Chapter Seven
CHAPTER SEVEN
DALTON
There were a few things I knew to be true about my husband. He loved me more than air, but he loved his friends just as much.
He loved Alex Burke just as much. Differently, but still the same.
So the shift in Ivey’s expression didn’t catch me off-guard when we walked into the dining room at the hotel, and he went from looking at me like I hung the moon to looking at Alex like he’d hand-painted the stars.
Different…
“What the fuck?” Ivey whispered, tightening his hold around my hand.
I swallowed hard, giving Alex and his boyfriend Dylan a slow onceover. Alex stood when we entered, smoothed his hand down the front of his stomach. He was dressed casually in jeans and a faded CBGB t-shirt, but I recognized the gesture as belonging to someone who wore dress shirts with buttons more often than not.
“Did you know he was going to be here?” Ivey asked me.
“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat. “Because I invited him. Kale and the rest of them too.”
Of course he’d seen Alex first, because he always would, but as I told him his other friends from New York were also joining us for dinner, he searched them all out. His lips fell into a wide smile, and he grabbed my face, crashing into me and licking his way into my mouth for all of them to see.
“Why?” he asked after he’d kissed me hard enough to make me ready to drag him back to the hotel room and fuck him until it was time to go home to LA.
“Because it’s our anniversary and they kept you safe until we were ready for each other.”
“Fucking get a room,” Grayson said, voice loud enough to carry over the commotion at our arrival.
Getting all of our friends—and his friends—into Cherry Creek at the same time had taken a monumental amount of planning, and I’d practically had to rent out the entire hotel, but seeing the elation plastered across Ivey’s face as he saw everyone in the same room made the cost and the struggle worth it.
The dining room was packed and practically private—Grayson and Rob, Archie, Owen, Flynn, Rose, Barclay and Val. Ivey’s friends from New York—Kale, his boyfriend Christian, Brooks and Tate, Kale’s brother Boston and his boyfriend Ford, Dylan and Alex—all of them clustered around a table for eighteen that left little room for anyone else to sit in the whole room.
“I’m at a loss for words,” he murmured, only to me.
“That’s okay,” I assured him, “Grayson and Archie have more than enough for the whole lot of us.”
I smoothed my hand down the long slope of Ivey’s back as we headed for the table, pausing before stepping away when we got to Alex and his boyfriend. Alex gave me a perfunctory greeting, which was more than enough and ten times the amount of conversation I wanted to have with him. The history between the two of them would always rub me in uncomfortable ways, but my trust in my husband and my understanding of his love for me soothed the ache. The two of them had cleared the air and made peace, and I was not the kind of partner that would stand in the way of that.
I left Ivey with his friends at the far end of the table, dropping a kiss on his temple and reminding him to come find me, then I made my way to the other end where two empty chairs and our friends from LA waited for us. I sank down into a seat beside Barclay, who was quick to slide a glass of wine into my hand.
“The drinks here suck,” he said.
“You should have stolen the whiskey from Rob’s room,” I suggested.
On the other side, Rob made an unamused sound. “I’ve locked the kitchen whiskey away. Heathens, the whole group of you.”
“You can’t get us used to the finer things in life and then deprive us,” Archie pointed out, rolling his eyes and taking a drink of whatever wine the hotel had managed to scrounge up for us. “This actually isn’t horrible, Barclay. I think you’re just a snob.”
Barclay scoffed, frowning at the wine and taking a drink anyway.
“He looks pleased, though,” Barclay said, both of us looking down the table while Ivey threw his head back and laughed at something one of his friends had said.
“It’s nice to have everyone together, I’m sure.”
“You’re a bigger man than me. I wouldn’t have invited them.”
I glanced past him to Val, raising a brow. “Am I bigger than him?”
Val’s cheeks flushed, and Barclay smacked my arm hard enough to hurt.
“I kid,” I apologized, “I kid. How was the flight?”
“It would have been better if it was private,” Grayson chimed in from Rob’s right.
“It was private,” Rob reminded him.
Grayson gestured at Barclay and Archie. “They were there.”
“Spoiled, indeed,” Rob mused.
Grayson shrugged and made a pretend pouty face at Rob. “Maybe you can punish me later for bad behavior.”
“I hope this place retrofit the walls before letting us check in,” Owen murmured, easily the quietest of the bunch, but not one to be discounted.
“What about you, Rose?” I asked Flynn’s younger boyfriend. “Did you have a good trip into Denver?”
Rose was a gorgeous wisp of a man with curly blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. Everything about him was delicate, a sharp contrast to Flynn’s broad muscles, but the two of them were a perfect combination together.
“It was nice,” he said, tucking his chin toward his chest.
“Your first time?”
He nodded.
“Good.” I turned my attention down the table, finding Ivey deep in conversation with Kale Sheffield, and Kale’s boyfriend chatting casually with Flynn.
It was nice, I realized, to have everyone in one place. Even though Ivey’s friends weren’t mine, the way mine were his, I appreciated everything the group of them shared together, the lives they’d lived.
“You do realize it, right?” Grayson asked, calling my attention to his voice even though I kept my stare on the seven men at the other end of the table.
“Realize what?”
“Kale is hooked up with a prince, but rich enough in his own right to own a country if he wanted to. He and Boston are heirs to some of the most magnificent property in Manhattan. Alex is comfortable enough to never work another day in his life and Astor Brooks in name alone has more money than all of us put together,” Grayson mused, covering his mouth with his hand while he talked.
“Not different from us then?”
Grayson grumbled under his breath, letting his hand fall onto the table. “Fucking Trophy Doms Social Club and Trophy Doms New York over here. I wonder if Cherry Creek knows what hell has descended upon them.”
I snorted a laugh, taking another drink of wine and finding the vintage more palatable than Barclay had insinuated.
“You say that like you’re not part of that club.”
I watched Ivey offer Kale a hug before searching me out. His stare traced over all of our LA friends before finding me, and when he caught my stare, he blinded me with a breathtaking smile that had my knees going weak.
“It’s not the same,” Grayson went on, unbothered. “It’s like having an honorary doctorate as opposed to having done all the work.”
“Rob does plenty of work with you. I’ve heard stories.”
“What does that mean?” Grayson asked, eyes going wide just as Ivey came around the corner of the table and slid into the empty seat at my right.
“Ask Robert,” I teased, reaching up and stroking my fingers down the swell of Ivey’s throat. His cheeks flushed at my touch and I leaned in close to whisper, “If I close my eyes, I can still picture you choking on a twelve inch cock.”
He shivered, lashes fluttering.
“Happy anniversary, Ivey,” I murmured, sliding my fingers around to collar his throat. I kissed him chastely on the mouth. “Are you happy?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. I can’t believe you arranged this.”
“I feel like I get you to myself most of the time,” I said. “I thought it would be a good occasion to make sure you knew I wasn’t the only one who loves you.”
“And Alex?” His mouth quirked in the corner, and I had half a mind to gag him over it.
“He seems smitten with Dylan.”
It was easy to make assumptions about everyone at the table. Ivey was the way he was, which meant Alex was…more like me than I would ever admit out loud. Swallowing, I watched the less-than-tender way he curled his fingers around Dylan’s arm, peeling his fingers back to leave a kiss against the inside of his wrist.
“He is,” Ivey agreed.
“How’s everyone’s drinks?” the man from check-in, Cameron, called out, voice ringing loud and clear over all of our conversations. He was met with a rousing noise that sounded a lot like approval. “Great. Salads are coming!”
Ivey chuckled and settled back in his seat. “Do you have any other secrets up your sleeve Mr. Fox?” he asked.
In the shower, I’d picked the airtight bandage off my ring finger, and I lifted my left hand onto the table, giving that finger a wiggle.
“No,” I told him, “but I would love if you could give me back my wedding band.”
Another low laugh, and he looked down at my ring on his right hand, then his on the left. Ivey’s band was heavy and plain, simple and understated compared to mine, which was brighter and bigger than necessary, but I didn’t want anyone to miss it. I didn’t want anyone to even suspect there might not be a man at home who had my whole heart.
“I was just getting used to it,” he teased.
The post-play glow must have had him feeling bold, or maybe it was the presence of his friends—our friends—that left him feeling like he could speak out of turn that way.
“Get un-used to it.”
He flashed me a dangerous smile. “Make me.”
“Oh, Ivey.”
I grabbed his wrist, much harder than was necessary, and I lifted his hand to my mouth. With my stare trained on his, I sucked his whole ring finger into my mouth, using my tongue to swirl off the band that was his just as much as it was mine. Once it popped over the last knuckle and landed on my tongue, I gave his finger one wet suck…for good measure.
“I said salads were coming,” Cameron said from behind me, reaching around my other side and setting a plate down in front of me. “You didn’t need to eat your husband.”
Grayson barked out a sharp laugh, pouring the rest of his wine down his throat.
“I like this one,” he said, gesturing to Cameron with an empty glass. “Let’s eat.”