Complete Bliss (Her Billionaires #5.3)(23)
Author: Julia Kent

“Not a fan of orgies?” Trevor joked.

“Ha ha. I did go to Eden,” Joe shot back, grabbing a chocolate wafer cookie and absent-mindedly gnawing on it.

Dylan nudged Mike and pulled him over to whisper, “What’s Eden? And what’s up with Joe?”

“No clue about Eden,” Mike whispered. “But remember me in college?”

Dylan stiffened. “Yeah. That bad?”

Mike held back a snort. “That bad.”

“That why Laura wants us here? To try to help?”

Mike sighed. “I don’t know, but I think it’s a fool’s game. I wouldn’t have talked to anyone back then. Only you and Jill.”

Dylan nodded. “And even then, you were a f**king ass**le.”

“We’ve gone over this before,” Mike said tightly. He didn’t need his nose rubbed in it.

“That time you told us we were abominations and that there was something wrong with Jill for wanting us both at the same time was a blast,” Dylan threw out there, making Mike cringe.

“You really want to run through an inventory of stupid things we’ve done over time? Because I have a list with your name on it, too.”

Mike sensed a change at the table and broke away from his whispered talk with Dylan to find Alex, Joe, and Trevor all licking ice cream-covered spoons and watching them carefully.

They both stared back.

Alex broke the silence, poking his thumb toward the tri-headed, huddled mass at the booth next to them. It was clear to Mike that Josie, Darla, and Laura were not bonding only over ice cream and caramel sauce. The whispered gasps made him extra curious, but he knew how this worked.

While Laura might share intimate details with her friends, she’d never share what she shared with him and Dylan.

And that was that.

He hadn’t talked with any man other than Dylan about what he did in the bedroom—or in his heart—in…

Ever.

Never, once, had he been the guy who talked about conquests. In college he’d kept his damn mouth shut about sex, because what he wanted and what everyone else wanted diverged wildly. Better to act like he was one of them than to risk being labeled a deviant.

At least with Dylan and Jill they’d been deviants together.

Safety in numbers.

A decade of adjustment and two years with Laura now meant his headspace was a lot clearer, and he could talk more openly if pressed, but as Joe folded in on himself with Alex’s words, and as the food dwindled down to table scraps (mostly from Trevor, who had the appetite of a thirteen-year-old boy with hollow legs and a tapeworm), the anticipation of what was coming made all the men seem disturbed. Rattled.

Deeply uncomfortable.

Mike included.

Dylan, on the other hand, stretched his arms wide with a yawn, muscles bulging, and then kept his arms high, though never touching Mike or Trevor.

“Who wants to talk about dicks and holes? Lube? Sex toys? How about swings that don’t have cheap clamps that break while you’re in the middle of—”

Madge walked right up behind Joe with eyebrows high. Alex turned bright red at her appearance, and Mike bit the inside of his cheek to avoid laughing. Trevor was flushed, like an errant schoolboy.

Dylan just stared her down.

“You need to get a good quality beam clamp. One that can hold…” Her eyes catalogued Mike, then Dylan, and finally flitted over to Laura. “Can hold a good seven hundred pounds or more. Not hard. Just go to White’s Hardware and explain that you need one that can handle lots of wear and tear and that kind of weight load. If Dmitri’s there, tell him Madge sent you.” She winked. “He’ll know exactly why you’re there.”

Joe pushed his plate away from the table and kept his head low, as if the old woman would smack him upside the head if he brought any attention to himself.

Dylan wasn’t cowed. “Seven hundred pounds? How big is your grandpa?” he asked Alex with a giant, shit-eating grin on his face.

“Oh, not from Eddie,” she answered, laughing and placing a friendly hand on Alex’s shoulder. “From…before him.” Her voice went low, and Dylan just laughed.

Alex looked like a statue. A closed-eyed, post-apocalyptic statue who remained stoic in the face of complete, soul-sucking destruction. Mike imagined that thinking about his grandfather’s sex life was about as appetizing as tea-bagging the old Warlock Waitress cardboard cutout.

“Madge, could you please not talk about my grandfather and sex in front of me? We’ve talked about this before,” Alex said in a voice that sounded like broken guitar strings. He let out a long, hot sigh, and Mike was surprised by Madge’s reaction.

She looked chastened.

Dylan sat straight up and folded his hands in his lap, staring at Alex like he was a god.

Someone had made Madge behave?

“For you, sweet Alex, I’ll stop.” She touched his cheek and strode into the kitchen, then shouted, “Caleb, get out those penis molds! We need to make more lobster cakes!”

“Your grandfather is a lucky man,” Mike joked, ribbing Alex. He got an anemic smile in return.

“Your grandpa is Madge’s boyfriend?” Trevor asked.

Alex just nodded.

“Holidays must be really fun. The dinner conversation. Does she bring a strap-on to the table?” Dylan asked.

Alex threw a sugar packet at him.

The atmosphere had changed just enough to make everyone relax slightly, an odd reaction to geriatric sex toy jokes, but hey—they’d take what they could get. That locker-room jocularity that Mike never understood descended over the group, Dylan and Trevor most comfortable with it, Alex somewhere in the middle, and Mike and Joe bewildered, it seemed, if Mike was reading the younger man right.

“You ever been in a threesome relationship before?” Dylan asked Joe directly.

Joe’s mouth dropped open, and Mike was sure pea soup was about to pour out of it.

“First time. We’re cherries,” Trevor said as he dragged half a red lobster cake through a congealed mass of melted ice cream and marshmallow sauce, then shoved it in his mouth. The guy must have the metabolism of a hummingbird.

“Cherries,” Joe echoed.

“And so far, so good?”

Joe just nodded. Mike resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Dylan was being cagey and coy on purpose, making a mockery of the entire scene. What was next? Talk about the weather?

“Look,” Mike said, leaning forward. All four men leaned with him. “This isn’t exactly the easiest conversation to have,” he added in a hushed tone. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Madge gently push on Darla’s shoulder, the younger woman giving her a WTF? look, but sliding in, turning their three-top into a four-top. Mike’s curiosity opened to full throttle, but he was trapped.