A Lovely Shade of Ouch Read online

  Suncoast Society

  A Lovely Shade of Ouch

  Abbey Rockland’s life goes from bad to worse when she learns she needs back surgery the same day her long-term boyfriend dumps her, making her homeless. She can barely get around, much less move. Her friends express their concerns when she accepts Gilo’s offer to let her and her beloved pet tortoise, George, move in with him.

  John Gilomen admits focusing on Abbey is a way to avoid dealing with his grief over his best friend’s death, but Abbey’s a nice woman. His unrepentant SAM act at the BDSM club isn’t the real him, just a way to blow off stress. He’s always held feelings for Abbey, and he won’t screw up his chance to finally show her.

  But when life-threatening complications arise, John steps in and takes charge. Now Abbey has to decide what’s more important—what everyone else thinks, or what her heart tells her about the man whose Dominant side only she has seen.

  Genre: BDSM, Contemporary

  Length: 57,557 words

  A LOVELY SHADE OF OUCH

  Suncoast Society

  Tymber Dalton

  SIREN SENSATIONS

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Siren Sensations

  A LOVELY SHADE OF OUCH

  Copyright © 2014 by Tymber Dalton

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-63258-752-7

  First E-book Publication: December 2014

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2014 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 A Lovely Shade of Ouch 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 the pup, from Cailleach…and pet. Because the “hell, no” list is far shorter than the “yes, please” list. And it’s getting shorter all the time.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  This book features Gilo and Abbey, and events toward the beginning of this book overlap slightly with events at the end of His Canvas (Suncoast Society 10). 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 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

  Some of the minor characters who appear in this book also appear in other books in the Suncoast Society series. All titles are 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

  About the Author

  A LOVELY SHADE OF OUCH

  Suncoast Society

  TYMBER DALTON

  Copyright © 2014

  Chapter One

  John Gilomen sat and stared at his computer screen, trying to make sense of his office e-mail.

  Wasn’t working.

  Nothing seemed to want to work in his brain at that exact moment. Not when he’d just been hammered by the news that a dear friend of his since high school had died.

  He took off his glasses and set them on his desk. Leaning back in his chair, he rubbed at his eyes. No, he wasn’t going to sit there and bawl like a baby. Not at work.

  Worst. Thursday. Ever.

  He hadn’t even known Mick was having a problem, but it had happened suddenly. Went in for a routine colonoscopy yesterday morning, and earlier this morning, he’d died from peritonitis.

  Shit.

  John had just eaten dinner with Mick and Mick’s wife, Nancy, a couple of weeks earlier. Mick had been one of the few people from high school he’d kept in touch with, over twenty-five years since their graduation. And even rarer in numbers from that small pool, they’d both settled in the Sarasota area, not far from where they’d grown up.

  Mick had gone to college at UF in Gainesville and become an ophthalmologist. John had majored in engineering at USF in Tampa and now worked for Manasota Electric Co-op as their head safety engineer.

  Breathe through it.

  While that worked perfectly for dealing with physical pain, handling emotional pain was a totally different beast.

  Which was why he usually preferred to deal with physical pain. It faded fairly quickly.

  His cell phone still lay on his desk. Nancy had called him in tears a few minutes earlier. Nancy and her kids had plenty of family surrounding them right at that
moment. He didn’t want to race over and intrude.

  Then there was the fact that he honestly didn’t know how to deal with his own emotions. The last thing Nancy would need was for him to burst into tears in front of her. She needed people around her she was closer to, who could be strong for her. He knew and liked Nancy, but he was friends with Mick.

  Had been.

  Shit.

  The knock on his open office door startled him, nearly sending him off-balance in the chair when he turned around.

  Dell Clayburne from Communications stood there as John worked to get himself situated.

  “You all right?” Dell looked amused.

  Why deny it? “No, I’m not.”

  Dell’s face fell as John explained. “Oh, man. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like a dick.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

  “You going to take off?”

  “There’s nothing I can do for his wif—widow right now. They’ve got grown kids, family, other friends. I’d just be in the way.” He settled his glasses back on his face. He only needed them for computer work, so far. “What’d you need?”

  Dell held a sheaf of papers in his hands. “No, this can wait. I just wanted to go through some stuff with you before I get interviewed by Bay News 9 late tomorrow morning about that incident on Tuesday.”

  The “incident” being a contractor doing work on their Bradenton power plant had accidentally hung himself while performing work on one of the large stacks.

  John arched an eyebrow at him. “Then I don’t think it can wait, can it?”

  “I mean…” Dell rubbed at his face. “I’m sorry. You really should go take care of your personal stuff.”

  John held out a hand for the papers. “Let’s do it now. If Nancy does need me, I probably won’t have another chance later. And I don’t know if I’ll even be in tomorrow. I’d rather go through it with you while I can and not have anyone from legal crawling up my rear end for not doing it.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. Grab a chair and let’s see what you’ve got.”

  * * * *

  John ended up leaving work at lunchtime. He needed time to get his head together, to think, to process. He couldn’t begin to contemplate facing Nancy and her kids until he’d done that much.

  He grabbed a sandwich and a drink from Subway and headed over to the De Soto National Memorial park, which was only twenty minutes from his office. On a weekday this time of year, they wouldn’t be very busy.

  Fortunately, they weren’t. He parked in the shade before walking out to a bench that overlooked the mouth of the Manatee River where it dumped into the southern end of Tampa Bay. There, he tried to quiet his mind, tried not to overthink things as he forced himself to eat.

  It’d be too easy to settle into a dark place emotionally. Better to lock things away.

  Although, without the stark grief of Mick’s wife and other family right in front of him, it was still too easy to stay detached from it. From his own emotional pain.

  While he was good at many things, dealing with emotional pain wasn’t one of them.

  Physical pain, on the other hand, he was a master of that. Enjoyed owning and controlling the way he dealt with it. Enjoyed how it could temporarily transport his mind to a blissful place where he was able to shove everything else aside except the pain. Loved working with the pain from the inside out, like a potter with clay, molding it, forming it, transforming it into something useful until he came out on the other side of it.

  He knew what he had to do that afternoon, he just didn’t want to do it.

  Not entirely accurate. He wanted to go be a support for Nancy and the kids, but wasn’t sure he could be one. And he didn’t want to add to her misery when the expectation of his presence would likely be to comfort her, her two sons, and her daughter.

  One part of himself he didn’t like, but at least he owned it. Understood his limitations.

  Why is this kind of shit so easy for other people?

  Finding a therapist to talk to wouldn’t help. He’d tried that before. Trying to explain to a shrink that he’d rather get his balls kicked than face a personal, emotional loss usually earned him strange looks and the therapist’s desire to find the root cause buried in the trauma that had caused the disconnect.

  Fuck that noise.

  He knew the cause.

  What he wanted to know was the cure. Thus far, no one had offered one to him that didn’t involve suggestions of medication and talk therapy that was utter bullshit. Mental masturbation of the not-fun kind.

  Not when he could go to the club and get his ass caned and find a little bit of respite there, even if it didn’t provide a resolution.

  He wanted to know the way others dealt with shit. But to hear a counselor say “they just deal with it in their own way” was neither helpful nor productive. And tossing suggestions for “normal” stuff at him that he’d already tried—and failed at—wasn’t helpful or productive, either.

  He already had a way he dealt with it.

  He wanted a better way to deal with it.

  At forty-five, he suspected he wasn’t going to find a better way to deal with it if he hadn’t already.

  Maybe I’m overthinking it.

  Okay, no maybes about it, he was definitely overthinking it. He overthought a lot of things.

  Most things.

  Hence why getting the crap beaten out of him from time to time allowed him to shut down the thinking processes for a little while.

  And here I am avoiding the issue by sitting here and staring at my navel and whining in my head about how I can’t deal with shit.

  Like the fact that my best friend is dead.

  He thought about calling Seth, but he didn’t know if the good-natured man would appreciate being asked something like that.

  Hey, how’d you deal with Kaden dying?

  Even though it had been a few years since Kaden’s death, Seth probably wouldn’t appreciate an out-of-the-blue question like that.

  Not to mention it was a totally different situation there. Seth and Leah had time to prepare themselves. Kaden himself had made extensive preparations for his wife and best friend before he died, to ease them through the process. Vanilla and kinky preparations.

  Hell, Mick was his best friend, but even he hadn’t even known about the kinky parts of John’s life. John never mixed the vanilla and the kink. There was too much personally at stake for him to do that. He didn’t think he could lose his job over it but it might make things extremely uncomfortable for him at work if this aspect of his life ever became common knowledge.

  Maybe Tony could offer me some advice.

  Then again, Tony was a full-on Dom. That might not be any help at all, even though he was friends with the man.

  Maybe Essie can offer me advice.

  She’d been estranged from her parents when her father died.

  Then again, he didn’t know her a fraction as well as he knew Tony or Seth.

  This is what I get for being a loner. Maybe I deserve this. Maybe this is some sort of karmic retribution I don’t even know about.

  That would be easier to believe if he had a belief system to start with.

  He’d learned at an early age that, sometimes, bad things happen to good people. That shit happens.

  It. Just. Happens.

  The way it had happened to Mick, someone who’d lived a good life, had a great wife and family, someone who’d been active in community and charity organizations like the Lions and Rotary.

  Someone who didn’t deserve to die over something as stupid as a routine health procedure designed to catch and prevent future health issues.

  Horrific irony.

  If something like that happened to John, he really didn’t have any next of kin to notify. No girlfriend, no close relatives, no siblings.

  Not even a dog or cat to worry about or miss him if he didn’t come home.

  He imagined someone at work would begi
n to wonder where he was if he didn’t show up and call in, but other than that…

  Jesus, I’m pitiful.

  After a few more minutes, he gathered his trash, tossed it in a garbage can on his way to the car, and headed home to change clothes and decide how to handle the next, excruciating part of his day.

  Chapter Two

  Late Thursday morning, Abbey Rockland sat in her car outside the orthopedic surgeon’s office and cried following her appointment. Not just from the pain in her back, which was excruciating, but also from frustration.

  Surgery was inevitable if she wanted her life back. The freak fall she’d taken at work eight weeks earlier, when she and several coworkers had decided to take the stairs two flights down to go to a meeting in a conference room on a different floor instead of waiting for an elevator, had resulted in two blown disks in her lower back.

  There weren’t any other options. Physical therapy would only delay the inevitable without providing her any results or relief.

  That the doctor recommended she get a cane and use it to help her get around until after the surgery had been yet another blow to her psyche.

  She’d been working limited hours ever since the accident, which had hit her wallet far harder than she’d expected. Workmen’s comp didn’t cover the full amount of pay she lost, either.

  Another shocker.

  The only good thing so far was that WC was paying for all her medical expenses. Their company’s health care plan was okay, but had this happened to her outside of work, she would have been screwed because of co-pays.

  After the surgery, the doctor told her to expect to be out of work a minimum of four weeks, more likely six to eight weeks. Even then, when she returned to work, she’d be on restricted hours again for several more weeks.