Wrapped Up in You

by Jill Shalvis

  Curious now, she turned, and time stopped.

  Brandon stood there, looking leaner and entirely uncertain of his welcome. “Hey,” he said. “I see you kept your cop.”

  “I married him,” she managed through a raw throat.

  This had become their standard, teasing greeting over the past five years whenever she’d visited him in prison. But she hadn’t been this year because of a difficult pregnancy.

  “You’re out early,” she whispered.

  “Good behavior.” He lifted a shoulder. “I’ve been practicing.”

  Swallowing the lump in her throat, she nodded. “It’s good to see you.”

  Some of the worry left his eyes and his shoulders dropped from where he’d held them practically up to his ears. “You don’t have to say that.”

  “I mean it.”

  He held her gaze with his mismatched eyes. “Part of my early release was contingent on me having a place to stay and work. Kel got me a job working for him and Donovan. I’m going to live in the employee barracks on Donovan’s property.” He paused. “If that’s all okay with you.”

  Ivy thought she was choked up before, but she could scarcely draw a breath, overwhelmed with love and affection for her amazing husband. She looked up at him and hoped she conveyed her love and affection and gratitude back, because she couldn’t speak.

  With a smile, Kel leaned in and gave her a quick, warm kiss.

  “I love you,” she managed to whisper.

  “I know,” he whispered back before lifting his head and looking at Brandon. “I think it’s safe to say it’s okay with her.”

  “Very okay,” she said and reached for Brandon, pulling him in for a hug. When little Kenzie mewled her protest, Ivy pulled back with a laugh. “Meet your niece, Kenzie Snow O’Donnell. She’s as impatient and feisty as her mom.”

  Brandon stared down at Kenzie in awe. “Wow.” He seemed choked up. “She’s . . . amazing.”

  Just as choked up, Ivy nodded. “Guess us Snows have a future after all.”

  Brandon let out his first smile. A small one, and it felt a little rusty, but totally genuine. “Didn’t see that coming.”

  She looked up at Kel, knowing her heart was in her eyes. “I didn’t either. But I met someone who made me see anything was possible.”

  Kel smiled down at her. “To our future,” he said softly.

  “To our future.” And once again she kissed him to seal the deal.

  Announcement to Almost Just Friends

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at the next women’s fiction novel from Jill Shalvis

  ALMOST JUST FRIENDS

  Arriving January 2020

  Pre-order now!

  Chapter 1

  “Chin up, Princess, or the crown slips.”

  Piper Manning closed her eyes and plugged her ears against the horror. She’d known this would happen even as she’d begged against it, but sometimes there was no stopping fate. You’ve survived worse. Just push through it. Pretend you’re on a warm beach, vacationing, and there’s a hot surfer coming out of the water. Wait, scratch that. A hot Australian surfer coming out of the water, heading for you with a sexy smile—

  Someone tugged her fingers from her ears. Her best friend and EMT partner, Jenna. “It’s over,” she said. “You can look now.”

  Piper opened her eyes. No warm beach, no sexy surfer. She was still at the Whiskey River Bar and Grill, surrounded by her coworkers and so-called friends, and way too many birthday streamers and balloons, all mocking her because someone had thought it’d be funny to do it in all gloom-and-doom black.

  “You do realize that turning thirty isn’t exactly the end of the world?” Jenna said.

  Maybe not, but there was a reason Piper hadn’t wanted to celebrate. She’d just hit a milestone birthday without being at any sort of milestone, or anywhere even close to a milestone. Certainly nowhere near where she’d thought she’d be at thirty.

  “Hey, let’s sing it again now that she’s listening,” someone called out. Ryland, no doubt. The hotshot firefighter was always the group’s instigator.

  And so everyone began singing again, laughing when Piper grimaced and did her best not to crawl under the table. Truth was, she’d rather have a root canal without meds than be the center of attention, and these asshats knew it. “It’s like you all want to die,” she muttered. But someone put a drink in her hand, and since she was off duty now for two days, she took a long gulp.

  “I was very clear,” she said when the alcohol burn cleared her throat, eyeing the whole group, most of whom were also first responders and worked with her at the station or hospital in one form or another. “We weren’t going to mention my birthday, much less sing about it.”

  Not a single one of them looked guilty. In fact, they ignored her. “To Piper,” Ry said, and everyone raised a glass. “For gathering and keeping all us misfits together and sane.”

  “To Piper,” everyone cheered and drank, and then thankfully, conversations started up all around her so that she was finally no longer the center of attention.

  Her friends, God love them, were all used to her ways, which meant they got that while she was touched they’d all remembered her birthday, she didn’t want any more attention. Easily accepting that, they were happy to enjoy the night and leave her alone.

  “Did that hurt?” Jenna asked, amused.

  “What?”

  “Being loved?”

  In tune to the sounds of the bar behind them—someone singing off-key to Sweet Home Alabama, rambunctious laughter from a nearby table, the slap of pool balls . . . Piper rolled her eyes.

  “You know one day those eyeballs are going to fall right out of your head, right?”

  Piper ignored this and went back to what she’d been doing before being so rudely interrupted by all the love. Making a list.

  She was big on bullet journaling. She’d had to be. Making notes and lists had saved her life more than once. And yes, she knew she could do it on a notes app on her phone, but her brain hadn’t been wired that way. Nope, she was annoyingly old school, so she had to write that shit down by hand to make it stick.

  She had pages dedicated to:

  Calendars

  Grocery Lists

  Future Baby Names (even though she didn’t plan on having babies)

  Passwords (okay, password, single, since she always used the same one—CookiesAreLife123!)

  And then there were random entries, such as:

  Life rules

  —Stop eating entire bags of Cheese Poofs in one sitting.

  —Don’t cut your own bangs no matter how sad you are.

  —Never ever EVER under any circumstances fall in love.

  She had a bucket list of wishes. Oh, and a secret secret bucket list of wishes . . .

  Yeah, she probably needed help. Or a little pill.

  Jenna leaned over her shoulder and eyed the open page. “New journal?”

  Her vices were simple. She didn’t drink much, never smoked, but . . . she was an office supply ’ho. A never ending source of amusement to Jenna because Piper was also a bit of a hot mess when it came to organization and neatness. Her purse, her car, her office, and also her kitchen always looked like a disaster had just hit. “Maybe.”

  “How many journals have you started and either lost or misplaced since I’ve known you, a million?”

  Piper didn’t answer this on the grounds that it might incriminate her.

  Jenna played with the pack of stickers that Piper had tucked haphazardly into the journal. “Cute. But I feel like stickers are cheating.”

  “Bite your tongue. Stickers are everything.” So were pens. And cute paper clips. And stick-it notes . . .

  “Stickers? Come on. There are far more important things than stickers.”

  “Like?” Piper asked.

  “Like food.”

  “Okay, you’ve got me there.”

  “Or sex,” Jenna said.

  “Since it’s been awhile, I�
�ll have to take your word on that.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?” Jenna nudged her chin at the journal. “What’s today’s entry?”

  “A list for figuring out what’s next on fixing up the property.” Which was the house and cottages on Rainbow Lake that Piper and her siblings had inherited from their grandparents. “It still needs a lot of work. I’m in way over my head.”

  “I know.” Jenna’s smile faded. “I hate that you’re going to sell and move away from Wildstone.”

  Wildstone, California, was Piper’s hometown. Sort of. She’d moved here at age thirteen with her two younger siblings Gavin and Winnie, to be raised by their grandparents. But in the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.

  And hers could finally start.

  All she had to do was finish fixing up the property, then she’d sell and divide the money in thirds with her siblings. With her portion, she’d finally have the money and freedom to go to school and become a physician’s assistant like she’d always wanted.

  So close. She was so close that she could almost taste it. She squeezed Jenna’s hand. “Don’t worry. I’m coming back to Wildstone after school.”

  Where else would she go? Her only other home had been following her parents all over the world, providing healthcare wherever they’d been needed the most. But her mom and dad were gone now. Her family was Gavin and Winnie, and everyone in this room.

  “But why the University of Colorado?” Jenna asked. “Why go so far? You could go right here to Cal Poly.”

  Piper shook her head. Staying wasn’t an option. She’d been stuck here for seventeen years. She needed to go away for a while and figure out her life, who she was if she wasn’t raising her siblings. But that felt hard to explain, so she gave even her bff the excuse. “U of C is one of the really strong schools for my program. And I think I’ll like Colorado.”

  Jenna looked unconvinced, but she was a good enough friend to let it go.

  “Don’t worry,” Piper said. “I’ll be back.”

  “You’d better.” Jenna read the journal over Piper’s shoulder. “You sure make a lot of very responsible lists. I can’t even make a shopping list.”

  “That’s because you don’t go food shopping. You order in.”

  Jenna smiled. “Oh, right.”

  “Paint samples!” Piper remembered suddenly, and wrote that down. When you ran your world, everyone in that world tended to depend on you to do it right. That’s how it’d always been for her. She’d been in charge whether she liked it or not.

  “You know you’re a control freak, right?”

  Piper chewed on the end of her pen. “I’m forgetting something, I know it.”“Yeah,” Jenna said. “To get a life.”

  “What do you think I’m doing here?”

  Now it was Jenna’s turn to roll her eyes. “Everyone else is talking about the hot new guy in town, and you’re over here in the corner making a shopping list.”

  “Hot guys come and go.”

  Jenna laughed. “Yeah? How long has it been since you’ve had a hot guy in your life, or any guy at all?”

  Piper looked across the bar to where Ry was currently chatting it up with not one, but two, women. Her ex was apparently making up for lost time.

  “Well, whose fault is that?” Jenna asked, reading her mind. “You dumped him last year for no reason, remember?”

  Actually, she’d had a really good reason, but it wasn’t one she wanted to share, so she shrugged.

  “You need a distraction. Of the sexy kind,” Jenna said. “You carry that journal around like it’s the love of your life.”

  “At the moment, it is.”

  “You could do a whole lot better.” Swiveling in her barstool, Jenna eyed the crowd.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “About what?” Jenna asked innocently.

  “Fixing me up.”

  “Would that be so bad?” Jenna asked, softer now, putting a hand on Piper’s writing arm. “You’re the one always fixing everyone’s life, everyone but your own, of course. But even The Fixer needs help sometimes.”

  It was true that she’d gone a whole bunch of years now being the one to keep it all together. For everyone. Asking for help wasn’t a part of her DNA. But Jenna did have a point. Today was her birthday, a milestone birthday at that, so she should do at least one frivolous thing, right? She turned the page of her journal and glanced at her secret bucket list.

  —Take a cruise to Alaska.

  —Get some “me” time every day.

  —Learn to knit.

  —Buy shoes that aren’t nursing shoes.

  “Okay, seriously, I’m worried,” Jenna said. “You’re sitting at your birthday party eyeing a list about buying nursing shoes?”

  “About not buying nursing shoes,” Piper corrected. “And this isn’t my party.”

  “It’s your party. And if you’d told Gavin and Winnie about it, they’d be here helping you celebrate too.”

  Just what she needed, to give her twenty-seven-going-on-seventeen-year-old brother and her not-quite-legal-to-drink sister a reason to party. “I told them not to come. Gavin’s busy at his job in Phoenix, and Winnie’s working hard on her grades at UCSB.”

  “They’re lucky to have you, I hope they know that,” Jenna said genuinely. “You work so hard, Piper, keeping all of you going. But today, at the very least, you should have some fun.”

  “I hear you. But keep that . . .” She pointed to the sign hanging above the bar. “. . . In mind, yeah?”

  The sign read:

  WARNING:

  ALCOHOL MAY MAKE THE PEOPLE IN THIS PLACE

  APPEAR BETTER LOOKING THAN THEY REALLY ARE.

  Jenna laughed, but wasn’t deterred from glancing over at the closest table to the bar, where three guys sat.

  “Oh, no,” Piper said. “Don’t you dare.”

  But then she was grimacing because Jenna dared. “Who here is single?”

  Two of the guys pointed to the third at their table.

  “You?” Jenna asked him.

  He took a beat to check Jenna out. Tonight her partner was channeling Beach Jenna with her wild blonde hair rioting around her pretty face, her athletic build emphasized by tightly fitted fancy yoga gear. “Yeah,” he said with a smile. “I’m most definitely single.”

  “Good. Because my friend here . . .” Jenna turned to gesture at Piper, who’d been trying to sneak off, but froze in the act of getting off the barstool when they all looked at her.

  “It’s her birthday,” Jenna said.

  “She’s hiding in the corner writing in a book,” the guy said doubtfully.

  “Yes, well, we can’t all be perfect, right? Look, she’s friendly . . .” Jenna grimaced and made a correction. “Ish. And she’s got all of her shots and is potty-trained to boot. I mean, yeah, sometimes she hides out in bars writing in her journal. Or in her pantry closet inhaling an entire bag of Cheese Poofs while thumbing through Pinterest, but hey, who doesn’t, am I right?”

  Looking alarmed, the man turned back to his friends.

  “Gee,” Piper said dryly. “And you made me sound like such a catch too.”

  Jenna shrugged. “Maybe he’s just not a Cheese Poofs fan.”

  “Yeah. That’s definitely it.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Jenna said. “I’m not done.”

  “Please be done.”

  But Jenna was now eyeing the man who’d just taken a barstool a few seats down. That’s him, she mouthed to Piper.

  Who?

  New Hot Guy!

  Piper sneaked a peek. He was in military green cargos and a black Henley that hugged his long, leanly muscled body. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and dark scruff, all of which went with his quietly dark expression that said Not Feeling Social.

  Jenna stood as if planning on another round of Let’s Embarrass Piper, but Piper grabbed her. “Don’t you dare!”
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  Jenna just smiled and looked at the man. “Hey.”

  He nodded at her.

  “So . . . you’re a guy.”

  “Last time I checked,” he said dryly.

  Jenna jerked a thumb to Piper. “It’s my best friend’s birthday.”

  Hot Guy’s gaze locked on Piper.

  “She’s made herself a list,” Jenna said.

  Hot Guy eyed the still open journal as Jenna assisted by turning it his way for ease of reading.

  Honest to God, Piper had no idea why she loved this woman.

  Hot Guy read the list and then rubbed the sexy scruff on his jaw. “Is this for you or your grandma?”

  Jenna snorted. “Hey, that’s her nickname, actually. Grandma.”

  “Some wingman you are.” Piper snatched up the journal and closed it.

  “What does ‘me’ time entail?” Hot Guy asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it involves batteries,” Jenna answered helpfully.

  “Okay,” Piper said and pointed at Jenna. “You know what? You’re cut off.”

  “Notice that she didn’t answer the question,” Jenna said to Hot Guy. “She’s good at that.”

  “It doesn’t involve batteries!” Piper snapped. No way was she going to admit she’d meant a nap.

  Jenna took the journal back, flipped the page, and added something to Piper’s supposedly secret list:

  —Get laid.

  Then she drew an arrow pointing at Hot Guy, who nodded in approval. “Now you’ve got a list.”

  “Keep dreaming, buddy,” she said before turning back to Jenna. “And you. Are you kidding me? You wrote that in ink.” Which meant it couldn’t be erased. And Piper couldn’t rip it out either. She couldn’t just rip out a page from a bullet journal, it went against how she’d been coded. She supposed she should be grateful Jenna hadn’t turned to the next page and revealed her secret secret bucket list.

  “Don’t let her bad attitude scare you,” Jenna said to Hot Guy. “She’s all bark and no bite.”

  “I like bite,” Hot Guy said, and his and Piper’s eyes locked again. His were an intense, assessing hazel, a swirling, mesmerizing mix of green, brown, and gold. He was good looking, but so were a lot of men. He was leanly muscled—also not all that uncommon. But he had a way about him that created an odd fluttering in her belly. It took her a long moment to recognize it for what it was—excitement. Which made no sense. None. Zero. Zip. She wasn’t looking for anything, and he . . . well, he was obviously both sharp and witty, but his eyes seemed . . . hollow, and he hadn’t cracked a smile.