All Kinds of Tied Down (20 page)

“He sounds like an actor or something, huh?”

“Yeah, he does.” I chuckled.

“Okay, well, I gotta go.”

“All right, be safe.”

“Always,” he grunted and the line went dead.

“I think that was the most words we’ve ever said to each other,” Kowalski commented, glancing over at me.

“Well, that’s Ian, Captain Communication.”

Apparently that was damn funny. Kowalski choked on his coffee.

B
RENT
I
VERS
had lied.

He’d said he was on a business trip and only visiting the Windy City from Florida. But it turned out the new job was a bust, so he’d moved back. All of that was in a message he’d left me when, as he explained, “that coven of yours wouldn’t let me in to see you after you were shot.” Apparently he’d called when I was in the hospital, and after Aruna informed him I’d been hurt in the line of duty, she went on to clarify that under no circumstances was he allowed to see me. She threatened him with bodily harm, and he reported all of it in his second message. He was still ranting on the fourth one he’d left.

“He sounds nuts,” Kowalski said as he dealt the cards.

I was explaining it to the table at our regular Thursday night card game, this week at Becker’s house. Originally we’d held the game on Fridays, but me, Ian, Kohn, and Ryan were all single, and Friday was the night we were usually out getting laid.

“Maybe you need a restraining order,” Kohn suggested before taking a long drag on his beer. “I can get one tomorrow since you’ll be on a plane with Becker.”

“You don’t need a TRO for your ex,” Mike Ryan—tall, dark, and built like the swimmer he’d been in college—explained to me. “Gimme his address and me and Sharpe’ll go over there and have a talk with him. He won’t bug you after that.”

“Yep,” Sharpe agreed from where he sat across from me.

I laughed. “I can fight my own battles, thank you, gentlemen. And it’s not like that, just funny, is all.”

“Yeah, it’s a riot,” Jack Dorsey said as he walked back into the room from the kitchen and passed Becker a Corona. “But if you see him hanging around, polishing a knife, you let us know.”

I scoffed. “Absolutely. Hey, Jack, I have a question.”

“What?”

“I was meaning to ask, what happened to your brother and his partner? I haven’t seen either of them here in months. I miss taking money off the nice ATF agents.”

He grunted. “Elliot’s partner moved to this little asscrack of a town in Kentucky with his boyfriend and—”

“What?” I blurted in surprise.

“What?” he parroted.

“That guy I met, Pete… he’s gay?” Holy crap, maybe the girls were right to give me shit about being oblivious. All I’d seen when I met agent Peter Lomax and his partner, Jack Dorsey’s little brother Elliot, was two very alpha guys. They both came off as swaggering douchebags in the nicest way possible. It had been obvious that Jack had a good relationship with his brother, and by extension, Pete. But I had no idea Pete was gay; he hadn’t pinged my gaydar even once.

“I thought all you gay guys knew each other,” he said seriously.

“You did
not
just say that,” Sharpe remarked dryly.

“What?”

“Finish your damn story,” Ching directed.

“Well, whatever. He’s gay, and so he moved to be with his partner, and so two months later when another opening came up in Louisville, my brother and his wife moved there too.”

“No shit.” Kohn sounded surprised too.

“Yeah, I mean, I thought for sure his wife Felicia would be upset about it, but her family ain’t here, they’re in Cincinnati. So it’s actually closer for her to see her side.”

“That sucks that your brother’s not here anymore.” I said sympathetically.

“Yeah, but he’ll visit in the summer, and me and Sandi are going for like a week around Labor Day,” Dorsey said, and he sounded okay with it. “And then he’s coming home for Thanksgiving. So it won’t be like it was, but it’s okay. I mean, I get it, right? I love my family but I spend more time with Ryan than I do with my wife.”

Sharpe nodded. “Yeah, I mean, if your partner moves, you’re supposed to do… what? Just get a new one? How would that work?”

I looked around the room. I couldn’t imagine Ryan without Dorsey, Ching without Becker, Kowalski without Kohn, or Sharpe without White. Or me without Ian. It was weird to even contemplate. And when one of us was away—or two as it was now, with Ian gone and White still off work—we all swapped around. Even though every single one of us would take a bullet for any of the others, your partner was the one who always had your back, who rode to the hospital in the ambulance if, heaven forbid, something happened, and he was the guy who always thought how much better whatever it was would be if you were there.

At least that was how it worked for me.

“What the fuck is this?” Ryan complained loudly from the kitchen.

Glancing over at him, I saw him holding up a thinly sliced piece of meat.

“It’s prosciutto,” Kohn called over.

“What is that?”

“It’s like fancy super-thin sliced salty ham,” Kohn continued.

“Why does it have a whole other name?”

Kohn huffed. “Why are you asking me? I’m Jewish; I don’t even eat that crap.”

“Just eat it,” Kowalski ordered Ryan.

Ryan growled, and I would have said something, but Dorsey joined him in the kitchen to try it.

“It’s good whatever the fuck it is,” Ryan said, shrugging.

“I want a sandwich,” I announced.

“Well, get the fuck up and make it,” Ching instructed.

I snorted out a laugh, folded my 2 and 7 off suit, and got up.

“Oh, oh!” Becker said, his phone in one hand. “It looks like boss man says that I ain’t makin’ the trip to Tennessee.”

“Then who’s going with me?” I asked, glancing back to the poker table.

Everyone checked their phones and no one else had a text.

“Oh man,” Ching groaned. “Tell me we don’t have a newb.”

Kohn cackled. “I bet we’ve got help since White and Doyle are both still out.”

“Yeah, but White should be back next week, and Doyle’ll be back… when?” Becker asked, glancing toward me.

“Monday.”

“Yeah, see?” he said, looking at the others. “There’s no room at the inn. We got everyone we need.”

“Don’t be an elitist pig,” Ryan warned. “If the team never grew beyond the first guys, it would still only be me, White, Sharpe, Dorsey, and Kowalski. You wouldn’t even be here. Change can be good.”

We all threw food at him.

“Assholes!”

It was good to laugh with all of them, but really. Babysitting for a twelve-hour drive was not my idea of fun. I’d rather go alone.

S
INCE
I
was flying, I had been smart and stopped drinking right after midnight, chugged water, and took Tylenol before I went to bed. So when 6:30 a.m. rolled around and it was time to get up and go to the airport, I was in pretty good shape. At the gate, I was slurping coffee and sipping from a bottle of water at the same time.

“Did you get water for me?”

Ian Doyle stood over me, dressed casually with his military backpack slung over one shoulder.

We weren’t supposed to stand out in any way; we weren’t marshals transporting a witness, instead we were just two guys on vacation. But there was no way for him to blend in. Even in the junker pants and military boots, the white T-shirt under the heavy wool sweater, and the duffle coat I’d bought him for his last birthday, he looked amazing. Nothing he had on went together at all, and yet, the smirk made that fact meaningless. I was weightless with happiness.

“Oh shit.” I whimpered without meaning to, leapt to my feet, and grabbed him tight.

Because he was slightly taller, whenever he hugged me, he leaned heavily, giving me more of his weight than he was probably aware of. I loved it because it meant that, every time, we notched together tighter than I did with anyone else but a lover.

“You thought I’d make you have to endure a whole day in a car with Becker?”

He smelled so fucking good, like the damn citrusy soap in his bathroom and the aftershave he bought at a little place in Chinatown. Supposedly he wore it because it took care of razor burn, but I didn’t care. I liked the way it smelled. It was like mint with a trace of lemon, and woodsy and smoky at the same time.

He chuckled. “Did you miss me?”

“Yeah,” I whispered, realizing that for once, he was hugging me back as hard as I was hugging him.

“That’s good.”

He already had clear blue eyes and dimples, a smile so incredible that once you saw it you’d do anything to see it again, and a long and lean powerfully muscled frame. It was ridiculous, really, that he also smelled like heaven. To be fair to the rest of us, something needed to be wrong with him. Various women in his life had complained about everything from intimacy issues to him being crappy in bed, but I didn’t actually buy that he wasn’t perfect. An asshole, absolutely, but no more than any other guy I knew.

I pulled back, because any longer and the hugging might have been weird for him. I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. “So,” I said, smiling like an idiot, I was sure. “You look good, no holes or nothing.”

His brows furrowed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Right shoulder and left collarbone?”

“What?”

“Where you were shot?”

“Oh. Yeah.” I put my hand on my right shoulder. “Both went straight through, so it was no big deal. I was really lucky.”

The muscles in his jaw tightened, and I slipped my hand around his throat, rubbing over his jaw with my thumb.

“It’s okay.”

His gaze stayed locked with mine, and then I noticed the feel of Ian’s whiskers under my callused thumb and realized what the hell I was doing.

Coughing, I moved my hand. “I’ll go get you some water,” I announced. I didn’t wait for him to say anything, bolting away instead.

When I returned to the gate, he had his coat off, discarded on the seat next to him, and was bent over, hunting for something in his backpack. As I watched, he pulled off his sweater, rucking the T-shirt up, revealing the bare stretch of skin of his powerful back.

I was abruptly bumped from behind and twisted to see a woman looking at me, mouth open, before she snapped it shut.

“You walked into me,” I teased.

She bit her lip.

“’Cause you were looking at the pretty man.”

A nod.

“So was I,” I confessed, and she smiled at me before she rushed off.

After taking a steadying breath, I walked up to him at the same time as he pulled a dark blue Henley over his head and tugged it into place.

“What was wrong with the sweater?” I grumbled as I flopped down into my chair and held the bottle of water up to him.

“I’m burning up. It’s hot in here.”

“Could you not get naked in front of everyone?”

He squinted at me. “I’m not naked. I’m taking off my sweater.”

I pretended to be engrossed with checking my phone for any status changes until the call came for boarding.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked while we stood in line, his backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Nothing,” I said, because it would pass—the feeling I always got when he returned home. The surge of possessiveness nearly choked me every time. It was like I needed him marked or something, I wasn’t sure how, or… I just needed people to know he belonged to someone and that they shouldn’t think he was attainable.

“You always get like this when I come back.”

I ignored the comment even though he was right. Immediately after the vicious desire to keep him—to tie him down—dissipated, I was hit with the exhaustion of having to redo all my work. Getting Ian comfortable with me, getting him to trust me, was like housetraining a feral cat. His time away always erased whatever had been built up and I was back to square one. He would come back to our world and his training would be riding him, looking for threats from every corner, and that included me. It was so tiring, the uphill battle of returning to Ian Doyle’s circle of trust.

“Maybe you would have liked Becker with you better,” he muttered under his breath.

“Becker keeps his clothes on in the middle of airports,” I said petulantly, the only thing I could think of to say, smiling for the gate agent who scanned my boarding pass.

“Have a nice flight, Mr. Jones.”

“Thank you,” I said crisply, striding forward quickly, putting a little distance between me and my partner.

He caught me quickly on the Jetway, his hand on my left
shoulder, his fingers digging into the muscle there. “Why’re you….”

He didn’t finish and neither did he move his hand, and after a moment I registered that he was using a lot of pressure to hold me still. I could feel the heat from his hand through the zippered cashmere cardigan and T-shirt, and a throb of need spurred by the rough caress went straight to my groin.

I’d never survive ten to twelve hours in a car with him if I didn’t get myself under control. I should have slept with someone, anyone, even Brent, while he was gone. As it was, friendship and lust were riding me at the same time. It was a bad combination.