Jayden:
I thought I knew what desperation felt like. Sleeping on couches, counting pennies, watching the days tick down until I'd have nowhere to go.
I was wrong.
True desperation is kneeling inches from Silas, feeling his gaze trace paths his hands have yet to follow. It's the ache that builds when someone owns every part of you but refuses to claim it with their touch. When they forbid you from touching them or even yourself.
He's teaching me to crave the simplest contact like water in a desert, and I’m sure I’m about to go mad with need. But with my lease running out and Chicago’s winter approaching, I need this arrangement to work. I need to prove I'm worth keeping. That I can follow his rules, no matter how impossible they seem, and that I can serve him in the way he likes.
With the distance between us shrinking in every way except the one I need most, I'm terrified of what I'm becoming—someone who would beg for the brush of fingertips against my jaw. Someone who would confess any sin just to feel his approval.
Someone who's starting to think submission might be its own kind of freedom.
Silas:
Trust is a liability I eliminated from my arrangements years ago. After Jimmy's betrayal left me bleeding in court and Luca's growing attachment threatened everything I'd built, I vowed never again.
My rules exist for a reason. Distance maintains order. Touch creates weakness. Emotion destroys control.
Then Jayden crashed into my world with his desperate eyes and stick-and-poke tattoo. The boy who still can't remain still when he kneels. The boy who trembles when I pass without touching him, who confesses his sins when silence would have kept him safe.
A boy who looks at me like I'm salvation, not just sustenance.
Every submissive before him understood obedience, but Jayden struggles. He fights with himself before surrendering, and it makes the victory taste sweeter for it.
I tell myself I'm teaching him patience through denial, that he's learning what it means to hunger for a touch that never comes.
What I won't admit is how much I ache to break my own rules. Or how watching him starve is making me ravenous.
Crave Without Contact is the second book in the Seven Rules to Ruin a Man series, following the evolving power exchange between a controlling billionaire Dom and his untrained, defiant submissive.
