“Yeah,” she waved her hand at it. “I like cold food better anyways. I’m gonna go fiddle around on the piano for a minute. Leave the dishes for me. I’ll do them in a bit.”
And then she was gone and Marcus stared after her. He’d wanted her to light up like that since he’d seen her in the basement. But now that she had, he was worried that he could never un-see it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Iris woke up the next morning with considerable more spring in her step than she would have thought she’d have. She’d fooled around on the piano for a few hours last night and had nailed down the top melodies of the two songs that had been banging down the door inside her head since she met Marcus.
Being able to release them had been a tremendous relief. In some ways, she felt like she was a champagne bottle that had finally been uncorked. All the tension had been boiling and growing within her, fueled by the broody, intense presence of Agent Marinos. Iris had never been happier to hear that there was a musical instrument in close proximity.
She woke up with the sunrise but spent an hour in her room trying to get some lyrics down. She always liked working right when she woke up in the morning, before the world had a chance to get in the way. It was a surprisingly fruitful writing session. Both of the songs that had been hounding her had pretty much flowed right out of her. She didn’t understand some of the lyrics that she’d written, they didn’t quite make sense yet, but they matched the melodies well and she considered it a healthy start.
When the need for coffee was starting to fog her senses, Iris showered quickly, brushed and dressed in more borrowed clothes to find her way downstairs.
The sun through the windows was warm, bordering on hot, so she donned shorts and a roomy long-sleeved t-shirt. She had to belt the shorts tight around her waist to keep them up, but she thought the overall effect was pleasing. In her normal life, she didn’t often wear things that showed her legs. She considered them to be her best feature by far and she got way too many stares and comments on them when she wore anything that revealed them. But she was basically alone out here on this little island, so what was the risk? The cool air felt delightful on her bare legs as she made her way down the stairs and into the kitchen.
Iris made her way to the coffeemaker and noted that it was already full of steaming coffee.
“Beau dropped off some groceries,” a deep voice spoke from behind her and Iris whirled, gasping. Her fingers knotted in the fabric of her shirt in complete surprise. Agent Marinos merely raised an eyebrow at her reaction and continued on, “So if you take milk in your coffee there’s some in the fridge.”
Iris nodded and willed her blood to resume its normal pace through her veins. And immediately, she noted that she’d miscalculated with her shorts. The agent’s eyes dropped from her face to her bare legs. He took them in in one beat before turning away from her and back to the pile of papers that sat on the table in front of him, his cup of coffee steaming away.
Iris frowned as she poured herself a cup of coffee and found the half and half in the fridge. It wasn’t that she wanted him to ogle her, that kind of thing always made her dreadfully uncomfortable. But he’d looked at her bare legs with something like disdain and disapproval. Was she dressed inappropriately? She hadn’t thought there was a dress code for this kind of thing. Sipping her coffee, she turned and took a covert peek at his attire.
His legs, bronzed and toned, were angled under his chair and covered with dark hair. He wore shorts and a t-shirt. Iris wondered briefly if his chest was covered in that same smattering of dark hair but she mentally slapped herself. That was no way of thinking about the federal agent who was charged with protecting her life right now. Besides. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt just like she was. So she had no reason to be self conscious about her attire.
Without another word, Iris slipped out of the kitchen and toward the back living room with the piano. She was grateful that it was several rooms away from the agent. He looked like he was consumed by the file in front of him and she didn’t want to distract him as she noodled around on the piano.
Iris slid the sliding doors closed behind her and sat gratefully down at the piano. She’d left her lyrics upstairs but that was okay. She preferred to work on the sound of a song separate from the words for a while before she combined them.
Her hands melted over the keys as she reclaimed the top melody of the song that she’d nailed last night. That part was working well. It was bright and flirty and brought to mind a first date on a summer night. Pure pop. She loved it. But she stumbled as she tried to find the bottom harmonies. She had the gravy and now she needed to find the meat and potatoes. The structure that would hold the song up. She tried and tried again, but it just wasn’t right.
As she usually did when she ran into a road block like this, Iris thought back to the original feeling that had inspired the song within her in the first place. The agent’s smile. The first time she’d seen it. That flash of white against his coppery skin. Unexpected and burning brightly. The song had nearly rocketed out of her right then and there.
The skittish part of her hesitated to really dwell on that moment, that image. It was inappropriate and complicated and, she was sure of it, pathetic. She was sure that he viewed her as the inept little waif who couldn’t take care of herself. She thought back to the way he’d had to feed her that orange. God, she’d been completely helpless. And now she was shivering over the memory of his smile. Yeah. It was too pathetic.
But there was another part of her. A part that she’d kept secret for so long, definitely from her mother and even from her twin, that didn’t think it was pathetic to swoon over the agent’s smile. It was the part of her that read romance novels and watched shirtless men walk past on the beach. It was the part of her that threw out lyrics that weren’t exactly right and always brought her songs up one more notch to perfect. There was a strong, virile part of her that asked for what she wanted. And this was the part of her that let her brain call up that image. His teeth, his perfect lips pulled back. And it was that brave, obstinate part of her that thought back to the agent’s eyes. Marcus’s eyes. Black and menacing and alluring. Eyes that immediately challenged her and sucked her in at the same time. Eyes that had made her feel like a magnetic charge was raising the hairs on her arms.
And just like that, the bottom notes of the song revealed themselves. Sticky and powerful and magnetic. The notes were assertive and brutal and when she threaded the original, light melody back through the new part, the effect was intoxicating. Even without the lyrics, the song screamed of all the facets of a new crush. The bubbling drunk butterflies, the sweaty insecurity, and, she realized with a jolt, the lust of it. It was a feeling she hadn’t known she was capable of having. But here it was, plain as day in the song she was writing.
The coffee pot appeared over her shoulder and Iris sprang to her feet, the song cutting off abruptly as Marcus refilled her now empty cup.
He raised an eyebrow at her as he landed a rough, hot palm on her shoulder and firmly sat her back down on the piano bench. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
His voice rumbled through her as he finished leaning over her.
Iris cleared her throat and commanded her heart to slow the hell down, to no avail. “Sorry I’m so jumpy.”
“Well, you were abducted and locked in a basement just two days ago. I think you’re entitled to some butterflies.”
Iris winced at his choice of words, but not for the reasons he thought. Marcus cursed himself when her body folded inwards. He was a dumbass, casually reminding her of the incredibly traumatic ordeal she’d just undergone. He didn’t know that she was wincing at his use of the word butterflies. He didn’t know that she’d just been musing on them, in an entirely different context. One that had involved the color of his teeth, the wattage of his smile, the gravity of his eyes.
Iris reached out for her newly filled coffee, but he stilled her hands as he splashed in a little of the half and half he’d brought
with him.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Silence crept over them and Marcus knew he should be leaving now. But instead, he found himself sitting on the piano bench next to her, facing the opposite direction. Their shoulders brushed just briefly before she straightened and set her coffee back down, rested her hands on the keys of the piano.
“So,” he found himself saying, “you’re a musician.”
Iris bobbed her head from side to side and Marcus caught a whiff of the shampoo she’d used that morning. He realized it was his shampoo. The kind that he left for himself in the bathroom that adjoined the room she was staying in. His room.
He shifted himself on the piano bench. She shifted too.
“Sort of,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I’m a songwriter. For my brother.”
“Your brother’s a musician?”
Iris cocked her head to one side and squinted her eyes a little, as if she were trying to figure out whether or not he was lying. “You don’t know who my brother is?”
“I just read in your file that his name is Owen Stanton. And that he’s your twin.”
“Yeah,” Iris nodded. “But his stage name is O Wolfgang.”
“No shit?” Marcus chuckled a little. “I didn’t realize. Damn, you can’t turn on the radio without hearing one of his songs.”
Iris grinned, quick and gone. She gave him a long sip of the blue in her eyes. “One of my songs,” she corrected.
“No shit,” Marcus repeated, going back through his mind, trying to call up one of the many O Wolfgang songs he’d heard over the last few years. He hummed a few bars of the one he’d liked the best. It was a song about a third date, about what happens at the end of the night. The beat was sultry and expectant, telling the listener everything the lyrics flirted around.
Iris hummed along with him, immediately catching the melody on the piano, making it come to life.
Marcus laughed again when she trilled her fingers on the last notes. “You really wrote that song?”
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded. “I write all my brother’s music.”
“I like that song,” he said, and then added without thinking, “It’s sexy as hell.”
Iris’s face flamed up like the sky on the fourth of July as she turned quickly back toward the piano keys. “Well, uh, good. That’s what I was going for with that one.”
Marcus cast around for something else to say. “So, is it just piano for you? Or do you play other instruments too?”
Iris turned back to him, her fingers noodling on the keys absently. “I love the piano. But yeah, I can play most instruments.”
“Most?” he asked incredulously.
She shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah, it’s just something that comes naturally to me.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Oh.” She leaned back, crossing her arms over her chest and squinting. The movement brushed their shoulders against one another again. “I’d have to say mandolin. Or the harp. I’m not as good at the harp as I am at other instruments and I like that. It kind of plays hard to get with me.”
She grinned at him and he found himself grinning back. Their faces weren’t more than ten inches apart and Marcus found himself standing up out of self-preservation. He was beginning to suspect he was making this harder on himself than it had to be.
“I’ll leave you to it.”
He could feel Iris’s eyes on his back as he strode across the room with the empty coffee pot. He knew he was being abrupt. So he turned back before he slid the door closed again. “I like the new song you’ve been working on. It reminds me of something. But I can’t tell quite what.”
He left Iris staring after him, frowning as she tried to figure out exactly what the hell that meant.
CHAPTER FIVE
They kept out of one another’s way. For the most part. It didn’t take them long at all to fall into a rhythm. A week went by with the two of them seeing one another over the coffee pot in the morning and at dinner at night. But in the hours between, they kept to themselves. Iris, for the most part, stayed in the room with the piano, working on songs. She figured she’d have an entirely new album ready for Owen by the time this whole thing was done.
Occasionally she read a few chapters of some book or another, or she just took time to stare out over the water. At some point every day, she could hear the clink of weights down in the workout room, or the rhythmic footsteps of Marcus on the treadmill.
But he went to bed after her and woke up before her. And in-between it was almost like he was a work machine. He poured over the thick files of information that had come along in the black backpack. And he worked tirelessly on a laptop that Iris supposed was protected and encrypted in one way or another. Every once in a while she heard him speaking, low, on his cell phone. But he never spoke about the case to Iris and most of her just didn’t want to ask.
But as the days piled up, there was one part of all of this that was really starting to bother her.
It was that tension that had her fretting in the doorway of the dining room while he sat with his head bent over some papers. She stared at the back of his head, at his perfectly trimmed hair.
Without warning, he swiveled in the chair to face her, pinning her with his eyes. Iris jumped in place, but forced herself to stay calm.
“Yes?”
She thought there might be a touch of humor in his tone, but she couldn’t be sure. He didn’t seem irritated with her, though, and that was a relief.
“I don’t mean to bother you.”
“You just meant to stare at the back of my head for ten minutes while you linger in the doorway?”
“Sorry.” Her cheeks flamed as she stared down at the fingers she twisted up in front of her. She wore an oversized white sweater that came down to the bottom hem of the navy shorts she wore. His words embarrassed her until a thought occurred. “But that’s not that different from what you do in the morning when I’m playing.”
She was right. He’d taken to drinking his second cup of coffee in the doorway of the music room, as he’d come to think of it, watching her work through song after song. Each one was more incredible than the last and they really did remind him of something, he just couldn’t figure out what. Regardless, it was very clear that she was tremendously talented and he enjoyed the opportunity to see her in action every day.
“Fair enough. But when I watch you play, I’m not busily working up the courage to interrupt you.”
She blushed, hard, and he almost cursed himself for embarrassing her. But then he realized that he liked the petal pink color of her cheeks way too much to regret anything.
“Well,” she swallowed and stepped into the room, the sunlight falling across her face. Her black eye had gone yellow around the edges and the worst part was more lavender than the deep wine color it had been in the days after she’d been hit. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
His eyes on hers and his arms crossed over his chest, Marcus set his foot on the chair next to him and slowly slid it outwards. “Sure.”
Iris softly sat herself down on the chair and pressed her fingers underneath her thighs. Marcus did his best to ignore everything from the waist down. Seeing her in shorts was not good for his blood pressure. And she’d taken to wearing them every day. He wasn’t sure he could handle watching her hands touch her legs, so he anchored his eyes to her face. That, he found, wasn’t much better. She’d piled all that blond hair up on top of her head in a messy bun and the effect was that she looked like she was wearing a crown of some sort. She looked like a little golden queen, all fragile and somehow regal.
“Is my brother alright?” Her voice was small but steady, in a way he hadn’t yet heard it. Marcus suddenly got the distinct impression that as fragile as she seemed, she’d still spent a lifetime protecting her brother.
Eyeing her, weighing the level of honesty he was about to use, he decided she could take it. “We have barely any intelligen
ce on him. My handler thinks he’s in Mexico right now. He disappeared about three weeks ago. After repeated interactions with the Kutros family. But we have no reason to think that he’s—”
“I know he’s alive,” she said, surprisingly cavalierly. She waved one hand through the air.
“How?”
“I can feel it,” she said, patting the space between her breasts gently. “Whether or not you choose to believe the twin thing, it’s real for me and Owen. I know he’s alive.”
Marcus continued to eye her for a second, nodded.
“What does the Kutros family do, exactly?” she asked like she didn’t want to know the answer.
“They’re gun runners for the most part. Occasionally they’ll smuggle some drugs if the haul is worth enough.” He paused. “As far as I can tell, your brother got mixed in with them because he borrowed money from the wrong people and talked his way into some mercy. Then suddenly he was all tangled up and over his head.”
“Owen,” she groaned into her hands. What the hell was wrong with him? She refused to acknowledge the guilt that gnawed at her. She’d long ago stopped loaning him money. It only fed his bad decisions. Apparently he’d found another way to get his hands on the dough he so desperately was always in need of.
“Isn’t he a millionaire? From all the number one hits?” Marcus asked.
Iris chuckled humorlessly. “He might be, if he knew how to hold on to even a penny of it. He’s an act-first-think-later type of guy. With very expensive taste.”
Marcus cocked his head to one side. “And you?”
“Well,” Iris knotted her hands together. “As just the songwriter, I don’t make nearly what Owen makes. But no, I don’t really spend it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Marcus shrugged. His eyes dropped to her foot as it tapped up and down on the ground. And then up to her lips that were currently being worried between her teeth. And then to her hands that twisted up in her lap. It suddenly occurred to him that though he’d been running 7-10 miles on the treadmill each day, she sure hadn’t. And neither of them had left the house in a week. She must be damn near coming out of her skin with energy.
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