed in with the load her mom had done for her the night before.
He kept several plastic storage bins under the bed, and three of the square cloth bins. She thought the shelving unit the cloth bins went into was either disassembled in the garage or residing in his storage unit.
Another chore that could wait until another day.
It was in the second cloth bin that she’d discovered the journal.
When she opened it and realized what it was, she froze, hesitating.
Should she even read it?
It took her a while to make that decision. A long while, and draining the glass of wine.
Vanessa’s older brother, Tony, had been thirty-nine when he passed suddenly from pneumonia. Only five years older than her, and while not quite the center of the universe, his position in her life had pretty much cemented him as the center of her world. Her big brother had been her best friend growing up. He’d moved in with her at her insistence over four years earlier, after a nasty divorce that took pretty much everything from him except Carlo and some furniture.
He’d insisted it would only be temporary.
She’d insisted it wouldn’t.
This time she’d won, in typical little-sister fashion.
After refilling the glass with wine and more ice cubes, she sat on Tony’s bed with Carlo curled up next to her and started reading. Apparently, this journal was one of several, based on the dates and indications he’d made on the inside cover. This one had been started over four years earlier, just before he’d filed for divorce and a few weeks before he’d moved in with her, and he didn’t write in it every day.
It did, however, uncover startling revelations about her beloved brother. Nothing that would make her hate him, or lose respect for him.
But it made it perfectly clear she’d done the right thing following her instincts to handle this herself. Especially when she started reading and learned there was a lot more to her brother than she’d ever suspected.
Like the fact that he was bisexual, something he’d successfully hid not just from his family, but from his ex-wife as well.
And the fact that he was into BDSM.
* * * *
I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to file for divorce from Kelly and move in with Nessie. I’ve dragged this out long enough and I can’t deny the inevitable. Hence, the new journal. All fresh and empty and ready to be filled.
There’s a joke there, but I’ll avoid making it…
Vanessa couldn’t help but laugh. That was sooo Tony, always ready with a quick double-entendre to crack her up. Not at work, no. He was professional at work, but at home or around friends, he was easily the funniest guy in the room.
…but I’ll avoid making it and instead take a moment to reflect. Ten years of my life where I denied who I was even more than I had in the past. Where I stuffed my needs and tried to pretend I could be that “normal” guy with the dog and the wife and the great job and the great house and maybe even kids.
Kelly wasn’t the person for me. I know that now, and no, this isn’t fair to her. I thought I was going through a phase in my life and thought I’d successfully locked the door.
All it did was point out to me in glaring clarity how wrong I was. How I should have listened to that still, quiet inner voice that always told me I wasn’t vanilla. That I wasn’t strictly hetero. That I wasn’t the image I’d tried so hard to portray to everyone.
And now I will, unfortunately, be hurting Kelly in the process. I’ve tried to hint around at it, but she’s not taking the hint. I thought maybe she was as unhappy as I am, but apparently not. The crater-pocked battlefield of her parents’ marriage must have numbed her to dysfunction at an early age.
Yay, me.
Yes, red flags I should have looked at, but I thought it would be okay. The fact that she doesn’t like Nessie and hates spending time with my parents, too, should have been another. Not that she doesn’t have her good points, because she does, but she’s not the person for me.
I suspect this won’t go well, that there will be a lot of anger on her part. That there will be more than a little bit of fighting before I get through to the other side. Hell, no, I won’t tell her everything. I hate to say it, but I can’t trust her not to fling it in my face or take it to my family and friends. Hell, maybe even my regional supervisor.
What does that say about me, that I settled for someone that I can’t fully trust like I can Nessie? Hell, there’s shit I told Nessie as a kid I know our parents never heard about. She’s about the only person I can trust in this world…
Now she broke down crying again. That was the other thing that greatly sucked about this, beyond the grief over losing her brother.
She’d lost her best friend, her confidant.
The one person she knew
would never pick on her in a mean way, who would never violate her trust. Well, yes, she loved her parents, but they were her parents, not friends.
Tony had been her best friend, not just her brother. It saddened her a little that he’d never admitted any of this to her before, but she suspected she understood. He thought it better to hide it away completely than to risk her freaking out over it. He knew she never snooped in his room or about his life.
Another reason she’d wanted to be the only one going through his things. She didn’t know what she’d find—case in point—and didn’t want anyone else finding it.
That’s not what he would have wanted, and she knew it.
And yes, Kelly had made Tony’s life a living hell during the divorce. Now knowing that he’d tried to make things easy on Kelly, that just pissed Vanessa off even more, that he’d martyred himself in the divorce for a woman who wasn’t worthy of him.
…trust in this world to not tell my secrets. I wish I could tell her about all of this but I don’t want to burden her with it. No, I’ve never cheated on Kelly, but I have started going to events on the side to make sure, and now I know this is what I need. I’m going to have to walk a bitter line and come up with a valid excuse as to why I want—need—out. It’ll mean giving up a lot, maybe everything.
But that’s just stuff. Things. Material possessions I can replace later.
I think I married Kelly partly because I was worried I was missing out on something. But then when Kaden died…I think that was the final wakeup call that shook me to my core.
Life is short. Too damn short. I don’t want to be at the end of my life and looking back at all the things I wish I’d done in the limited amount of time that I had. I don’t want it to be a series of regrets over things I didn’t do. Better one large regret of having to divorce Kelly to be my real self, which will also allow her to find someone better for her than I am while she’s still young enough to rebuild her life.