A Case of You

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by Tymber Dalton




  Suncoast Society

  A Case of You

  Life is starting to settle down for Brandon, Jeff, and Stuart. Raising a teenaged daughter frequently tests the limits of Brandon’s patience, until he meets some of Stuart’s family. Now he understands why Stuart craves the stability of their unusual poly pack.

  Stuart doesn’t want to miss his sister’s wedding, but he’s terrified of his oldest brother. It’s hard not to worry about their safety. Add becoming a parent to Emma, and Jeff’s health issues, and Stuart’s stress is through the roof.

  Jeff knows his guys love him. Yet when a chance to return to work comes along, he’s desperate to take it so he doesn’t feel like a mooch. Only one problem—Emma and Grace will rat him out if his health tanks again. Can he juggle a job and a severe, chronic health condition? Worse, when danger rears its head, can he protect his family?

  Add Grace and her barbecue fork of doom, and life proves even more…interesting.

  Genre: Alternative (M/M/M, Gay), BDS, Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre

  Length: 58,294 words

  A CASE OF YOU

  Suncoast Society

  Tymber Dalton

  

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  A CASE OF YOU

  Copyright © 2017 by Tymber Dalton

  ISBN: 978-1-64010-587-4

  First Publication: September 2017

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2017 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.

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  If you find a Siren-BookStrand e-book or print book being sold or shared illegally, please let us know at

  [email protected]

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  DEDICATION

  For Hubby for putting up with me. For Sir, because He knows why.

  Thanks to Trish for talking me off ledges, Lucille for egging us on, Bill for keeping us all out of jail, Elke and Mark for the fun and IKEA pervertible runs, Norma for the nommies, Tim for the smiles, Bree and Felyx (because I warned you I’d put you in a book, and technically the Dedication counts as “in” the book), and to all my other adopted family and friends who keep me going when I don’t think I can take another step.

  I love all of y’all. You have no idea how much.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tymber Dalton is the wild-child alter-ego of author Lesli Richardson. She lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”) and too many pets. Active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC award winner is also the bestselling author of over one hundred books, including The Reluctant Dom, The Denim Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Suncoast Society series, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, the Coffeeshop Coven series, the Good Will Ghost Hunting series, the Drunk Monkeys series, and many more.

  She loves to hear from readers! Please feel free to drop by her website and sign up for updates to keep abreast of the latest news, views, snarkage, and releases. You can also find all of her Siren-BookStrand releases under all four of her pen names on her author page on the BookStrand site.

  Honest reviews are always welcomed. They help with a book’s visibility and can boost its placement on book retailer sites. Even a few lines about what you felt reading the book will help. Thank you so much, it’s greatly appreciated!

  www.tymberdalton.com

  www.facebook.com/tymberdalton

  www.facebook.com/groups/TymbersTrybe

  www.twitter.com/TymberDalton

  For all titles by Tymber Dalton, please visit

  www.bookstrand.com/tymber-dalton

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Brandon, Jeff, and Stuart first appear in Heartache Spoken Here and then Roll With the Punches. Those two books should be read in order, before this one, to fully understand all the backstory in this book, although you can still enjoy this one without having read those two.

  Yes, these characters have told me there will be more stories featuring them.

  While 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 and to not miss any backstory information is as follows:

  1. Safe Harbor

  2. Domme by Default

  3. Cardinal’s Rule

  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

  27. Open Doors

  28. One Ring

  29. Vulnerable

  30. The Strength of the Pack

  31. Initiative

  32. Impact

  33. Liability

  34. Switchy

  35. Rhymes With Orange

  36. Beware Falling Ice

  37. Beware Falling Rocks

  38. Dangerous Curves Ahead

  39. Two Against Nature

  40. Home at Last

  41. A Kinkmas Carol

  42. Ask DNA

  43. Time Out of Mind

  44. Happy Valenkink’s Day

  45. Splendid Isolation

  46. Similar to Rain

  47. Happy Spank Patrick’s Day

  48. Fire in the Hole

  49. Pretzel Logic

  50. This Moody Bastard

  51. Walk Between the Raindrops

  52. Rub Me Raw

  53. Any World That I’m Welcome To

  54. Heartache Spoken Here

  55. Roll With the Punches

  56. See You Sometime

  57. Borderline

  58. A Case of You

  Some of the characters in this book appear in or are featured in previous books in the Suncoast Society series. All titles available from Siren-BookStrand.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  About the Author

  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

  C
hapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Landmarks

  Cover

  A CASE OF YOU

  Suncoast Society

  TYMBER DALTON

  Copyright © 2017

  Chapter One

  Jeff moaned where he lay facedown on the bed. “Oh, my gaaawwwd. That feels soooo good.”

  “Does it hurt?” Stuart asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s the good kind of pain.” Jeff wrapped his fingers around Stuart’s hand and held on tightly. “Ooohhhh.”

  Brandon sat on Jeff’s other side, on the edge of the bed. “Are you okay, buddy?” He brushed the hair from Jeff’s face. Jeff’s eyes were squeezed closed, his face contorted in a grimace.

  “Uh-huh. Please don’t stop!” Jeff let out another noise that sounded like a cross between misery and an orgasm.

  “If it’s too intense,” Nate said, “let me know.” He adjusted another pressure cup on Jeff’s right shoulder.

  “No, it’s great,” Jeff said. “Seriously.”

  Jeff now had six of the cups on his shoulders, three on each side, each one with an acupressure pointer in it.

  “Once I see how you respond to this,” Nate said, “we can maybe try fire cupping next time. But we can’t do that on a bed for safety reasons. I’d bring in my massage table and we’d do you in the living room or on the lanai. Someplace with tile floors, preferably.”

  Emma and Grace watched from where they sat perched on the end of the bed. “That’s really cool,” Emma said. “I know all of us on the swim team were watching the reports about Michael Phelps at the Rio Olympics getting that done. Is that hard to learn how to do?”

  “Well, it’s not rocket science,” Nate said. “To do it therapeutically, it does take some study. I mean, you can buy a kit yourself and learn how to do it. The kits are less than a hundred dollars. I do not recommend trying fire cupping without getting properly trained first. You can seriously hurt someone if you don’t know what you’re doing. But, sure, with the pressure cups there’s not the same risk. You just put them where they will give him the most relief for whatever it is you’re trying to help.”

  Jeff let out a long, low moan as Nate placed another cup, this time lower on Jeff’s back, to the left of his spine.

  “That is sooo good,” Jeff mumbled into the bed. “Seriously good.”

  “Happy to help. I wish you’d called me in sooner. Like I tell one of my other stubborn friends, who is also a client, don’t wait for the pain to get so bad you can’t function. That only makes it harder to recover. You should probably be seeing me at least twice a week right now, as bad off as you are.”

  “I didn’t know I was as bad as I am until I couldn’t get out of bed this morning.”

  “We have an appointment with his doctor tomorrow,” Brandon said. “I already called off work. I’m driving him. I think he crashed himself yesterday by doing too much out in the yard, then this change of weather on top of that finished him off.”

  Brandon sent a pointed glare toward Jeff that he couldn’t see because of his position on the bed, but Brandon let his tone of voice convey it. “With no one else home to stop him because it was Monday, someone thought they could be sneaky and try to do more than they should.”

  “That’ll do it,” Nate agreed. “I have quite a few clients with chronic pain conditions who are impacted by weather changes.”

  Jeff’s Lyme disease had seemed to be getting better for a while. He’d started with oral medications after he’d collapsed with Bell’s palsy, which had scared the men but finally allowed his Lyme to be diagnosed. Weeks of oral medications hadn’t brought much in the way of improvement, so he’d had several months of IV drug treatment with a PICC line installed, followed by more oral medications.

  That’s when Brandon and Stuart put their feet down and told Jeff he would quit working. He couldn’t be a mechanic with a PICC line, anyway, because there was too much risk of him accidentally yanking it out or it getting contaminated or infected from dirt or chemicals.

  Brandon had married Jeff, putting him on his insurance so Jeff could still get treatment. Now, their inside joke was that Jeff was their little house slave. He did what he could as he felt up to it, sometimes having to be ordered to bed or the couch by Brandon and Stuart when he tried to do too much.

  Now, Jeff was generally better, although he still had residual symptoms. The doctors had warned them it was possible he could have flares from time to time. Every patient was different. There were no magic bullets to knock out Lyme disease. And even then, he might experience residual effects of the disease for the rest of his life.

  The other problem being that when Jeff felt good, naturally he tried to do more, instead of taking it easy to nurse the good periods and make them last longer.

  He’d tackled yard work yesterday that Brandon had already told him not to do.

  Correction, Brandon had ordered him not to do. Combined with a gorgeously cool fall day yesterday—that had turned into a harsher cold front overnight—it was a perfect storm of the bad kind of pain for Jeff today with damp, cold temps in the fifties, practically Arctic weather for Sarasota in early November.

  Except Brandon couldn’t punish his stubborn beta slave and husband for overdoing it, because the Lyme disease was doing a damned fine job of that already.

  In the bad ways.

  Emma, his daughter, and Grace, her girlfriend, both sixteen, seemed entranced by Nate and the cupping procedure. Nate also had his acupuncture kit with him and was going to do some of that to Jeff as well, once he had the cups in place.

  “Did you girls get your homework done?” Brandon asked.

  “Yes, sir,” they chimed in unison.

  Lowercase S, natch.

  Grace might as well be their daughter, as much time as she spent at their house. Now with the secret out that the girls were actually dating, and they’d taken the punishment both Brandon and Grace’s parents had dealt to them to address the lying and sneaking around, he’d eased back some on a few restrictions. They still weren’t allowed to sleep in the same room anymore until they both turned seventeen, but he was trying not to be an overbearing father.

  They were teenagers who were dating, and while he might wish he didn’t remember what he’d been like at that age, he also knew his daughter was growing independent and needed to have some space.

  Tonight, even though it was a school night, Grace was spending the night at their house because she was riding with Emma tomorrow to swim practice and then school. Grace was now one of the swim team managers, helping keep track of practice times and learning about the sport from the coaches. She physically couldn’t keep up with the team to actually swim with them, didn’t have the strength or stamina to be a competitive swimmer, although the coaches said she was showing great promise as a coach.

  Being born a preemie, she was tiny, only five two, and wore thick glasses to correct her horrible vision. She also couldn’t tolerate the sun with her pale skin, so large, floppy hats, long-sleeved fishing guide shirts, and umbrellas were part of her team uniform to protect her vampire-white flesh.

  She was also a genius, wielding razor sharp snark when wit was called for.

  No, first love frequently didn’t survive the trials of becoming adults, but Brandon had a strong suspicion Grace and Emma might make it over the long-haul. Especially since long marriages tended to run in Grace’s family.

  On the dresser, Brandon’s cell phone rang. Emma leaned over, snagged it, and handed it to him without looking at the screen first.

  After having lost her own electronic privacy for four weeks as part of her punishment, she now valued it far more than ever.

  It was Tracey, his ex-wife…and Emma’s mom.

  He answered. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “I hate to ask this, but I need
a favor.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m stuck on I-75. AAA said it’ll be over an hour before the wrecker gets here, and I’m kind of freaked out. It’s dark and raining and freezing-ass cold, and I really don’t want to wait by myself. I already had one creepy-looking guy stop and ask if I wanted a ride. I’m south of Bee Ridge, on the northbound side, off on the right shoulder. It just stopped running. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I gassed up earlier today, so I know it’s not that.”

  “Shoot. Okay, hon. We’ve got Nate here doing a treatment on Jeff. Let me get dressed and do a car shuffle in the driveway and I’ll come get you. Stay in the car, keep the doors locked, and make sure the flashers are on.” They were less than thirty minutes away from where her car had broken down.

  “Thanks, Bran. I really appreciate this. I owe you big time.”

  “It’s okay. Keep your phone handy.” He ended the call.

  “What’s wrong?” Jeff mumbled. “I can go.”

  “Uh, no, you cannot,” Brandon said.

  “I’m a mechanic.”

  “You’re a patient. Your butt stays right there while Nate does a full treatment on you. That’s an order.”

  Jeff let out an aggravated sigh but stopped arguing.

  “Is Mom okay?” Emma asked.

  “Car broke down. You and Grace stay here and help Stuart wrangle Jeff.” If anyone could help Stuart with that besides Brandon, it was the girls.

  He climbed off the bed, retrieved his checkbook from the dresser, and wrote a blank check made out to Nate. He gave it to Stuart, leaning in to whisper in his ear so the girls couldn’t hear.

  “You let Jeff up off that bed before Nate says he’s done, and I’ll cane your ass.”

 

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