Influencer in the Sheets — Bonus Chapter

The Brand Deal
by Jace Wilder

Eight months after the HEA. Contains spoilers and very explicit content.

The Brand Deal

Theo

The resort existed to be photographed, which was exactly why I’d booked it. Private cabanas lining a turquoise infinity pool that dissolved into the Caribbean. White linen everything. The kind of ambient music that sounded like someone had distilled relaxation into a frequency and was pumping it through invisible speakers. A luxury lifestyle brand called Solaire had commissioned a three-day content shoot here — my biggest solo campaign since the rebrand — and I’d convinced Dom to come along as my “creative consultant.”

“Creative consultant,” he’d said flatly on the flight down, reading the itinerary over his reading glasses — the glasses he’d started wearing three months ago and that I’d developed an obsession with that bordered on clinical. “That’s not a real title.”

“It’s the title I put on the travel request so the brand would pay for your flight.”

“You lied to a client.”

“I creatively positioned our travel arrangement to align with the campaign’s strategic objectives. You taught me that.”

He’d looked at me over the top of the glasses and said nothing, which was Dom’s way of conceding a point without the indignity of saying so.

Three days of beachside setups. Three days of Dom in our private cabana in linen trousers and rolled sleeves and those fucking glasses, looking like a man who’d been placed there by a casting director who understood my exact type and had decided to test my professional stamina. My professional stamina had limits. I’d found them at approximately 2 PM on day two, when I’d been mid-pose on a beach lounger and had glanced over to see Dom watching me work with an expression I recognized from eight months of intimate data collection. It was the expression that preceded the removal of clothing. Mine, specifically.

The shoot wrapped at four on day three. I gave the crew my bar tab. They’d be occupied for hours. I was generous like that. Also strategic. Also deeply, viscerally done sharing the same square footage as Dominic Kessler in reading glasses without doing something about it.

I found him exactly where I knew he’d be. The private cabana was less a cabana and more a small, curtained room on the beach — a daybed the size of a small apartment, sheer linen walls filtering the Caribbean light into something golden and warm. Dom was sitting on the daybed with his laptop open, reading glasses on, wearing linen trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, and looking like something out of a campaign he hadn’t been hired for.

I pulled the curtain closed behind me. The fabric whispered shut, and the cabana became its own world — golden light, white linen, the muffled sound of the ocean, and the man I’d been thinking about for three solid days.

“Shoot’s done,” I said. “Close the laptop.”

I took his glasses off. Carefully, the way I always did — folding them, setting them on the cushion, the small ritual of undressing the professional before undressing the man. Then I climbed onto the daybed, straddled his lap, and rolled my hips once, slow and deliberate, grinding down against the front of his trousers where he was already hard. His hands came to my hips, automatic, proprietary.

“We’re in a cabana,” he observed. “With a curtain for a door.”

“Baby, we fucked in a coat closet at a gala. A curtain is an upgrade.” I rolled again. Harder. Felt him throb against me through the linen. “I’ve been thinking about this since the second setup. The one on the beach. I was supposed to be looking at the ocean and all I could think about was you sitting fifty feet away in those glasses, and I wanted to walk off set and sit on your lap and let the entire crew watch me ruin you.”

“That would have been off-brand.” His voice had dropped. The register that meant the strategy was dissolving.

“It would have been the best content I’ve ever produced.” I kissed him. Not gently. With the accumulated force of three days of performing for cameras while the only person I wanted to perform for sat in a cabana reading quarterly reports. His mouth opened under mine and he groaned into the kiss and his hips rolled up against me and the friction — through fabric, through layers of professional propriety — was electric.

Shirts came off fast. His, mine. I undid his trousers and pulled them down — trousers and briefs together — and his cock sprang free, thick and hard and flushed dark at the head, a bead of precome already gathering at the tip. I wrapped my hand around the base and stroked once, slow, watching his stomach clench and his head drop back.

“During the shoot today,” I said, kissing down his chest, his ribs, the trail of blond hair below his navel, “the photographer told me to think about something that makes me feel desired. To sell the look.” My mouth reached his hip bone. “I thought about the face you make when I first get my mouth on you. That specific face — the jaw going slack, the eyes closing, your hand finding my hair and holding on like you’ll fall if you let go.” I looked up at him. “The photographer said it was the best shot of the day. So now I’m going to make you make that face for real.”

I licked him. Base to tip, one long, slow stripe, my tongue flat and wide against the underside of his cock. His hand flew to my hair — there it was, the grip, the hold — and his breath stuttered out in a broken exhale that sounded like my name dismantled into syllables.

I took him in my mouth. Slow. Inch by inch, my lips stretching around the girth of him, my tongue working the underside as I swallowed him down. The head of his cock hit the back of my throat and I held there, breathing through my nose, feeling him pulse against my tongue, and the sound he made — guttural, ruined, the sound of composure dying — vibrated through both of us.

I pulled back. Took him deep again. Set a rhythm that was deliberately, calculatedly slow. My hand at the base working in counterpoint to my mouth. I hummed around him and felt the vibration travel through his body — his hips jerked, his grip in my hair tightened to the edge of pain. I liked the edge. He knew I liked it. The pull was its own communication — more and don’t stop and I’m losing this fight.

“Fuck,” he breathed. Dom didn’t swear often — when he did it meant his internal thesaurus had crashed and the backup system was running on instinct. “Theo — your mouth —”

I worked him until his thighs were shaking and his breathing went ragged and his hand was pulling in a way that communicated stop or I’m going to come like this. I pulled off. Looked up at him. His face was the face — the exact one I’d described. Jaw slack. Eyes dark. Composure replaced by something raw and hungry and so exposed that looking at it felt like being trusted with something breakable.

“There it is,” I said. “That’s the shot.”

“Get up here.” The command register. The one that bypassed my decision-making and went straight to compliance.

He rolled us. Suddenly I was on my back and he was above me, between my legs, and he stripped my trunks off with an efficiency that was almost clinical and entirely devastating. “You’ve been performing all day,” he said, his mouth on my neck, his teeth on my earlobe. “For three days. For cameras. For brands. For everyone.” He bit down on the tendon where my neck met my shoulder and I gasped. “No more performing. For the next hour, you’re not content. You’re not a brand. You’re mine.”

The word mine hit me like it always did. A claiming that was also a sheltering.

He kissed down my body with the methodical attention that was his signature. My chest. He spent time on my nipples — tongue circling, teeth catching, the dual sensation making my back arch and my hands fist in the cushion. He kissed my ribs, my obliques, the hollow of my hip where muscle met bone.

Then his mouth was on my cock and I forgot the ocean existed. Dom gave head the way he managed crises — with thoroughness, precision, and an absolute refusal to leave the job half-done. He took me deep and stayed deep, his throat working, one hand on my hip holding me down, and the wet tight devastating heat of his mouth reduced my vocabulary to a single word on repeat: his name. Dom. Dom. Dom. Whispered, groaned, gasped, shouted, while the curtains swayed and the ocean kept its rhythm.

He pulled off before I could finish. I made a sound of protest so undignified I would have been embarrassed if I’d had the cognitive resources for embarrassment, which I did not. “Not yet,” he said. His lips were swollen. His chin was wet. The sight of Dominic Kessler with my precome on his face, looking at me like I was a problem he intended to solve at length, was the single most erotic image my brain had ever processed.

I told him about the supplies under the cushion. He found them. Raised an eyebrow. “You staged supplies in the cabana before the shoot.”

“I’m an influencer. Preparation is content.”

“Preparation is — that’s my line. You stole my line.”

“I stole your whole life. Keep up.”

He slicked his fingers. One first — circling, pressing, breaching with the gentleness that was maddening. I’d told him once he didn’t need to be so careful. He’d said, “I will always be careful with you,” and the sentence had ended the argument permanently.

One finger became two. Two became a twist, a curl, the specific angle he’d discovered in Miami and had been exploiting with dedication ever since. His fingertips found the spot and pressed, and white light erupted behind my eyelids and my hips came off the daybed and a sound left my mouth that was closer to a scream than a moan and was definitely audible to anyone within thirty feet of the cabana.

“Quiet,” he murmured.

“Then stop doing that.”

“I’m not stopping.” He did it again. The press, the curl. I bit my forearm and he pulled my arm away. “Don’t hide. I want to hear you.”

“You just said quiet —”

“I changed my mind. Let them hear. Let every person on this beach know exactly what’s happening in this cabana.”

A third finger. I stopped trying to be quiet. Told him I needed him inside me, needed him to fuck me until cameras and audiences ceased to exist, needed him to make me forget that I’d spent three days smiling for strangers when the only person I wanted to smile for was right here.

He rolled the condom on. Slicked himself. Positioned himself between my legs and I hooked my ankles behind his back and pulled him in and felt the blunt press of him at my entrance and took one breath — deep, the way he’d taught me on a bathroom floor in another life — and he pushed in.

Slow. Inch by inch, his eyes locked on mine, watching every response — the catch of my breath, the flutter of my lashes, the moment my mouth dropped open and the sound I made changed from anticipation to arrival. He filled me completely and held still, buried to the hilt, his forehead pressed to mine, and the fullness — the stretch and the pressure and the intimate, overwhelming fact of him inside me — was the same revelation it had been the first time and every time since.

“Like I was built for this,” he breathed.

“You were.” I clenched around him. Watched his eyes roll back. “Move.”

He moved. Long, deep strokes that I felt in my chest, my teeth, the soles of my feet pressing against his lower back pulling him deeper. The pace was steady — Dom’s pace, controlled, each movement calculated for maximum impact. He knew the angle. He knew the depth. He knew when to shift his hips and find the spot that made me arch off the daybed and claw at his shoulders and say things that would have gotten us banned from every family resort on the island.

“Harder.”

He gave me harder. The daybed creaked beneath us. The linen curtains swayed with the force of it, and the sound of our bodies meeting — skin on skin, wet and obscene and beautiful — filled the cabana and spilled through the fabric walls and out across the sand.

“I love you,” he said mid-thrust, voice shattered, and it sounded like a data point delivered by a man who was balls-deep in his boyfriend on a Caribbean daybed at golden hour, which lent it a credibility that no spreadsheet could match.

“I love you,” I said back, and it came out with a laugh and a gasp because he shifted the angle on the word you and hit the spot dead center and the declaration and the pleasure arrived at the same moment.

His pace cracked open. Harder. Faster. The controlled rhythm giving way to something more animal, more honest. He reached between us. Wrapped his hand around my cock. Stroked in time with his thrusts — firm, slick, perfectly calibrated — and the dual sensation, him inside me and his hand on me and the Caribbean sun going down through the curtains and his voice in my ear saying come for me, let go, I’ve got you, collapsed every remaining wall.

I came. Hard enough that my vision whited out. Hard enough that the sound I made was not a word but something older, something from the base of my spine and the center of the place where I loved him. My body clenched around his cock and I felt him respond — a groan, deep, almost pained, his rhythm stuttering, his hand tightening on me, riding me through it.

Three more thrusts. He buried himself deep and came with my name on his mouth and his face pressed to my neck and his whole body shuddering against mine, the orgasm rolling through him in waves that I felt from the inside, each pulse a sentence in a language we’d invented together over eight months of learning how to say I’m yours without speaking.

We lay there. The daybed was wrecked. The linen walls glowed with the last of the golden hour. The breeze from the ocean was cool against our damp skin and neither of us moved to cover up.

“So,” I said, my face against his chest, my voice wrecked and grinning. “How’s the creative consulting going?”

“I’d rate the deliverable as exceeding expectations.”

“Five stars. Would consult again.”

He laughed. The full one. The sound that had taken weeks to earn and now arrived freely.

I picked up my phone. His hand closed on my wrist. “Don’t you dare.”

“I’m an excellent liar. I faked a whole relationship once. Very convincingly.”

“That relationship stopped being fake approximately twelve hours in.”

“Fourteen. But who’s counting.”

“I was counting. I had a spreadsheet.”

I put the phone down. Facedown. Screen dark. Settled back against his chest. Watched the Caribbean sun drop toward the water through the gap in the curtains. Felt his arm tighten around me. Felt his heartbeat under my ear — steady, present, the rhythm I’d learned on a bathroom floor and would carry for the rest of my life.

Not content. Not strategy. Not a performance for an audience of millions.

Just us. Just this. Just the ocean and the light and the man who’d walked into my life with a binder and left with everything.

The sun went down. The curtain swayed. The ocean kept going.

We stayed.

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.