Sugar Daddy Down Low bonus chapter by Jace Wilder - MM Sugar Daddy Romance

Bonus Chapter: Quarterly Review

A free, exclusive bonus chapter from Sugar Daddy Down Low
by Jace Wilder

One year after the alley. Marcus and Leo live together now — but some Tuesdays, Halloran Consulting still books room 1204. Tonight, Reyes Consulting is conducting the annual review. Reader discretion: this one’s pure Inferno. 18+ only.

The summons arrived on official letterhead.

Actual letterhead — REYES CONSULTING: Findings You Can’t Argue With — which meant Leo had gone to a print shop, in person, with money, to produce stationery for a bit, and Marcus found it propped against the coffee maker on a Tuesday morning in the apartment they’d shared for four months, six blocks from Gloria’s, radiators certified haunted.

NOTICE OF ANNUAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW, it read. Subject: M. Hale. Venue: The Wexford, Room 1204, 7:00 PM. Dress code: the first-night configuration. The subject is advised that all findings are final, all penalties are collectible, and the reviewing consultant has had an entire year to prepare. Do not touch it before then. — Management.

Marcus read it twice, standing in his own kitchen in the softball shirt that had never been returned, grinning like a man holding contraband.

Then he went to work and accomplished, by his own honest audit, absolutely nothing all day.

At seven exactly, Leo knocked — his own ritual, unbreakable, even for a room he’d booked himself — and came through the door of 1204 in the cashmere coat with the duffel over his shoulder and the yellow legal pad held up between two fingers like a subpoena.

The original. The stolen one. ONLY US still circled soft on page one, the grocery-list terms stapled to it, a year of amendments accreted behind them in two alternating hands.

“Mr. Hale.” Consultant voice, dark eyes already wicked. “Thank you for making time. Sit in the chair.”

Marcus — first-night configuration as ordered, sleeves rolled, collar open — sat in the chair.

“Hands on the armrests. They stay there unless the consultant relocates them personally. That’s review protocol.” Leo shed the coat, dragged the desk chair around to face him at a distance calibrated to the inch — close enough to torture, far enough to forbid — and sat, ankle over knee, pen clicking twice. His tell. A year in, he didn’t bother hiding it. “We’ll proceed through the year’s findings. There are penalties. You’ve earned every one of them, and you’re going to sit in that chair and take them like the president of North America. Color?”

“Green,” Marcus said, already wrecked, hands flat on the armrests. “Emphatically green.”

“Noted for the record.” Click, click. “Finding one.”

Finding one was the shirt.

“The subject continues to wear — to sleep in — a Copper Rail Softball shirt belonging to a third party,” Leo read, deadpan, off the pad, while he stood and crossed the calibrated distance and settled astride Marcus’s lap in one fluid movement, still fully dressed, a warm deliberate weight that made Marcus’s breath go architectural. “Dani has asked for it back eleven times. The subject has claimed, quote, squatter’s rights. Penalty for theft of team property—” Leo’s mouth found his jaw, his throat, unhurried, merciless, while his hands started on Marcus’s shirt buttons at the speed of continental drift, “—is that tonight the consultant undresses him one finding at a time, and he keeps his hands on those armrests through every single item, or we start the review over from finding one.”

“That’s—” Marcus’s voice cracked as teeth grazed his ear. “That’s a conflict of interest. The penalty rewards the reviewing party.”

“Welcome to consulting,” Leo said, and bit him, gently, and Marcus’s hands went white on the armrests, and the review proceeded.

Finding two: the subject had been observed, on fourteen separate occasions, telling the story of how they met at dinner parties and getting the watch line wrong — “it was a hundred and SIXTY percent tip, Marcus, I did the math in front of you, it’s the founding document” — penalty: the shirt came off him, one button per corrected recitation of the true figure, Leo’s palms mapping every inch as it was exposed, slow and proprietary and reverent, the way he’d touched him the first night, the way he’d touched him every night since, like a man reading a language he owned the only copy of.

Finding three: excessive competence at domestic tasks, creating unrealistic expectations — “you fold fitted sheets, it’s unsettling, Marisol thinks you’re a sleeper agent” — penalty assessed against the belt, which took a very long time to unbuckle for a man with a bartender’s hands, deliberately, excruciatingly long, while Marcus made a low ruined sound and his hips lifted and Leo pressed him back down into the chair with one flat palm and a murmured ah-ah — armrests, Mr. Hale, we’ve barely opened the file.

Finding four — and here Leo’s voice changed, dropped out of the consultant register into the true one, though his hands never stopped their slow demolition — finding four was that the subject had, in the course of one fiscal year, come out to a CFO, a CEO, a PR director, a profile with a seven-figure readership, a church-sized extended family at a funeral in Ohio, and a very confused doorman named Gerald. That he had done it in that order at his own pace on his own legal pad exactly as ratified. That the consultant had watched him do it, month by month, wall by wall, and had been — the pen stopped clicking — so proud of him the whole time that some findings could only be delivered like this, and then Leo took his face in both hands and kissed him, deep and slow and completely off-protocol, and Marcus’s hands came off the armrests and wrapped around him and nobody restarted the review from finding one.

“Penalty,” Leo whispered against his mouth, when they surfaced.

“Name it.”

“Bed. Now. And you tell me every finding you’ve got, out loud, the whole time, boardroom rules — because it’s my review too, daddy, and I’ve been dying to hear my numbers all year.”

So Marcus reviewed him.

He laid Leo out across the bed of room 1204 and took him apart with a year’s fluency and a lifetime’s attention, and he delivered the findings the way he did everything now — out loud, unlevel, unrationed — a performance review conducted mouth-first down the whole length of the man he loved: that Leo Reyes had exceeded every projection ever filed; that his laugh was still the best line item in any room; that the way he said daddy — and Leo said it, right on cue, low and filthy and grinning — still detonated on contact, one year in, no dampening in effect, none expected, none ever; that he was brave and ferocious and ridiculous, that he’d taught a fifty-year-old building how to read, that every single morning Marcus woke up on the side of a bed with sides and conducted the same disbelieving audit — he’s still here, he came back, he always will — and found the books balanced, impossibly, perfectly balanced, every time.

Leo, who had planned an entire evening of penalties and protocols, lasted about six minutes of being praised like that before the consulting persona failed completely — before he was just Leo, wrecked and glowing and noisy, hauling Marcus up his body by the shoulders, wrapping around him, demanding the rest of the review be conducted inside the meeting, and Marcus laughed into his neck and obliged.

They came together slow and deep and eyes open, the way they’d taught each other, hands laced, the whole liturgy present and accounted for — mine, gasped; yours, answered; always was, traded back and forth until the words wore smooth — and when Leo crested it was with Marcus’s name breaking in his mouth and both hands fisted in the sheets of the room where a starving man had once apologized for staring, and Marcus followed him over two heartbeats later, wrecked and testifying, one year out from an alley and further from the potluck than Ohio could measure.

The legal pad lay on the carpet where it had landed sometime around finding four, face-down over its own agenda, thoroughly overruled.

“For the record,” Leo mumbled, much later, welded across his chest, one leg annexing its permanent territory, the city glittering unbothered through the glass. “The review isn’t complete. There were nine more findings. I had exhibits.”

“File them Thursday.”

“Thursday’s dinner at your — at Trevor’s.” A yawn, enormous, shameless. “Friday. Home. Our haunted radiators. I’ll bring the letterhead.”

“Friday,” Marcus agreed, into his hair. And then, because it was an anniversary, and because the man on his chest had once demanded a final rating at the end of every scene and it had become the oldest running gag on the books: “Leo. The overall assessment. Year one, full engagement period. For the permanent file.”

Leo lifted his head. Looked at him a long moment in the city light — the watch-reader, the term-amender, the whole taxonomy engine, running one last unhurried pass over the best acquisition either of them had ever closed — and delivered the finding with his crooked grin arriving sunrise-slow, effective the alley, acknowledged forever:

“Exceeds expectations,” he said. “Renew.”

— THE END —