Tied Up in Knots

by Mary Calmes

  He coughed.

  “Oh, screw you, Ryan,” I snapped. “I refuse to listen to your sister’s band again.”

  “Come on,” he begged.

  “Once in a lifetime is good enough for The Crimson Wave.”

  “They’re not that bad.”

  “Not that bad,” I moaned. “Are you kidding me right now?”

  “And besides, they changed their name. The drummer was worried that they might get sued by the University of Alabama for copyright infringement.”

  “Alabama is the tide, not the wave.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I didn’t wanna argue with him ’cause, yanno, the name was gross.”

  “The name of the band is not the glaring issue,” I said, unable to keep a straight face. “Jesus, Mike, their music is so bad.”

  “So bad!” Dorsey echoed me in the background. “Just say no, Jones. Save yourself!”

  I heard a bump and a crash and Dorsey laughing, so I figured nothing was broken.

  “Listen,” I told him. “If me and Ian get done with this funeral business at a reasonable time, I’ll call ya and see where you guys are.”

  “Good man,” Ryan replied. “I’ll save ya some pie.”

  I grunted and hung up and saw Ian scanning the crowd for me. Lifting my hand to get his attention, I saw his face sort of unclench—his jaw, the tight smile, and the furrowed brows as he started toward me. He hadn’t taken more than three steps when a beautiful woman with gorgeous long thick blonde hair stepped out from a crowd of five other women and into his path.

  He stopped short or he would have plowed into her, and to keep his balance, he had to take hold of her arms. Her hands went immediately to his chest.

  They stood there, staring for a long moment, and then he let her go and she backpedaled at the same exact time. Even from where I was, I could see the awkwardness. She looked at her feet, checking on the black patent T-strap pumps and then up at him, curling her hair around both ears, smiling like she wasn’t sure if she should. He swallowed, took a breath, and shoved his hands down in the pockets of his coat. Together they made a nice picture, him in his masculine military alpha resplendence and her in the ivory turndown collar coat that made her seem delicate and alluringly feminine. They should have been on posters for why opposites attract, as good as they looked together.

  “That would be funny,” Odell said, like whatever it was wouldn’t be at all.

  I turned and looked at Odell and Bates, who had joined me, one on either side.

  “What’s that?” I asked, turning to Bates because I liked him better.

  “Doyle with Danita Stanley,” Odell answered, moving so he was on Bates’s left, facing me now. “He did tell you why he transferred out of our unit, right?”

  I shook my head.

  Bates made a noise.

  “What?” Odell snapped at him.

  He shrugged. “Maybe Doyle doesn’t want his new partner knowing all that shit. I mean, no offense, Jones, but, I mean, are you guys even close when you’re not working?”

  “We’re close,” I said, holding my breath.

  “See,” Odell said with a cackle, thumping Bates in the chest. “They’re tight, so Doyle wouldn’t mind us telling Jones here that the reason he left our unit was because he fucked the wife of one of the guys who was supposed to be his brother.”

  I stayed quiet because, from the menacing look on his face, I could tell there was more.

  “And so in return, we accidentally left him behind after a raid went south.”

  Not at all what I was expecting.

  “Oh shit, Jones, look at your face!” Odell crowed. “Were you under the impression that Ian Doyle wasn’t a total fuckin’ piece of shit?”

  Bates winced and put his hand on my shoulder. “We only meant to leave him for a couple hours, just to scare him, yanno?”

  The urge to smash my fist into his face and then turn my rage on Odell was almost overwhelming. It was like I was drowning. I could barely breathe around my desire to hurt him, to hear him cry out.

  “But things changed so fast, and before we knew it, his position was compromised and he was taken into custody,” Bates continued.

  It sounded so benign when he said it, not at all like the life-and-death struggle I was sure it had been.

  “Thing was, even before we had to go back, Laird begged us to. He was the only one who refused to get on the bird when we left him. We had to pick him up and carry him.”

  And that was why Ian and I were here paying our respects to Edward Laird.

  Bates rambled on. “It was stupid, but—you get it, Jones. I mean, it’s the same thing with cops or marshals like you, it don’t matter. The guys you serve with—they’re your brothers. You don’t fuck your brother’s wife, no matter what.”

  No matter what.

  “And it’s not like we planned for things to get as bad as they did. Part of this was just dumb luck,” Bates said, his voice rising. I guessed me not responding was starting to freak him out just a little. “We never planned for him to be there that long.”

  Everything was too tight: my clothes, my coat, but mostly my skin. I needed to peel everything away, flesh, muscle, bone, and unleash the furious hatred I could feel burning me up from the inside out, starting with the hole it was eating through the wall of my stomach.

  “We got him back,” Bates choked out, sounding more like he was pleading with me than telling me. “Obviously.”

  “How—” My voice splintered, hoarse with pain. “—long did you leave him?”

  “We didn’t leave him. He got stuck. We left his ass for a couple hours, tops. He’s the one who got captured,” Odell answered snidely, the dare all over his smug, angry face. He hated Ian; I could almost smell it on him, like tainted meat rotting from the inside out. “And they had him for three days in all.”

  My eyes met his and held.

  “But don’t you go spreadin’ that around now, Jones, ’cause no one knows about that but us. That didn’t go in no report.”

  Plus it was a long time ago.

  Slowly, calmly, I drew cold, wet air into my lungs and then exhaled. “You guys should go on ahead to the house. Ian and I will catch up to you.”

  “Aww, now, don’t be like that,” Odell cajoled, his words thick with rancid honey he was trying to spread around. “Don’t get mad on his behalf. That’s water under the bridge, that is.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself?”

  “Don’t say something you’ll regret there, Jones.”

  I shrugged. “I’m just wondering why you really left him.”

  “I just told you why.”

  “Nah,” I taunted, grinning like I did when I was being a dick. “I’m not buying that your buddy was the only guy whose wife was fuckin’ Ian.”

  He flushed red. Just whoosh, scarlet. It was awesome. “You son of a—”

  “I heard you talk about your wife.” I put the leer in my voice easily, suggestively. “Greta, was it?”

  “You better shut your filthy fuckin’ mouth!” he roared, pointing at me.

  “Miro?” I heard Ian call out behind me.

  “Did he fuck all the wives, or just yours and the other poor sonofabitch?”

  He shuddered with rage, and I saw his eyes go dead just as I imagined a shark’s did before they took a big, fat bite out of a seal.

  “You don’t have any kids, do you? Around five years old?”

  Apparently he did, the way he came at me.

  The thing was, if I hit him, I could be suspended, or worse. If I didn’t, how could I ever look Ian in the face again, knowing what I knew now?

  There was only one viable alternative. I had to get Odell so enraged that he came at me like a charging bull. He had to throw the first punch. But how in the world did one bait a trained soldier? What did one say to get a man with nerves of steel to crack?

  It was a crappy thing to do to the guy, but abandoning Ian to certain torture and possible execution was higher on the sca
le of fucked-up shit. So when he threw the roundhouse punch and missed, I countered with an elbow in Pete Odell’s conceited, self-righteous prick face. After that the only smug asshole brawling at the funeral was me.

  Chapter 7

  YOU CAN tell when you break someone’s nose. There’s really never a question. The wet crunch, like a soggier version of stepping on freeze-hardened ice over snow, is unmistakable. And of course the gush of blood and that high-pitched animal wail most people who weren’t boxers or hit men let out. In the movies everyone takes it like a man, even the women, but in real life, knees buckle and down they go.

  Odell was impressive. He took a knee, but that was as low to the ground as he got.

  Bates shoved me back, and I understood. He and Odell were buddies, brothers-in-arms, so he’d do his best to get me off him.

  “Leave him alone,” Odell ordered, rising from his kneel, facing me. “I’ve got this.”

  I pivoted when he swung again, so he caught my shoulder instead of my face just as Cochran had the day before. I would have to e-mail my combat instructor from the police academy; her moves were serving me well in the field. Sergeant Garza loved throwing all of us candidates around. She said it was her sworn duty.

  “I’m gonna have your ass for this, Jones,” Odell vowed as he spit out a mouthful of blood. “You can kiss your career good-bye.”

  “I’m just defending myself, dickhead,” I taunted. “You can’t touch me.”

  His eyes narrowed and I took another step back as he came at me fast with moves that might have incapacitated me, or even really hurt me, if any of them connected. When he stopped, and I saw him weave a little, I finally understood why I wasn’t dead already—he was a Ranger after all—and why he’d been letting his buddy handle the driving all day when he had so much to say about how it was being handled.

  “He’s fuckin’ hammered,” I announced to Bates.

  All things converged at that moment.

  Odell stopped midcharge, blood running from both nostrils as he stared dumbly at me, seemingly unsure of what was going on.

  “The fuck, M?” Ian must have run because he was there at my side.

  “Your partner’s a dead man, Doyle!”

  “Are you all right?” he asked hurriedly, ignoring the blustering Odell, checking me over, hands on my arms, shoulders, lifting my chin, finally stilling gently, reverently, on both sides of my neck as he stared into my eyes. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Did I hurt him?” Odell was indignant and fuming from the few feet away Bates had dragged him. “Fuck you, Doyle!”

  “Don’t you fuckin’ touch him!” Ian rounded on him, and I had to scramble to grab ahold of him before he lunged at Odell.

  “He called my wife a whore!”

  A surge of bodies enveloped us, men coming from everywhere, and we were surrounded. Ian and I were pushed back, buffered by the crowd. Odell and Bates were mobbed and lost from view. I let Ian go so I could walk beside him and texted Ryan, who was waiting to hear from me.

  No lights.

  It would make no sense to anyone who wasn’t on our team. “No lights” was one of our boss’s things, a Kage-ism that meant danger wasn’t imminent, but hurry the fuck up and find me and get to wherever the hell I was.

  “The hell were you thinking?” Ian demanded, refocusing my attention on him and off my phone as he wrenched me around to face him.

  I couldn’t speak; I hurt for him too much. Instead I walked backward a few feet and then turned fast, needing to put distance between us and the others, knowing he’d follow without me having to tell him.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  Seeing what I was looking for, I slipped behind what looked like a family crypt. Ian was seconds behind me, shoving me back against the marble, pinning me there.

  “And why in the world would you go after Odell?” he yelled.

  The look on my face must have answered his question, which was good since I still couldn’t speak around the enormous, jagged lump in my throat.

  He sucked in a breath and I saw his face register what I now knew. “Fuck,” he groaned, shaking his head, angry and hurt at the same time. “I didn’t want—goddamnit.”

  I concentrated on keeping my voice level. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “No,” he murmured, hands fisted on the lapels of my overcoat.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t—I don’t—” He stopped, inhaled sharply, looked at my chin a second, and then lifted his gaze and locked it with mine. “I can’t ever have you thinking I’m weak.”

  It took a second for his words to register because they were so alien. “What?” That made zero sense. “You’re the strongest person I know!” I shouted. How could he think something so ridiculous at all, let alone think it about me? “Jesus, Ian, don’t you know me at all?” I gasped and I could hear my heart breaking in my words.

  “Yes, I know you!”

  “Then what the hell?”

  He let go of me but didn’t move. “Yeah, but already you’re thinking I did something wrong and—”

  “Who am I to criticize you for who you slept with before we got together?”

  “I wasn’t a good guy.”

  “I was a slut, and you’ve never once been judgmental about that.”

  “I hate it,” he confessed. “And when we run into guys you’ve been with… I don’t like it.”

  “But you don’t think bad of me.”

  “No.”

  “So how could I do that to you?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re a very good man, Ian Doyle.”

  I watched the emotions chase across his features: fear, relief, anger, hurt, happiness, all of them tightening his jaw, creasing his brows, and making him swallow hard and breathe deeply through his nose.

  “This isn’t just about you and a married woman.”

  “No,” he agreed, moving away from me, pacing, stopping a few feet away.

  “Contrary to popular belief, I am not a mind reader.”

  He scoffed. “Please, no one ever accused you of being a—”

  “Ian!” I barked.

  “Fine! I don’t want you to feel sorry for me about what happened in the desert!”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “But if you think I’m weak or—”

  “We covered that already,” I said, closing the distance between us, moving into his space, taking hold of his elbow so he couldn’t move away and bringing us flush together so we were breathing the same air. “I know you’re strong.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Just tell me.”

  He made a noise, not quite a cough, but enough. “There’s this way you look at me, and it’s only for me and I can’t—if you stopped feeling that way and then looked at me different because of it”—his voice cracked—“I couldn’t… I’m afraid you’re gonna stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Loving me.”

  Ah.

  The truth. Finally. It was always good when it came out.

  “Yeah, no,” I said, sighing and smiling, rubbing my clean-shaven cheek over his stubbly one, the sound as well as the sensation sexy and soothing. “Never happen.”

  He trembled against me.

  “We fight, we make up, but I know you’re never gonna say when. You’re never gonna say stop and go away. We both say shit like it could, but it can’t.”

  “No, it really can’t,” he assented, wrapping his arms around my neck and hugging me tight. “I was afraid it would change things if you knew.”

  “It doesn’t,” I vowed. “But I need to hear it all.”

  He let me go slowly, and when there was space between us, I saw a glint in the depths of his eyes, the blue at the center of the flame. “It could never make you less, idiot. How could you even think that?”

  “I think stupid shit sometimes.”

  “Yes.”

  “They left me, and I didn’t want you to know ’cause I th
ought you’d care about the why.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we really should stop that.” I sighed, so tired, zapped of my strength because it took so much just to get Ian to hear me sometimes. It was worth it, always, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t hard.

  “Stop what?” he asked, trace of alarm in his tone.

  “Stop saying that either one of us could go. It’s like when people bring up divorce all the time when they’re married. One of those times it’ll stick.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I mean, it’s stupid, right? I can’t imagine me without you.”

  His grin was warm. “Me neither.”

  “So then—”

  “That’s why I was so pissed last night.”

  “We were both mad.”

  He shook his head, closing on me again. “No, I mean when I came downstairs and the lawyer was there talkin’ to you, putting his hands on you and pettin’ Chick.”

  This was a surprise.

  “What?” He was surly.

  “You were not jealous of Barrett.”

  “The hell I wasn’t!” he flared.

  “Are you serious? You’re being serious right now?” I didn’t believe him; there was no way Ian Doyle was jealous of any man, but it was something I could fix, instantly and without question. The normalcy of that made me smile. And that was how it was with Ian and me. Big reveals followed by whatever the thing was simply being absorbed and becoming part of our shared history. It was one of my favorite parts about us, and how I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he was the one for me.

  “I am,” he growled, and I saw the uncertainty, pain and self-recrimination was gone from those gorgeous blue eyes, replaced by a healthy amount of irritation.

  “What the hell would you be jealous for?”

  “Oh, I dunno, a rich, handsome lawyer who’s crazy about you moves in next door, likes Chick, and has already met your friends without me…. I think jealous about sums it up.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “If the roles were reversed, you wouldn’t be worried?”

  I thought about it a second. “No.”

  “Why the hell not?” He was indignant now, and it took a lot of concentration not to smile at how adorable that was.