Liability (Suncoast Society #33)(3)

“Don’t want to buy a house, huh?” Leah asked.

“No, not going to jinx myself.” Mason smiled. “Besides, I sort of got spoiled not having to mow or do yard work the past eight years.” He’d rented an apartment in Nebraska. Moving back to Florida, he’d found an older condo that needed some upgrades and freshening up, but was a far easier purchase on his wallet than a home would have been. Not to mention the absence of any external upkeep on the grounds meant his free time was his.

And he planned on spending as much of his free time as he could catching up with his friends.

Seth smirked. “I didn’t think the Arctic tundra had much call for landscaping.”

Yes, all his friends, even the submissive ones, had taken great pains to send him pictures of Florida beaches every winter, teasing him with sunshine and balmy temps while he was ass-deep in ice and snow.

“I won’t miss my ice scraper, that’s for damn sure.”

“You toss it?” Tony asked.

“Hell, no. Repurposed it. It’s in my toybag now.” Mason smiled. “Makes a great slapper.”





Chapter Two


Mason enjoyed talking and getting caught up with his friends, watching others play. As he got involved with the community again, he’d have a talk with Marcia and Derrick about volunteering at the club as a DM, like he used to. Wasn’t like it would interfere with his own play time.

Mason didn’t have anyone to play with, and hadn’t for…well, a while. Freddie hadn’t been kinky. At all.

Another reason Mason wasn’t eager to have Freddie move to Florida, much less move in with him.

Mason had tried to make friends within what passed for a kinky community while in Nebraska. It wasn’t that the people weren’t nice—in fact they were very nice. And he had made a lot of friends, both kinky and vanilla, gay and straight.

Unfortunately, nothing more than friends. A guy could only sit on the sidelines for so long and watch others playing without being able to play himself before he called it a lost cause and gave up.

Which was basically what he’d done. Other than going to the occasional munch just to stay in touch with people and not become a hermit, he really hadn’t had any kind of a kinky life.

Online dating wasn’t his thing, and he wasn’t into one-night-stands. He needed to have an emotional connection to a person before he could be in a relationship with them.

Okay, question answered.

As he sat there, surrounded by his friends, he truly understood what had been missing in his relationship with Freddie.

Yes, the guy was nice enough, at first. Handsome, fun in the sack, but Mason hadn’t felt anything…deeply romantic for the guy. Especially not once he realized Freddie, despite eagerly agreeing in the beginning that he was kinky and submissive, was about as kinky as a flat, straight stretch of Nebraska highway.

And Freddie damn sure wasn’t submissive.

Yeah, Mason had been falling out of what little lust he’d had for the guy for several months, even before the new job had materialized. Hell, he hadn’t even told Freddie he was flying down to Florida to interview for the job until he’d already done it and had fielded a very snarky phone call from the man at the time. Freddie had decided to drop by his apartment unannounced on his way in to work that evening, and had wanted to know where the hell Mason was when he “should” have been home.

Which had irritated the snot out of Mason the Dominant, so he’d flat-out told Freddie where he was and what he was doing.

That had immediately earned Mason whiny apologies and less-than-subtle hinting about moving Freddie to Florida with him.

Thankfully, Mason had never given Freddie a key to his place in Nebraska.

Yeah, Freddie needed to stay in his rearview mirror. With two full months of space and over a thousand miles between them now, despite Freddie’s increasingly plaintive daily phone calls and texts, Mason knew he had to firmly end things between them once and for all.

Again.

Officially, they were free to date whomever they wanted. When Mason had last seen Freddie in Nebraska two weeks before his move, he’d refused to sleep with him that night and had left things settled—so Mason had thought—that they were on a permanent hiatus and nothing more than friends in an attempt to try to spare Freddie’s feelings.

Although Freddie seemed bound and determined to ignore that.

Maybe it was the fact that Freddie was only twenty-five and Mason had four months before he hit forty-five. Nearly twenty years and a lifetime of experiences separating the two of them made Mason less inclined to want to try to make things work with the guy long-term when he could already see how doomed they were.

Best to have this out now.

In his shirt pocket, Mason felt his cell phone buzz from a phone call. Without taking it out, he reached in and hit the button on the top to silence it as he rose. “Be right back. Need to check this.”

He had a work phone but left it in the car. They knew if there was an emergency and he didn’t answer his work phone to call him on his personal cell.

Walking out to the office, Mason pulled the phone from his pocket to see who’d called.

Freddie.

Dammit.

As if thinking about the guy had conjured him.

Mason had already sent three calls from the man to voice mail earlier that day. Freddie hadn’t left him any messages yet—