CHAPTER 1
JULES
The thingabout stalking someone to a BDSM club was that you really couldn’t half-ass it.
Jules had considered the alternatives. Bumping into him at a coffee shop. Engineering a meeting through one of his father’s business contacts. A well-timed charity gala where he could lean against a bar and let fate handle it.
All viable. All boring. All missing the critical piece of data he needed, which was whether Connor Thorne was the same man in the dark that he was in a boardroom.
Hence, the club stalking.
He’d done his research. Three years of it, if he was being honest. Connor Thorne: forty-one, self-made, quietly devastating in a way most business magazines failed to capture because they were too intimidated to dig beyond the surface. Former CEO of a firm he’d built from nothing after walking away from a partnership that went wrong in ways nobody seemed willing to detailon the record. Currently unattached to anything except a one-year guest lectureship at Marion University.
Jules had found the club through a receipt. Not Connor’s. It came from his father’s investigator’s. Dear old Dad kept files on the people he hated, and he hated Connor Thorne withmore fury than he seemed worth. It never made sense how a man so young could have such a hook on his father’s psyche. Jules had skimmed the file on Thorne at seventeen, looking for ammunition against his father and finding instead a grainy photo of Connor leaving this building wearing a long black coat and a scowl that made his mouth water. He’d stared at it for a long time. Longer than was polite.
His father had handed him his sexuality on a surveillance printout. Jules found this genuinely hilarious in a way he would never be able to explain out loud. He could definitely never tell his father. That was a death wish.
Now he was twenty-three, standing in the low amber light of a club called Veil, wearing a black shirt he’d chosen to blend in, watching the man at the end of the bar who hadn’t yet noticed him. Or who was pretending he hadn’t.
With Connor Thorne, Jules suspected, it was hard to tell the difference.
The club was subtle in its design. Dark wood. Low ceilings. Music ambient enough to make him feel relaxed despite his nerves. People moved through the space comfortably, as if there weren’t half nude people fucking on nearly every surface.
Jules gave it all a passing glance. A woman in leather did a double take his way as he passed where she kneeled for another woman who had to be her Domme based on the power exuding from her and the leash connecting them. A couple a few feet from those two were engaged in a negotiation that involved a lot of sustained eye contact and roaming hands. The bartender, a beefy man with a neck tattoo and a scowl, worked the crowd in a blur of movement.
None of them were why he was here.
Connor sat alone three stools from the end of the bar, his back partially turned as if to ward off attention while staying part of everything. Spine straight. Jaw set. He held a glass of dark amber liquid, probably a whiskey based on the information Jules had gathered on his preferences.
Jules shook away the last bit of his nerves. It was time to put his plan in motion.
He’d studied this man long enough to know he was exactly what Connor Thorne needed. And he was finally close enough to reach out and touch the man.
“Mind if I sit?”
Connor looked at him, eyes roaming from head to toe in a slow perusal. It lasted long enough that Jules felt it across his skin, a caress he wanted more of. Holding perfectly still, he waited out the man he intended to seduce.
“The bar has other seats,” was his reply in a voice lower than the interviews Jules had watched. The tone sent a lick of fire over his body.
“It does.” Jules sat down. “They’re worse. I prefer the view from here.”
Connor’s expression shifted a minute fraction. “You’re young.”
“Twenty-three isn’t all that young.”
“That’s what I said at that age. I was wrong, just as you are today.”
Jules smiled. He couldn’t help it. Most people softened their words around him. Wrapped them in qualifiers, tucked them behind polite expressions. Connor did no such thing.
It should’ve been taken as a sign to leave. Instead, it made Jules long to set up camp right there on the stool until Connor decided to leave. Then maybe he’d follow him out and to wherever he went next.
A dream, of course, considering Connor would definitely notice him now. Jules couldn’t hide his stalking after introducing himself this way.
“And you’re here alone,” Jules said. “Which either means you’re looking for a specific person, or you’ve decided no one here is going to interest you. I’d like to know which one it is.”
That got him another look. Longer this time. Connor’s eyes were grey, or close enough to grey that the low light made it so he couldn’t pick up any other colors. Jules could get lost in those eyes. He had, if he were to think about the hours he’d stared through photographs of the man before him.
“Presumptuous,” Connor noted.
