Best Man, Better Lover — Bonus Chapter

Room Fourteen (Revisited)
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place during Alex and Mia’s anniversary weekend, months after the epilogue of Best Man, Better Lover. Contains explicit sexual content. 18+ only.

The key card said Room 14.

Same room. Same converted carriage house at the edge of the property. Same gravel path through the sea grass, same French doors, same vaulted ceiling with the whitewashed beams.

Same bed.

“They gave us the same room,” Connor said, standing in the doorway with our bags, looking at the king bed like it owed him a confession.

“I requested it.”

He turned. “You requested it?”

“When Mia sent the anniversary weekend details, I called the resort and asked for Room Fourteen specifically.” I dropped my bag by the closet—left side, his territory now, our sides established six months ago and never renegotiated. “I have a sentimental attachment to this mattress.”

“You have a sentimental attachment to what happened on this mattress.”

“I have a sentimental attachment to what’s going to happen on this mattress. Tonight. In approximately—” I checked my watch. “—however long it takes you to stop staring at the bed and start taking your clothes off.”

Connor set the bags down. Closed the door. Turned the deadbolt.

“That’s a good start,” I said.

He crossed the room in three strides and kissed me, and it was the kiss of a man who’d been thinking about this specific room in this specific resort for the entire drive from the airport—deep, unhurried, his hands finding my waist with the practiced certainty of six months of mornings. He tasted like the terrible airport coffee he’d insisted on buying and the mint he’d popped afterward, and underneath both, the taste that was just Connor—warm, specific, mine.

“I’ve been thinking about this since Mia sent the invite,” he said against my mouth.

“The anniversary party?”

“This room. This bed. You, in this bed, with no wedding to attend and no brother to manage and no reason to be quiet.”

“We were very quiet last time.”

“You were quiet. I bit through the inside of my cheek.”

I laughed, and the laugh dissolved when his hand slid under my shirt, palm flat against my stomach, fingers spreading. The heat of his touch sent a ripple of anticipation through me that was embarrassing in its immediacy—six months of regular, enthusiastic, frequently acrobatic sex, and his hand on my bare skin still hit me like a circuit closing.

“I want to do something,” he said.

“You always want to do something. It’s one of your best qualities.”

“I want to recreate it. The first night.” His eyes were dark, intent, that focused expression I’d learned meant he’d been planning something with the meticulous care he brought to spreadsheets and binders. “I want to walk you through it. Every step. But this time, I’m not the one learning.”

My breath caught. “You want to teach me?”

“I want to show you what it felt like. Being on the other side. Being the one who’s guided.” His thumb traced a circle on my hip. “You spent that whole night taking care of me. Showing me how to touch you, how to read you, talking me through every step. And it was—” His voice roughened. “It was the most important night of my life. But I never got to do that for you. You were so busy leading that you never got to just—receive.”

The sentence landed in my chest like a key turning a lock I didn’t know was still closed.

“Okay,” I said. My voice was barely there. “Show me.”

He smiled. The full one, both dimples, the smile of a man who’d been waiting for permission and just received it.

“Sit on the bed.”

I sat. He stood in front of me—backlit by the French doors, the ocean visible behind him, the late-afternoon light painting him gold the same way it had six months ago, except now he wore the confidence the way I wore mine: earned, settled, sure.

“First,” he said, “I’m going to kiss you. And I need you to stop thinking.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You’re always thinking. You’re reading me right now—monitoring my reactions, calibrating what I need, adjusting your performance to match. Stop.” He put his hands on my face. Tilted it up. His thumbs bracketed my jaw, and his eyes—hazel, gold in the light, steady—held mine with an intensity that made my skin prickle. “You don’t need to perform for me. You don’t need to lead. Just feel it.”

My own words. The exact words I’d said to him in this room six months ago, reflected back at me with the precision of a man who’d memorized every syllable.

He kissed me. And it was different from every kiss we’d shared since the first one—not because the mechanics changed, but because the intention did. He wasn’t kissing me to start something. He was kissing me to take over. His mouth moved against mine with a deliberateness that left no room for me to steer, and when I instinctively tried to deepen it—to guide, to lead, to do what I always did—he pulled back.

“Let me.”

Two words. My hands, which had been reaching for his waist, dropped to the mattress.

He undressed me. Slowly. With the same button-by-button reverence I’d used on him in this room, but mirrored—his perspective, his pace, his attention focused entirely on me in a way that made me feel simultaneously exposed and held. My shirt, unbuttoned, pushed off my shoulders. His mouth following his hands—collarbone, chest, the ridge of muscle above my hip that he’d discovered made me lose language.

“You like this spot,” he murmured against my skin. “Right here. Your breathing changes when I—”

His teeth grazed the muscle. My breathing changed.

“—do that.” He smiled against my skin. “Tab Six.”

“I’m going to burn Tab Six.”

“No you’re not. You love Tab Six. Tab Six is the reason you make that sound.”

“What sound?”

He bit down—not hard, just the suggestion—and I made a sound that proved his point so thoroughly that arguing further would have been intellectually dishonest.

He took me in his mouth, and the sound I made was not composed.

Six months of practice had turned Connor Hayes from an earnest amateur into something entirely, ruinously different. He knew my rhythms. He knew the angle that made my spine bow off the bed, the pressure that held me at the edge, the exact moment to slow down and the exact moment to not slow down at all.

“Please,” I said. The word scraped out of me from a place I didn’t usually access—the place below the performance, below the confidence, below the charming-competent-in-control persona I’d spent thirty years constructing. The raw place. The place that wanted. “Connor, please.”

“Turn over,” he said.

I turned. Face in the pillow, the same pillow his fingers had found my collarbone on six months ago, and I felt his mouth trace down my spine—vertebra by vertebra, a cartography of devotion—and when he reached the base, his hands spread me open and his mouth continued its descent, and I buried my face in the cotton and made a sound that the entire resort probably heard.

When he finally pushed inside me, I said his name like a prayer.

He moved slowly. Deep, measured strokes that I felt in my core and my chest and the backs of my closed eyes. His chest against my back, his mouth on my shoulder, his hand reaching around to wrap around me, and the dual sensation—full, held, stroked—built a pressure that was tidal, oceanic, the kind of climax that announced itself from a distance and approached with the inevitability of weather.

“I love you,” he said into the curve of my neck, his rhythm steady, his voice breaking on every other word. “I love you in this room and in our apartment and in your parents’ living room and in the grocery store and at three AM when you steal the covers and in every room I’ve ever been in with you and every room I’ll ever be in. I love you in the daylight. I love you.”

I came. The orgasm tore through me with a force that whited out the room—his hand on me, his body inside me, his voice in my ear, the ocean crashing outside the same French doors where he’d first kissed me, and I cried out with no modulation, no control, no performance, just the raw, unfiltered sound of a man being loved so completely that his body couldn’t contain it.

Connor followed. I felt it—the stutter of his hips, the groan against my neck, the way his arms tightened around me and held on like I was the only solid thing in a liquid world—and I pressed back against him and held his hands against my chest and felt his heartbeat slamming through his ribs into my spine.

We collapsed. Tangled. The sheets were destroyed. The pillows were on the floor. The French doors were open and the ocean was loud and somewhere down the beach, the anniversary party was gathering and we were very, very late.

“Best man,” I said.

“Don’t start.”

“Best man.” I rolled over. Faced him. “Better lover.”

“Better everything,” he said, and kissed me, and outside the French doors the ocean crashed against the shore the way it had been crashing for a thousand years, and the two men lying tangled in Room Fourteen were indifferent, because they had everything they needed between these four walls and this one bed and each other’s arms.

Like a beginning that never needed an ending.

Like home.

Loved Connor and Levi’s story? The full novel is available now.

Never Miss a Release

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