Hayley started singing “Happy Birthday,” and by the time they all sang “Happy birthday, dear Daaadeeeee,” Max was offering a small smile despite not joining in. Jack leaned over the side of the bed.

Riley grinned. What else could he do? Years before, birthdays meant partying until all hours, random fucks, drinking, and spending money like it was water. Now he had his children, his husband, and his puppy….

Wait.

What the hell? Jack leaned over with a squirming black Labrador in his large hands, its tail wagging so hard, it nearly wriggled from Jack’s hold.

“He’s only just peed,” Jack informed Riley, but Riley wasn’t listening. He held out a hand, and the puppy bounced from Jack to him. A little piece of Riley melted. “So you’ll be okay,” Jack added.

“Oh my….” Riley didn’t finish the sentence. “Is this my birthday present?”

Lexie scrambled to pat the puppy, Connor sat back and watched, and Max pointed directly at it.

“Toby,” he announced loudly. “Toby the dog.”

Riley went nose to nose with the wriggling, happy puppy. “Hey, Toby.”

Toby licked his nose with tiny puppy licks, then nipped the end of it with his sharp little teeth.

“Ow,” Riley cried, and everyone laughed.

Hayley slid off the bed. “I need to check my levels. Don’t let Toby do anything cute while I’m not here.”

That was going to be difficult. Toby was damn cute lying there on his back with his belly exposed and four tiny paws waving in the air. Riley was kind of speechless. He’d never had a dog as a kid, and he’d always wanted one. Steve had dogs—two boisterous retrievers—and Riley had loved visiting.

Now they had their own puppy.

Add in planning a wedding celebration, and this was the perfect birthday.

That was until everything was quiet. The puppy was asleep in a small bed in the corner of the kitchen. Connor and Lexie were playing within the fenced porch area, Hayley was studying, and Max had decided puppies were smelly and disappeared to the sensory room. Which left Riley and Jack with coffee on the porch.

Riley relaxed, answered some texts from family and friends, then, with his feet up on the railings, he lay back.

“I don’t believe this,” Jack muttered from next to him. He had an article open on Riley’s iPad.

“You break it again?” Riley teased.

Jack had this habit of touching buttons all over the show to try to get back to what he’d been reading. Riley found it amusing that someone as clever as Jack could be so clumsy with his large hands on the screen. He never failed to tease Jack about it, especially last week when he’d caught Jack asking Hayley for help

“No….” Jack sounded distracted.

“What’s wrong?”

Jack huffed and passed the iPad to Riley. “Look at that shit.”

Riley turned the iPad and saw the title: “Texas county clerk refuses gay marriage licenses.”

“Again? I thought that had all died down now. It’s been four weeks.”

“Read it all.”

Riley skimmed, then silently handed the iPad back. Sometimes he was ashamed of his fellow man, in particular the idiots in Texas who were calling for secession because it was now legal for a man to marry a man, or indeed a woman to marry a woman. Riley had read some shit in the last month, from saying the vote undermined traditional marriage, which was an old argument, to how bestiality would be legal next, which was a new one to Riley, although Jack said he’d heard it before.

“They can posture all they want,” Riley said. “But nothing can change the vote.”

“What if we went to get a license and it happened to us? How would we feel?”

A lightbulb went on in Riley’s head. Jack had seemed incredibly invested in everything that was happening out there, to other couples like them. Riley felt selfish that he was sitting pretty on the ranch, already married, and with the satisfaction that Texas now had to acknowledge his and Jack’s status as a married couple. “Do you wish we had to get a license?”

Jack settled back in his chair. “Sometimes. I’d like to walk into one of those places and ask for a license and have them tell me no, so that I can file a complaint and raise awareness and actually feel like I’m doing something.” He snorted at what he’d said. “Yes, I get that is a bunch of crap.”

Riley dropped his feet to the floor and turned in his chair to face Jack. “We are Mr. and Mr. Campbell-Hayes. You want to make a statement about how we feel, then there are other ways we can do that.”

“Like?”

“Get Sean to do an article? Interview us? Make this wedding celebration a statement, not only for ourselves, but for every doubter out there.”

Jack raised a single eyebrow. “Really?”

“Why not?” Riley asked with a wave of his hand. “You want solidarity, you want to underline what has happened? Then let’s make this day something we can share with the entire state of Texas. Hell, the world.”

“I don’t want journalists at our wedding celebration,” Jack interjected.

Riley agreed with that sentiment. He’d been at the sharp end of journalistic fantasy for many years, him and the Hayes family en masse.

“This is different, though.” Riley held out a hand, which Jack took instantly. “We should contact Sean. He’d be our first port of call anyway, and he’d know some journalists he trusts.”

“And you’re sure.”

“More than.”

Riley did have a few doubts, but he wasn’t going to discuss them at length with Jack, not yet. This could be the worst decision they ever made, or the best. Whatever it turned out to be, it would be a goddamn statement that people would remember.

“Did Eden call you about the bridesmaids?”

“She did.” Riley counted out the names on his fingers. “Hayley, Leah, Sarah, Emily, and Annabelle. Oh, and Lexie of course. That’s six. Right?”

Jack let out a whistle of relief. “That’s what I said.”

Riley laughed. “She’s double-checking our figures. Did she also ask you if you were okay with blue as a theme?”

Jack nodded. “And about the tables.”

“The tables. Yep, I got that one too,” Riley confirmed.

“The question about round or square?”

“Yep. I said round.”

Jack looked horrified. “Fuck, I said square.”

They looked at each other, then burst out laughing.

All the serious issues were there, but they could still laugh. This celebration was going to be wonderful. Music, dancing, laughter, and family, Texas barbecue, both round and square tables. A proper Texas wedding.

Vaughn wiped his hands on the dish towel. “I don’t get why we were the ones who had to hold the new puppy. I swear it peed everywhere.”

Jack had come over to collected it a while back to take to Riley. There was still puppy pee in the weirdest of places.

Darren handed up the half-used pack of wipes. “Because Robbie and Eli’s place isn’t puppy-proof.” He’d said the same thing more than once, and each time his smile grew bigger.

“This isn’t funny, asshole,” Vaughn snapped.

Darren kissed him. “It is a bit.”

Vaughn scanned their rooms, part of the new staff accommodation that Vaughn had a hand in building. Three rooms, a kitchen-lounge area, a large bedroom, and an enormous bathroom with an extra-large shower area. All rooms built for them. So sue him if he had this thing for sex in the shower. Some people hated it. He loved it, and fortunately so did Darren.

Robbie and Eli, on the other hand, had this sprawling old property full of nooks and crannies, while he and Darren had very few places a puppy could hide.

Of course the tiny bundle of cute had found those few places, but Vaughn had the measure of the little thing, and he found ways to block it from getting too far under the bed.

Vaughn held up his running shoes. “Jack owes me a new pair.”

Darren couldn’t help himself. He snorted a laugh at the sight of the two chewed shoes, and while he was laughing, Vaughn huffed and collected all the trash to put outside. He included the shoes, which also had a poop deposit inside one. Finally coming back in, Vaughn found a contrite Darren waiting for him. This whole puppy-sitting exercise had been Darren’s idea; or rather, he didn’t say no when Jack asked. They’d had said puppy for a whole day. Well, eighteen hours—which was near as dammit an entire day. The tiny terror had ruled their lives and hadn’t stopped trying to make Vaughn into some type of puppy bed.