Tied Up in Knots

by Mary Calmes

  “Because if you hadn’t made Nor pay for what he did to you, he would’ve been home, and my kids would have no father and me no husband.”

  I nodded because there was no doubt in my mind. Hartley had stopped first for Cochran, to end things with him.

  “We’re moving to Boston when he gets back. I didn’t give him no choice.”

  It wouldn’t matter. If Hartley wanted Cochran, he’d get him eventually. But I would put money on the fact that with Hartley changing his mind about killing me, his desire to gut Cochran might also have fallen by the wayside.

  “So, uhm, can I….” She lifted her arms in question.

  “Yeah, come on, let’s go.”

  She dived onto the bed and hugged the hell out of me.

  “Oh, he looks like a good hugger,” Olivia commented and she was next—after passing the carrot cake back to Margo—which was how Becker found us a few minutes later.

  “I’m not even gonna ask,” he sighed, and then pointed at the baking dish Margo was back in possession of. “Is that carrot?”

  She beamed up at him. “It is.”

  “Carrot’s my favorite.”

  “Well, let me cut you a piece.” She sighed, turning for the stairs. “Come with me.”

  “I think another woman tempted your husband away with food,” I informed Olivia as I watched them go.

  “They all do try, but I have a secret weapon.”

  “Which is?”

  She arched a sinful eyebrow for me.

  “No, no, no, don’t tell me.”

  Her cackle was just the right amount of evil and fun.

  Ian led his father and stepmother up the stairs to the loft sometime around six. She took a seat in the chair and Colin stood next to his son. It was awkward, but they talked about Chickie and what a good dog he was, and then about Lorcan and when his trial was and how much they’d love it if Ian and I could come for a Sunday dinner sometime soon. Ian promised that we would, without committing to a specific date, and then led them back downstairs so they could eat. He was back a few minutes later.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes, baby, I’m good,” he promised, bending down to kiss me before disappearing again.

  Cabot, Drake, and Josue had been there for hours, apparently, helping Aruna—Cabot was her favorite—serving food, washing dishes, and in Josue’s case, reading tarot cards in the laundry room, where he was laying the cards out on top of the dryer. They were finally allowed upstairs to see me, and of course all three of them flopped down on the bed, never mind the chair sitting right there.

  Josue put his hand on my head. “You don’t have a fever. Do you feel all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I yawned. “I’m just wiped out.”

  He nodded. “Well, you never sleep, and you don’t take care of yourself at all. I could move in here and do that for you.”

  “That’s me,” Ian said as he came up the stairs with an enormous plate of food for me and a huge glass of apple juice. “I take care of him.”

  “But you’re never home,” Cabot said, looking sheepish. “I mean, shouldn’t we start taking care of Miro since—”

  “I’ll be home all the time now. I’m done with the Army, so you’ll see a lot more of me.”

  He was baffled, I could tell from his squint, when they all clapped, even Josue.

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” Drake sighed. “I mean, if I missed you a little, I can only imagine how tore up Miro was.”

  Ian nodded and sent them all downstairs. Josue stopped at the top and looked back at me.

  “What?”

  He bit his bottom lip. “I met a guy at the record store in Oak Park, where I’ll be working. His name’s Marcello McKenna. Isn’t that awesome?”

  “It is. You think he might be special?”

  “Miro, he was looking at me all weird, and he finally said that he’d dreamed about me coming into the store.”

  “And?”

  “He blurted out that he didn’t believe in any woo-woo stuff.”

  “But?”

  “But he dreamed about me.”

  I nodded. “Maybe just be his friend before you hit him with the whole you-saw-him-in-your-cards thing, huh?”

  He nodded, bolted back to me, bent and kissed my cheek, and then pounded down the stairs, announcing to Aruna that he was ready to read her cards.

  When I turned to Ian, he was chuckling.

  “What?”

  “You have the strangest effect on people.”

  His on me was sort of self-explanatory. “Would you please put the plate down, take off all your clothes, and let me have you under the covers?”

  “Oh, baby, it’s gonna be days before you see me naked again. White brought his Xbox over with him, and Sharpe is doing laundry. It’s gonna be an endless loop of guys through here until Sunday night.”

  I groaned. “His Xbox? Do you know how annoying he is with all those shooter games?”

  “As if he can beat me.”

  “Oh no. Please don’t go into hypercompetitive mode.”

  “What?” he balked. “I am so not competitive.”

  “Do me a favor and go stand on the other side of the room so the bolt of lightning doesn’t hit me too.”

  He scoffed. “I’m sure God has better things to do.”

  Perhaps.

  “What?”

  I couldn’t stop staring at him.

  “Speak.”

  “You just got here. I want to kiss you and hug you and fuck you and…. Jesus, Ian, I need you so bad.”

  He leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Here, have a little nosh. You’ll feel better.”

  “Don’t you care at all?”

  “Yes, baby, and don’t you worry, you can have me any time you want from now on.”

  I perked up.

  “After Sunday.”

  It was going to be the longest three days of my life.

  ARUNA BROUGHT me pumpkin pie with a mound of Cool Whip on it, and I wondered what she was doing there since she loved hosting and it made no sense that she wasn’t.

  “Liam’s mother is downstairs,” she said quickly, flipping through Netflix to find something she wanted to watch.

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I’m staying up here with you.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “What?” she said without turning.

  “Hey.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “She hurt your feelings,” I said, because I knew my friend and knew it had.

  “Well, we both know I’m a lot of things, but a diva is not one of them. I know what she said and I know what she meant. She honestly didn’t think I could cook anything traditional, and that’s why she wanted to help me.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “But she’s down there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she came.”

  She rolled her head on the pillow so she could look at me. “Your point?”

  I shrugged. “She made an effort and she’s eating your food now, right?”

  “Begrudgingly, I’m sure.”

  I raised my eyes to the sky.

  “We both know she never liked me.”

  “Oh, gimme a break,” I muttered, bumping her with my elbow. “That woman adores you. Liam was wild and took way too many chances before you came along. But because he fell so hard, he grew up, and now that he’s a husband and a dad, he’s ridiculously grounded.”

  She huffed out a breath.

  “You don’t think she knows that?”

  She made her eyes flutter like I was giving her fits.

  “Just go down there and be the bigger person.”

  “And if I don’t want to?”

  “But you do want to, ’cause you actually really like her too.”

  She waited another moment, but she got up, kissed me on the forehead, and left to go confront her mother-in-law.

  Feeling better, I got out of bed and went to change out of the pajama
bottoms and T-shirt I’d had on all day. My plan was to go downstairs, but once I was in jeans and a heather gray sweater, I lost steam. I was sitting on the bed debating socks when Ian appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Gearing up to be sociable,” I said, chuckling.

  He walked over to the bed and sat down beside me. “It’s breaking up soon, anyway. Just gonna be us and the guys.”

  I sighed. “Not that I’m not thankful, but everybody’s not coming up here to say good-bye, are they?”

  “No,” he murmured, leaning sideways to nuzzle my cheek before he planted a kiss there.

  I made a noise he must have liked because he slipped a hand around the side of my neck and turned my head with gentle pressure from his thumb on my jaw. When I was staring at him, he leaned in and kissed me.

  I wanted to soak up every drop of his attention, so happy with him, with his choices, with how things could be now that he’d really given us a chance. I could feel my stomach that had been in knots for so long finally begin to unclench as I parted my lips and let him in.

  I felt it, instantly, the spike of raw pleasure driving to my core, heating me from the inside out, filling me with the familiar need to have his naked skin all over mine.

  “Ian,” I panted, driving him down under me on the bed. “Take off your clothes.”

  “Oh, I would love to,” he said, threading his fingers through my hair and pushing it back from my face. “But like I said before, it ain’t happening until Monday.”

  I grunted and sat up, straddling his thighs, content to sit there and look at him beneath me, all beautiful and mine.

  “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You get all rested, and next month we’ll go somewhere, just us.”

  “A vacation?” I said drolly. “You’re saying you’ll take me on a vacation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “We both have a crapton of time saved up.”

  “Yeah, but—” And then it hit me, that I had him, he wasn’t leaving me anymore because he was, in fact, leaving the Army instead.

  I took a quick breath.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “What’s that?” I said, trying to keep it together. It wasn’t every day your whole life started. The overwhelming feeling of joy was swelling inside my chest and it was hard not to scream or cry or just lose it all over the man I loved.

  “Me being around.”

  I coughed. “I’m good with it now.”

  He laughed softly at me, hands on my thighs, squeezing tight.

  “So, a vacation?” I rasped.

  “Yeah. Wherever you want.”

  I nodded. “I’m holding you to it.”

  “Good.”

  I rolled off him and lay down close, still touching. “So tell me, how does it feel to be ex-Special Forces?”

  He was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m not really sure yet. It’s so new. Not even official yet.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I wanna tell you,” he insisted, “I do. But it’s just an us thing, no one else.”

  “Okay.”

  He got to his side to face me and trailed his fingers along my jaw. “I mean it. I want to talk to you and bore you with every little detail, but there are way too many people here, and once I get started, I won’t want to stop, much like when we’re screwing.”

  I laughed. “That’s so romantic.”

  His smile was arrogant. “I knew you’d think so.”

  “Ian—”

  “I know you wanna know everything, M, and I promise to tell you.”

  “It’s important.”

  “I know,” he agreed, tracing over my eyebrow with his thumb.

  “Will you at least tell me why the inquiry into Lochlyn ended so abruptly?”

  “There was nothing new for them to find out from the past. Clearly Lochlyn was unstable, and that was pretty evident from all the reports. Keeping us there was not gonna shed any new light on anything, so they let us go.”

  I was very thankful. “I missed you more than normal the last time.”

  “Me too. I felt the times between me going getting shorter and shorter, and when leaving makes you physically ill—something’s gotta give.”

  His words were guaranteed to make my heart stop.

  “You know it’s gonna be different for us.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Me being around all the time,” he explained as he pushed my hair out of my face again. “I know guys who got divorced after they quit ’cause they drove their wives nuts.”

  I slid a hand over his chest. “Yeah, you don’t hafta worry about that.”

  “You sure?” he teased.

  “Yeah, baby, I’m sure,” I sighed, and then I took a breath. “So can I ask how long it takes for your retirement to go into effect?”

  His lazy smile accompanied a rumbling sigh.

  “What?”

  “You said that like you weren’t dying for my answer.”

  I growled at him. “Just tell me.”

  “Well,” he began, his voice velvet and deep as he slid his fingers into the hair at the back of my neck, cupping my head, “it’ll take about nine months to a year to process my packet once I drop it.”

  “Drop it?”

  “Turn it in,” he clarified, easing me forward into a kiss of blatant ownership, languid and insistent at the same time.

  I needed to know things, had to, but this—him treating me like I was utterly his, I just wanted more.

  My shiver made him smile and ease back.

  “No—”

  “So once I turn in the packet,” he said, which silenced my pleading, “I won’t be sent out on missions anymore.”

  My breath caught. “You won’t?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll just have to do my one weekend a month drills and two weeks AT in the summer.”

  I knew what that was, annual training, so I didn’t have to ask. “Will they have to schedule that ahead of time or can they just call you up and make you do that whenever?”

  “They schedule it,” he assured me, leaning in to kiss me again, just a quick one, before he continued. “There’s no more of the no-notice missions for weeks or months on end, and they aren’t allowed to transfer me, either.”

  It was too good to be true, and when I saw the slight furrow of brows, I tensed. “What?”

  He squinted at me. “One thing that could happen is that my CO, or someone else, could ask me to withdraw my packet because they really need me and can’t find a replacement.”

  I kept the fear out of my voice, but it still cracked just a little when I spoke. “Would you do that? Withdraw your packet?”

  “If it meant the difference between men living or dying,” he said softly, “what would you want me to do?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Who told you life was fair?”

  I nodded.

  He folded me into his arms and tucked my face into the crook of his neck. “I’m really not worried about that possibility, M.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to be supportive when all I wanted to do was tie him to the bed.

  “I promise you.”

  “You promise what?”

  “That I’ll get out. I will.”

  I’d been holding my breath for a long time; it was only for a bit longer. I could wait it out. I could. I would. He was worth everything.

  “You trust me?”

  “Of course,” I said honestly and then realized I had things to say as well. “So…we should talk about Hartley, right?”

  “Later,” he whispered. “We’ve got time now.”

  I closed my eyes and relaxed against him.

  “We should make the vacation a honeymoon.”

  It took me a second and then I popped my head up in time to see his wild, wicked grin. “I’m sorry, what?”

  He was laughing a
t me, and it only got louder when I shoved him to his back and climbed on top of him.

  “Ian?”

  “You heard me,” he said, still chuckling.

  I took hold of his hands, keeping them over his head, pinned to the bed. “Could you maybe elaborate?”

  “Why, yes, Miro,” he baited, rolling his hips provocatively under me. “We should go to a justice of the peace next week, get married, and go on a honeymoon. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  It sounded perfect, and I would have told him so if every bit of air had not rushed from my body and my heart had not stopped beating.

  “Love?” he said quickly, and I saw the playfulness leach from his face, replaced instantly with worry.

  “Yes?” I answered with a voice that sounded like crushed leaves,

  “You do still wanna marry me?”

  “I do,” I managed to get out with a trembling breath. “More than anything.”

  He exhaled sharply. “Jesus, you made my heart stop for a second.”

  I knew the feeling.

  His flashing grin was back fast. “So, yeah, next week?”

  “Next week,” I echoed, feeling the happiness bubbling up to the surface.

  “You’re all mine now.”

  I had always been his, from the moment we met.

  “Gimme kiss.”

  Like he ever needed to ask.

  More from Mary Calmes

  Marshals: Book One

  Deputy US Marshal Miro Jones has a reputation for being calm and collected under fire. These traits serve him well with his hotshot partner, Ian Doyle, the kind of guy who can start a fight in an empty room. In the past three years of their life-and-death job, they’ve gone from strangers to professional coworkers to devoted teammates and best friends. Miro’s cultivated blind faith in the man who has his back… faith and something more.

  As a marshal and a soldier, Ian’s expected to lead. But the power and control that brings Ian success and fulfillment in the field isn’t working anywhere else. Ian’s always resisted all kinds of tied down, but having no home—and no one to come home to—is slowly eating him up inside. Over time, Ian has grudgingly accepted that going anywhere without his partner simply doesn’t work. Now Miro just has to convince him that getting tangled up in heartstrings isn’t being tied down at all.