Hot Sauce (Suncoast Society #26)(23)

They spotted Jenny first, sitting with her boyfriend, and Tilly, and a woman they didn’t know.

That likely meant the sister.

Jenny held up a hand and they made a beeline for them.

“Hi, guys,” Jenny said. “Vanessa Riddick, this is Lyle and Reed. They were friends and play partners with Basco.”

Lyle nodded. “Hi. We’re really sorry for your loss.”

“He was a great guy,” Reed added.

She looked close to tears. “Thanks. Sorry I didn’t get to tell anyone earlier about this. Jenny told me she told you guys. Thank you for coming tonight. I was hoping I’d meet you.”

“You were?” Lyle asked.

“I…I found my brother’s journal. He mentioned you both in there several times. He really liked you guys.”

Lyle didn’t know what to say to that. They slid into chairs at the table with them. Even usually feisty Tilly appeared somber and subdued tonight as she looked on. The two men loved Tilly and her guys. They’d both played with Landry as bottoms several times. The man was an extraordinary sadist.

Lyle couldn’t ever remember Tilly looking so close to being distraught as she did now. Like she was forcibly holding things together for everyone else’s benefit.

He returned his focus to Vanessa. With her long, auburn hair, which she’d pulled back with a barrette, and her hazel eyes, she strongly resembled her brother. So much so that it tugged at his heart.

He hated that he couldn’t help but notice she wasn’t wearing any rings. No jewelry at all, actually. And she had beautifully rounded curves, a real woman’s body, and wasn’t some skinny, bony twig.

Get your head out of your ass. Her brother just died.

Still…

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t attracted to her. Whether that was a protective, instinctive reaction because he knew how much she had to be suffering right now and he wanted to ease that pain, or because of her relation to Basco, or because he was just attracted to her—that all remained to be seen.

And now was not the time to be thinking any of that.





Reed couldn’t help it. Logically, he realized it was most likely a reaction due to grief and longing, missing Basco.

But he felt a draw to Vanessa. He’d be lying if he denied it. He could see Basco in her features, the way she talked, the tilt of her head. Even had he not known her brother very well, much less having known Basco for over three years, had he seen the two of them side-by-side the likeness would have been eerie.

It was a very melancholy feeling. So close, and yet so far from their friend.

And it was exactly on that point Reed realized he did understand why she was there. Probably for that very reason—wanting to hold onto a little bit of who her brother was, in the only way she could.

With people who knew a different side of him.

Just like Reed regretted not getting to know Basco even better, the way he and Lyle had wanted to.

“So you guys were friends with Ton—Basco?” she asked.

Tilly reached out and patted Vanessa’s hands. “We had a slight misunderstanding when she first got here,” Tilly said without a trace of her usual trademark snark in her tone. “She told us her brother was Tony and…” She pointed with one hand, palm up, at where Tony was starting to teach.

“I’m so sorry,” Vanessa said.

Tilly squeezed her hands. “It’s okay, seriously.”

Reed wanted to be the one comforting her instead of Tilly.

“Yes, we were friends with Basco,” Reed said. “Play partners.”

“I just…I don’t know how or what to ask.”

“You can ask us anything,” Lyle assured her as Jenny slipped an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll do our best to answer it.”

“I don’t know what’s considered too personal,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Reed said. “If we can’t answer it, or don’t want to, we’ll say so.”

“They mean it,” Jenny told her. “One thing about this lifestyle is people quickly learn that communication is extremely important.”

Vanessa looked at where Tilly still clasped her hands around hers. “I wish he’d felt like he could have communicated to me about this.”





Reed and Lyle seemed like nice guys, which was probably why her brother had mentioned them a lot in his journal. While he hadn’t come right out and said he loved the two men, it was patently obvious to her through her readings that Basco had a deeper affection for them, felt a closer affinity to them, than toward most other people in the lifestyle.

Tonight, they both wore jeans and short-sleeved, button-up shirts. Not exactly the garb she would have expected from Doms. Or subs. Or switches, or whatever it was they called themselves.

They seemed like two ordinary guys who wouldn’t get more than a second glance from her normally, and that only because they were both fairly attractive men, by her standards.

Reed looked like he spent a lot of time out in the sun, with his tan and the lines at the outer corners of his blue eyes, and the sun-lightened tint to his short, brown hair. Lyle had sweet brown eyes and black hair with only a few sprinkles of grey at the temples.

If she had to guess, from his paler skin tone, she figured he worked in an office.