Suncoast Society

  Things to Do in Denver

  Tony Daniels has a high-stress job running the data center for Asher Insurance. When he’s sent to Denver to supervise building their new facility, it completely takes over his life, including stealing valuable time and attention from wife and slave, Shayla.

  Shayla doesn’t like having to spend time apart from her husband, but she’s a big girl with a job of her own. Still, it would be nice to actually spend their wedding anniversary together. And that gives her an idea…

  But then Tony receives an unexpected phone call, and his past moves to darkly intrude on and overshadow his already thinly stretched present. Sadist doesn’t mean soulless. Except now it also means asking something of his wife she has every right to refuse. Will this new weight draw them closer, or will their already dangerously stressed dynamic split apart at the seams?

  Genres: BDSM, Contemporary

  Length: 31,308

  THINGS TO DO IN DENVER

  Suncoast Society

  Tymber Dalton

  

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  Things to Do in Denver

  Copyright © 2018 by Tymber Dalton

  ISBN: 978-1-64243-335-7

  First Publication: July 2018

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2018 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  If you find a Siren-BookStrand e-book or print book being sold or shared illegally, please let us know at legal@sirenbookstrand.com

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  DEDICATION

  To Sir. He knows why.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tymber Dalton is the wild-child alter-ego of author Lesli Richardson. She lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”) and too many pets. Active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC award winner and part-time Viking shield-maiden loves to shoot skeet and play D&D with her friends. She’s also the bestselling author of over one hundred and forty books and counting, including The Reluctant Dom, The Denim Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Suncoast Society series, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, the Coffeeshop Coven series, the Good Will Ghost Hunting series, the Drunk Monkeys series, and many more.

  She loves to hear from readers! Please feel free to drop by her website and sign up for her newsletter to keep abreast of the latest news, snarkage, and releases. You can also find all of her Siren-BookStrand releases under all four of her pen names on her author page on the BookStrand site.

  Honest reviews are always welcomed. They help with a book’s visibility and can boost its placement on book retailer sites. Even a few lines about what you felt reading the book will help. Thank you so much, it’s greatly appreciated!

  Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/cXKR7v

  Website: http://www.tymberdalton.com

  Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/tymberdalton

  Reader Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/TymbersTrybe

  Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TymberDalton

  For all titles by Tymber Dalton, please visit

  www.bookstrand.com/tymber-dalton

  Author’s Note

  This book’s timeline overlaps with A Spanktacular Fourth and A Crafty Ever After and should be read after those two titles. You’ll see another side of certain events.

  Tony and Shayla’s feature books are The Denim Dom and Click, with another small feature for Tony in Open Doors, although they appear in other books in the series as secondary characters, including Domme by Default, The Reluctant Dom, and others.

  Some of the characters in this book appear in or are featured in previous books in the Suncoast Society series. While most of the books in the Suncoast Society series are standalone works which may be read independently of each other, the recommended reading order to avoid spoilers and to not miss any backstory information is as follows:

  1. Safe Harbor

  2. Domme by Default

  3. Cardinal’s Rule

  4. The Reluctant Dom

  5. The Denim Dom

  6. Pinch Me

  7. Broken Toy

  8. A Clean Sweep

  9. A Roll of the Dice

  10. His Canvas

  11. A Lovely Shade of Ouch

  12. Crafty Bastards

  13. A Merry Little Kinkmas

  14. Sapiosexual

  15. A Very Kinky Valentine’s Day

  16. Things Made Right

  17. Click

  18. Spank or Treat

  19. A Turn of the Screwed

  20. Chains

  21. Kinko de Mayo

  22. Broken Arrow

  23. Out of the Spotlight

  24. Friends Like These

  25. Vicious Carousel

  26. Hot Sauce

  27. Open Doors

  28. One Ring

  29. Vulnerable

  30. The Strength of the Pack

  31. Initiative

  32. Impact

  33. Liability

  34. Switchy

  35. Rhymes With Orange

  36. Beware Falling Ice

  37. Beware Falling Rocks

  38. Dangerous Curves Ahead

  39. Two Against Nature

  40. Home at Last

  41. A Kinkmas Carol

  42. Ask DNA

  43. Time Out of Mind

  44. Happy Valenkink’s Day

  45. Splendid Isolation

  46. Similar to Rain

  47. Happy Spank Patrick’s Day

  48. Fire in the Hole

  49. Pretzel Logic

  50. This Moody Bastard

  51. Walk Between the Raindrops

  52. Rub Me Raw

  53. Any World That I’m Welcome To

  54. Heartache Spoken Here

  55. Roll With the Punches

  56. See You Sometime

  57. Borderline

  58. A Case of You

  59. Reconsider Me

  60. Never Too Late for Love

  61. Blues Beach

  62. Happy Spanksgiving

  63. Our Gravity

  64. Friends in Common

  65. Almost Gothic

  66. Empty-Handed Heart

  67. Steady Rain

  68. Indifference of Heaven

  69. Like the Seasons

  70. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

  71. Through With Love

  72. Judgment of the Moon and Stars

  73. For the Roses

  74. A Spanktacular Fourth

  75. Blue Motel Room

  76. A Crafty Ever After

  77. Come In From the Cold

  78. Things to Do in Denver

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THINGS TO DO IN DENVER

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  THINGS TO DO IN DENVER

  Suncoast Society

  TYMBER DALTON

  Copyright © 2018

  Chapter One

  June 1

  Well, that’s not happening.

  Tony Daniels leaned against the concrete block wall of the data center, taking advantage of the small bit of shade available on that side of the building. Currently open on his personal cell phone was the e-mail thread for the Suncoast Society Fourth of July private party invite, which had been sent out yesterday. Someone else had just RSVP’d as coming to the party.

  Ross was also looped into that e-mail account, a Gmail account they’d created to only handle the private party invites. That way, he could respond to the RSVPs and related questions, since Tony was currently stuck in Denver, and probably would be for the foreseeable future.

  Tony marked the message as unread so Ross would see it and respond next time he logged in.

  Fuck.

  Max, Sean, and Cali had once again volunteered to host a private holiday party. Which he felt kind of guilty about, since he was one of the main private party organizers for the Suncoast Society munch group.

  It’d been a while since he and Shayla had hosted one. But like hell would he ask Shay to take one on if he wasn’t even sure he was going to be home for it.

  Right now, it was looking like he wouldn’t even be home to attend the party, much less be around to host one of the damn things.

  He was going to be lucky if he made it home in time for their wedding anniversary.

  Fuck.

r />   He hated Denver, but Asher Insurance was constructing a new campus because they’d outgrown their existing facility. Meaning he had to help oversee this part of the new data center’s equipment installation and configuration. They’d rapidly outgrown the off-site colocation server site he’d been in charge of putting together just a couple of years ago.

  The new campus would be a full secondary facility to the main one down in Florida, complete with an expanded call center three times the capacity and staffing they had now, as well as an on-site data center. As opposed to the small call center and administrative offices they’d had in Denver up until now. That site couldn’t house a full data center, either.

  Hence the colo.

  Which was ironic, because that first colo build-out had happened right when he and Shay were early in their relationship, at the expiration of their initial “contract” for him to train her as his submissive as research for a series of articles she’d been writing.

  The two weeks he’d spent out of town then had nearly fucked them as a couple. All because he’d been too stupid to outright tell her he wanted more with her, and she’d been too scared of admitting to him that she wanted more, too, out of fear he’d think she was “clingy.”

  For this trip, he brought one of his guys, Jim Coughy, out there with him. But, honestly? Now he was truly regretting picking Jim for this job. Tony would have been better off grabbing nearly anyone else with a pulse and training them on the spot.

  Not to mention, he and this dude were going to have a serious meeting with an HR rep when they returned to Florida about his behavior, attitude, and work habits.

  And a drug test, because he suspected the guy was taking full advantage of Colorado’s marijuana laws and buying himself a ton of edibles. That was despite Asher Insurance having a zero-tolerance drug policy.

  Except, right now, Tony needed a warm body with a valid NDA on file in HR’s hot little hands, someone reasonably familiar with their systems. It wasn’t simply a matter of moving equipment into place, bolting frames together, and racking boxes. It was the wiring, the hook-up, the UPS, the datacom end of it—the whole system infrastructure.

  And, once they got the new data center up and running, they had to take the old system down out of the colo and relocate those racks to the new building as well, and get them all back online.

  Yes, he’d have to hire a dedicated IT team for this site, but HR was fucking around and hadn’t posted the job listings yet.

  Which pissed him off.

  They couldn’t seem to get it through their damn heads it wasn’t like hiring a one-off DBA here and there, or hiring in people for a call center. You needed to interview people, check their references, and make sure they weren’t bullshitting you on their skills before turning them loose with confidential customer data a couple of thousand miles away from where you were actually located. Fortunately, until this data center was up and running with a full crew, it would literally be used only as a secondary, like the colo was currently being used. He could monitor it from Florida and call in third-party vendors to come in from the colo facility if there was a hardware issue to address—at a premium price, sure, but the company would have to pay it.

  Because he’d already flat-out told them he wasn’t moving to Denver.

  Been there, done that, wasn’t doing it again. Although that hadn’t been a permanent move, just a short stint supervising the upgrades at a smaller insurance company Asher had bought and which needed serious IT overhauls to bring them into compliance with federal laws.

  Especially not now that he was married to Shay, and they had a life together in Florida.

  Worse, he’d budgeted for a trained and compliance-certified IT vendor to come in with a team and help him do this, which would have cut down the total project time to maybe three weeks, max, including padding in time for fuckups.

  Then some Asher Insurance VP he’d never even heard of higher up in the company, who’d only been there three months at that point, struck it from the project budget and didn’t bother to tell anyone that until after everything was approved and signed off on by legal and accounting.

  And then corporate wouldn’t budge on adding it back into the project budget.

  Tony suspected it was no mere coincidence that the same amount of money the asshole had sliced from his budget had later been paid out to a lobbying “consultant” in DC.

  Fuckers.

  Since he was a salaried employee who didn’t get overtime, he was expected to bend over without lube and take it like a man. Cannibalizing his existing staff from Florida wasn’t an option right now. Two of his staff had transferred over from the data center to the Windows group, he had two vacancies he was already trying to hire for in addition to them, and his existing staff was stretched as thinly as he dared without compromising service.

  They are not paying me enough money for this bullshit.

  Getting this facility up and running…they were averaging sixteen-hour days, it’d been over three weeks since he’d been home, and he missed Shay like crazy.

  Aaannnd he couldn’t even call her right now, because he knew she was covering a county commission meeting for work. Not usually her bailiwick, but it was a zoning issue with a massive environmental impact for a local neighborhood, and the magazine she wrote for was covering it as part of a series on other ecology and environmental stories.

  Fuck.

  Even his boss, Darren, who he usually hated with a passion privately and barely tolerated at work, was just about licking Tony’s taint trying to keep him happy. If Tony up and quit on them right now, they’d be up shit creek without so much as a kayak, much less an oar to paddle it with.

  It wouldn’t help him get a glowing recommendation from Asher when he applied to other companies if he left under those circumstances, but it would damn well give him a modicum of personal satisfaction to fuck them over.

  Except…sadist or not, he was the better person. He was a professional.

  And it wasn’t just him anymore. He had a wife, responsibilities. They had a life together.

  His house was, fortunately, paid off, so that was one pressure off his mind. But he was too damn young to afford to retire and keep that house, either.

  Tony pulled up his ongoing text message with Shay.

  I know you’re working right now and can’t text Me, pet, but I wanted to come outside and text you that I love you and miss you. Thank you for your patience with this. I’ll talk to you later.

  He stood there for another moment, his personal cell in his left hand, hoping she’d reply while he scrolled through e-mail and messages on his work cell in his right hand. He didn’t get service on his personal cell inside the building, but his work cell was tapped into the Wi-Fi already installed.

  After a few minutes, resigned, he tucked his personal cell into his back pocket and his work cell into his shirt pocket and returned to the building.

  Fuck.

  Chapter Two

  Shayla haaaated this. Covering county government was probably one of her least-favorite tasks. She hadn’t been fond of covering the government beat when she’d still been a reporter up in Cleveland for the Plain Dealer, either, but at least she’d had a more familiar foundation of local knowledge to call upon.

  Not to mention, she’d had fellow reporters whose brains she could pick for background info on topics.

  She was flying mostly blind right now, and Florida environmental topics were tricky to cover, anyway. This one in particular. There was a convoluted patchwork of federal, state, county, and even city agencies with their fingers in this particular pie—and that was before a couple of non-profit orgs like the Sierra Club tossed their lawsuits into the mix.

  And complicating matters was the county’s 2050 comp plan, which she was still trying to decipher.

  But this whole series of articles were her babies, and she’d see it through to the end. Being an investigative reporter had been her dream, even if her career had taken a slight dogleg on her when she’d left Ohio and moved to Florida a few years earlier to start working for Sunshine Attitude magazine.

  She wouldn’t complain about the personal benefits.