All Tied Up (The Boston Five Series #4)

by Poppy J. Anderson

  “Shit, Heath!” Jordan heard the cuffed man say excitedly as she marched out of the bedroom. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier you have such a hot chick on your squad?”

  “Why don’t you start praying Jordan doesn’t cut off your pecker with that bolt cutter she’s getting from the truck? And where did you learn to thoroughly piss off every woman you encounter?”

  “Jordan? Her name’s Jordan?”

  Jordan shook her head as she walked through the kitchen, where her colleagues were chilling, listening to what had been going on in the bedroom, and now studying her with curious eyes.

  The suggestion of taking a bolt cutter to soft things suddenly sounded rather alluring.

  Chapter 3

  “Say, Ryan,” Shane began conversationally, putting a another spoonful of potatoes on his beloved’s plate at Sunday dinner. “Station rumor has it that you needed a new pair of handcuffs this week. Did you lose your last pair, or did a suspect run off with it?”

  Ryan gave his older brother a murderous look, but continued to ladle his mom’s sautéed carrots onto his own plate. The glint in Shane’s eyes told his little brother that he was about to parade Ryan’s recent predicament before the entire family. Here he was, sitting at his mom’s table and looking forward to her frequent, but still beloved, meat loaf, and now Shane was going to make him run the gauntlet. He knew the signs because he had twenty-nine years of experience being a Fitzpatrick.

  Everyone was there. Shane and his wife, Thorne, with their two sons, Brady and Connor; Heath, with his wife, Hayden, and their daughters, Joey and Kayla; and his sister, Kayleigh, with Aidan, her pitiable boyfriend of two years. And next to Ryan sat his twin brother, Kyle, who was oblivious to anything but the cucumber salad, and at the head of the table was his mom, feeding two-year-old Connor, her youngest grandchild.

  The seat at the other end of the table was left empty, and had been ever since their father died in a firefighting operation six years ago. He’d been chief of the station where Heath still worked today.

  “So tell me, Ryan,” Shane prodded, “I can’t imagine what the problem with our sturdy handcuffs might be. Should I have mine checked for proper functionality or something?”

  Ryan was positive everyone at the table—except his Catholic mother—already knew he’d been chained to his bed and freed by his brother’s entire squad, so he suspected that Shane just wanted to embarrass him.

  The fact that Heath was chuckling into his napkin, while Kayleigh grinned gleefully and Kyle rolled his eyes, made Ryan think his siblings had conspired to bring it up at the table, intending to spoil the meat loaf for him.

  For five days now, everyone at the police station, at O’Reary’s, and even at the gas station kept telling him how funny they thought it was that he’d been chained naked to his own bed with his own handcuffs and left to rot. One of the videos recorded on a phone, showing Ryan ranting at Heath to cut him loose already, had even made it to Steve, a pal Ryan played basketball with once a week. Fortunately, Ryan was quite unashamed of his own body and possessed enough of a sense of humor to face this embarrassing situation in stride. But he’d had just about enough of the constant giggles following him as he stepped into his office, his favorite pub, and now also his mother’s home.

  Since his little nieces and nephews were present, he’d hoped to be left in peace here, but it seemed Shane didn’t mind his small sons hearing about their uncle’s sexcapades.

  Ryan sighed and replied with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “After the cuffs were cut open with a bolt cutter, they couldn’t be reassembled. Could you pass me the salt, please?”

  “A bolt cutter?” Kayleigh repeated, feigning innocence as she handed him the salt shaker, wearing an utterly diabolical grin. “But why would they need to be cut open with a bolt cutter, Ryan?”

  “Yeah, I’d be interested to hear about that, too,” Shane said with mock curiosity, nodding at his sister with a mischievous wink.

  Ryan ground his teeth and flashed his siblings a look that promised at least dismemberment, if not worse, if they didn’t shut up right then. He was briefly relieved to see his mother so focused on getting little Connor to eat his carrots that she seemed oblivious to the subject of her children’s conversation. But then Shane prodded again. “Well, I’ve been with the police for a while longer than you have, and I’ve never had any problems with my handcuffs.”

  Ryan’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “That’s a miracle, considering your own sordid past.”

  His older brother, once having been Boston’s worst womanizer, was now happily married and the proud father of two, so he merely grinned and put an arm around his wife’s shoulder. She leaned into him automatically but continued her own conversation with her sister-in-law Hayden.

  “Oh, we get quite a few suspects in the ER escorted in by police,” Kayleigh chimed in, unable to fully suppress a chuckle, “and they’re usually cuffed to the hospital bed.”

  “Cuffed to the hospital bed?” Shane repeated like an uncomprehending moron. “Why do people need to be cuffed to a bed?”

  “Well … I don’t know.” His sadistic sister, whose unappetizing stories from the ER were the reason Ryan often couldn’t finish the food on his plate at their Sunday dinners, was obviously relishing this stupid act. “Why do people let themselves be chained to beds anyway?”

  “Beats me,” Shane said with a shrug and a grin. “Must be perverts.”

  “Now that you mention it, Kayleigh,” Heath cut in, “we had an emergency call only a few days ago, where a naked man was cuffed to his bed and couldn’t free himself.”

  “You don’t say!” Kayleigh cried in a show of disgust. She tapped her lips with a finger. “But can’t you open those handcuffs with a key, Heath?”

  Their oldest brother nodded with the air of a medieval king on his throne handing out draconian justice. “In theory, yes. But the … victim didn’t have the key anymore. A woman had thrown it out the window.”

  “Out the window?” Shane echoed, still playing the dumbass. He shook his head as if shocked. “Fancy that!”

  “You guys are so funny,” Ryan hissed at them and threw a meaningful glance in his mother’s direction. But she merely kissed her grandson on the cheek.

  All his siblings rolled their eyes at him and then thankfully turned back to their overloaded plates. Ryan heaved a great sigh just as Ellen Fitzpatrick looked up from her grandson.

  “Don’t think I don’t know that your brother had to cut you loose from your own handcuffs, young man.”

  Ryan gasped, outraged, and glared at Heath, who had been in the process of stuffing his mouth with meat loaf when he froze, just as flabbergasted as Ryan.

  “No, your brother didn’t say anything about it,” Ellen answered his silent accusation. “Father MacCallahan showed me a phone video at bingo night last night. You were naked and chained to your bed!”

  “Father MacCallahan?” Ryan wouldn’t have been more mortified if his mom had caught him masturbating as a teenager.

  His eyes widened in panic as he asked himself how it was possible even the Catholic priest had access to one of those damn videos.

  Kayleigh began to laugh like a hyena and didn’t stop until she was gasping for air. “How come Father Mac has that video on his phone, yet I still haven’t seen it?” Her howl was making Ryan’s head ache.

  “And how come you’re so keen to see your brother naked?” Aidan asked her indignantly.

  Ryan answered his almost-brother-in-law’s question with a hiss. “Because she’s a pervert. If I were you, I’d grab my stuff and run away while you still can,” he spat, evading his mother’s reproachful eyes.

  “Hah!” Kayleigh wrinkled her nose. “Excuse me, but people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I wasn’t the one who let someone chain me to my bed with my own police handcuffs, was I?”

  “True,” Ryan replied with the dryness of a Somali desert. He lifted his chin. “You prefer having your boyfrien
d spank you in bed, my dear.”

  Ellen Fitzpatrick’s quick prayer was drowned by Aidan’s hearty laughter. He patted his girlfriend’s head and turned to her mother. “Ellen, you know I’d never criticize you, but how is it possible your children grew to possess such an urge to parade their sex lives at the dinner table?”

  “They don’t get it from me,” Ellen asserted, shaking her head at the lot of them. “I’d certainly love to be able to sit here, eat in peace, and talk to you all, without having to listen to things no mother wants to hear.”

  Since she’d addressed them as a group, Ryan thought that he was off the hook, but his mom turned to him again. “What in heaven’s name made you want to be chained to your bed in the first place?”

  He squirmed in his seat and ignored his sister’s holier-than-thou smile, focusing on lightly dismissing the whole thing. “It’s a long story, Mom.”

  “It’s not like I have an appointment in ten minutes.” With the authority of a fivefold mother, Ellen nodded regally and folded her hands in her lap. “Everyone in the congregation knows my son was found naked and cuffed to his bed by his brother’s fire department. I don’t want to be the last person in Boston to know what happened there.”

  Ryan’s twin, who looked like his exact copy, apart from a small scar on his chin, looked up from his meat loaf at that point. “Mom,” he grumbled, “what do you think happened? I doubt he just wanted to test the functionality of his handcuffs.”

  “I know that, Kyle.”

  Kyle, who did forty-two-hour shifts in the hospital and worked his ass off to get his medical license, and who, so far, had been the only one not to tease Ryan about the incident, shrugged and went back to mashing his potatoes with his fork. “So what?” he said, oblivious to their mother’s close-lipped expression. “Ryan just wanted to add some spice to his love life. You know, experiment a little. That’s nothing compared to the things I see at work on a daily basis! Just yesterday, we had a patient who fell off a ladder while cleaning naked and landed right on his pe–”

  “Not again!” Heath cut him off. “I’m eating!” Heath, despite his profession in firefighting, was notorious for being tetchy about stories with medical punch lines.

  Kyle raised a placatory hand and looked around the table. “All I’m saying is that a lot of people like to experiment with their sexuality. Some men like cleaning female strangers’ houses stark naked, or licking their shoes, and others enjoy being chained to their beds, or letting someone pee on them.”

  Ryan gasped, outraged. “I do not enjoy naked cleaning or bondage,” he stated categorically, “and least of all do I want to be peed on!”

  “Then why did we find you chained naked to your bed?” Heath put a few more pieces of carrot on his youngest daughter’s plate and lowered his head to give Ryan a meaningful stare. “To put it nicely, I endured embarrassment for my baby brother. How could you let anyone lead you down the garden path like that?”

  “Easy,” Kayleigh butted in. “He was thinking with the wrong head,” she explained, her mouth full of food. “But apart from that, I’d say, at twenty-nine, he’s no longer a baby brother and, thus, should know better.”

  “No comments from the peanut gallery!” Ryan gave his sister a scathing look before advising her boyfriend, “If you really want to punish her, you should stop spanking her for a while. She enjoys that a little too much for her own good.”

  Before Kayleigh could open her mouth to shoot back, Thorne chimed in, “How about a change of subject?” and pointed at her nine-year-old son, Brady, who was sitting next to his five-year-old cousin, Joey, playing with his dad’s phone. Since phones were normally banned from the dinner table, Ryan could easily guess his brother had slipped Brady his phone to distract him. And of course, Joey, who adored her older cousin and followed him around like a puppy, was looking at the display as well, just as distracted. “I don’t want to have to tell my son tonight why everyone has a video of his naked uncle,” Thorne said, “and why another uncle is supposed to spank his aunt.”

  His sister-in-law’s desperate face would have been funny if Ryan hadn’t been the reason for her request.

  Kyle, who had become calmness incarnate since he’d started working in the ER, ignored Thorne’s plea. “Was she at least hot?” he asked Ryan with an air of mild curiosity.

  It took Ryan a moment to realize his twin was not talking about hot-blooded Jordan Esposito, who’d freed him from his chains with a bolt cutter and an expression like a martyr. No, he was talking of the bitchy Tina, who was probably serving tomato juice somewhere in the air right now and maybe flirting with the pilot, if anyone.

  He also realized he’d all but forgotten Tina—and decided to studiously ignore her when he next saw her—but would love to see the bigmouthed firefighter again. Though he’d prefer to be fully clothed the next time.

  Under normal circumstances, he tried to avoid women with mouths as big and senses of humor as earthy as his sister’s, but this young firefighter babe had something about her that intrigued him.

  “The point is not whether a woman is hot, Kyle,” his mother lectured with a serious expression, thereby interrupting Ryan’s daydream of meeting a completely different woman again.

  “But if she was hot, I could understand why he let her tie him to the bed like that.”

  Ryan had heard this one time too often. He rolled his eyes. “Could we please change the subject now? I’m sure many other exciting things have happened in this family, and we can talk about those now.”

  Unfortunately, both his twin and his mother seemed to disagree.

  Ellen Fitzpatrick frowned and twisted her mouth disdainfully, which was a sure sign that she was about to launch into a full-scale dressing-down. “When your father found pornographic magazines in your room when you were only fourteen, he lectured you on protection, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. Did he, by any chance, forget to mention that a responsible young man doesn’t let himself be cuffed to his bed by a casual acquaintance?”

  Ryan felt mentioning “the talk”—the conversation their dad had forced upon him and Kyle shortly after their fourteenth birthday—was almost as painful as the talk itself had been. With the aid of a banana, Dad had demonstrated how to use a condom. Ryan still felt the urge to cover his ears whenever he thought of that day. There was a host of situations and moments when Ryan wished he could chat with his dad again, but a conversation about his most recent predicament was not one of them. His parents had been married thirty years, having gotten hitched right after high school. Ryan was sure his dad wouldn’t understand or appreciate that his son chose to remain unattached as he approached thirty, not wasting a thought on settling down or having kids. Theirs was a Catholic family, but Ryan had never subscribed to eating fish on Friday, staying celibate until he was married, or viewing condoms as the devil’s work.

  His siblings could continue making babies, but he didn’t feel the urge to pass on his genes. Maybe in ten years or so. But, until then, he preferred letting someone tie him up. If she was hot, of course. On that point, he agreed with Kyle.

  Ryan made a face. “Mom,” he pleaded, “can’t we discuss this at a more suitable time?”

  “You’re a policeman, Ryan. You ought to know how dangerous it is to surrender control and be at someone else’s mercy.” His mom was talking herself into a rage. “That woman could have done anything!”

  “I think that’s exactly what Ryan was hoping for, Mom.”

  “Shut your mouth, Kyle!” Ellen shook her head disapprovingly. “I am serious! She could have robbed you, hurt you, even cut off your you-know-what! Ryan Niall Fitzpatrick, have you even considered that?”

  The only thing he could think of right now was that his family was successfully suffocating any sexual drives he’d ever had. This conversation about his date-gone-wrong in front of his entire family was more effective than chemical castration.

  “You should file a report on that woman,” his mother advised, soundin
g more belligerent than normal.

  He frowned and cocked his head. “So I can become the laughingstock of the entire department? No, thanks!”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.” Shane gave him a jovial wink. “Everyone in the department already knows the story.”

  “And everybody at the fire stations, too.”

  “Someone asked me about it at the hospital, too,” Kayleigh added cheerfully. “So you don’t need to worry about your reputation. It’s dead and gone.”

  Ryan wanted to stick out his tongue at her. “I’m glad to hear it,” he replied angrily, but then a frustrated sigh escaped his lips.

  His sister-in-law Hayden gave him an affectionate look and smiled. “At least you’ve made sure the Fitzpatricks are the talk of the town once again, Ryan. No more gossip about old Mr. Barnaby’s nephew and his attic pot plantation. Your sexual lapse interest people much more.”

  He answered with a helpless grimace and stuffed his face with a large piece of meat loaf. He wanted to keep his mouth occupied not only because he’d had enough on the subject of his run-in with the bitchy flight attendant, but, more importantly, he liked Hayden a lot. She was more than his sister-in-law; she felt almost like another birth sister. They’d grown up together, because Heath and Hayden had already known in elementary school that they’d one day get married and have kids. While Ryan had always loved the blond and her dazzling smile purely like a sibling, he still envied his older brother for having found such an easygoing and friendly wife.

  One look at Aidan, who hung on his girlfriend’s every word, reminded Ryan that most men weren’t so lucky. The docile workman, who was Thorne’s brother and had a small renovation business, had for some reason picked Kayleigh, a woman who was cantankerous, bigmouthed, and anything but shy or reserved. While it might be amusing to have her as a sister and listen to her wild and ugly tales, Ryan could not imagine being in a relationship with a woman like her.

  He preferred a situation more harmonious, less noisy, and most of all, less confined. Women like Kayleigh demanded their partner’s full attention at all times and wanted them to give up all their liberties. Ryan was far from ready to give a woman that much power over him, orienting his life according to her needs and wants. He was young and wanted to have a good time. He didn’t wish for a woman who expected him to turn his entire life upside down so he could sit on the couch with her and let her decide what to watch on TV.