Bachelors In Love

by Jestine Spooner

  She pursed her lips, as if she weren’t done being irritated that he’d almost lost his life for her. But she gave a nod as she cast her eyes over him again. “Very.”

  He grinned. But it was brief, and fell away as he took her hands in his. “Iris, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Actually I wanted to talk about it even when we were still in the Bahamas.”

  Her stomach flipped. “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” Marcus frowned as he brought her hands to his lips. He couldn’t help but tuck her into his side. How to say this? His heart galloped. “I made mistakes, Iris. On this whole operation. I was distracted and disoriented and I made mistakes.”

  Her stomach dropped even further as he continued on. “At first I thought it was because I was getting older.”

  “Thirty-five isn’t old, Marcus.”

  He flashed a quick, white smile down at her. “For a field agent who has seen more than his share of action, 35 is ancient.” He sighed. “But I realized that I wasn’t making mistakes because it was time to be put out to pasture. I realized I was making mistakes—”

  “Because of me,” she filled in for him, dread in every word.

  “Yeah. I was all wrapped up in you. Even before I realized I had feelings. I was way too concerned with your happiness. Not just your wellbeing, the way I would have been with anyone I was charged to protect. But your actual happiness. I wanted it. More than anything. More than I cared about the job. And that’s—that’s never happened to me before.” He paused and sighed hard. “Remember that damn orange? That first night? I think I was in trouble even then. You hadn’t even looked at me yet. I’ve never been this distracted or thrown off before.”

  Oh lord. In the back of her mind, Iris had known that this was a possibility. That Marcus would realize that there wasn’t room in his life for both the job and Iris. She knew that he was a very passionate man, one who defined himself by his career. But now that she was staring down the barrel of him choosing his career over her, Iris felt like she was on a bus with no brakes, careening toward a ravine.

  “Well,” she piped up, cutting him off as she sat straight up and shoved her hair back from her face. “I won’t be on any more cases with you. You know? I’ll be all safe and sound at home. So you won’t have to worry about me at all. You can just focus, focus, focus!” Her voice was high and tight and had him lifting an eyebrow. “And I won’t even bother you. And then you’ll come home and I’ll be here and that way you can just go ahead and have your cake and eat it too!”

  Marcus clapped his mouth closed, a little flummoxed at the high-pitched, furious word explosion that she’d just spewed everywhere. He was also a little unclear as to why there were tears filling her eyes again. Tears spilling over onto her cheeks. He brusquely brushed them away.

  “Iris, baby,” he said as gently as he could. “I don’t want that. I don’t want to live like that.”

  She sucked in a breath and her lip came with it. She practically tore that lip apart with her teeth before Marcus reached up with a thumb and tugged it free. And then, because he couldn’t resist, he leaned forward and kissed that lip.

  She trembled beneath him. “So, so, so you’re saying that…”

  He unhanded her and scraped a hand over his face, over the top of his head. “I’m saying that you weren’t distracting me because you were there with me. I’m saying you were distracting me because you were here with me.” He tapped a hand over his heart and Iris froze. “And that isn’t going to change whether you’re safe at home minding your own business or if you’re crouching over me, pointing a gun at the bad guys.”

  Marcus found he had to clear his throat before he could continue. “Iris, I’m saying that meeting you made my focus shift. I don’t care about work the way I used to because I have something else to care about.”

  Understanding dawned over her and it was like a sunrise and sunset all at once. He wasn’t saying that he needed her out of his life. He was saying that he wanted to change his entire life to keep her. Iris discovered in that moment that panic wasn’t a very choosy emotion, it could attach itself to damn near anything. Her mood swung the other way on the pendulum and she found herself crying for a totally different reason. “You don’t have to give up your job for me!”

  He chuckled and raised his eyes to the heavens. “I’m not. I’m telling you that I don’t want to leave you for weeks at a time. I don’t want to miss you like crazy for half my life. I don’t want to put myself in harm’s way, and know that you’re worrying about me the whole time. I just want to live here. With you.” He paused for a second. “And that dumb-ass kitchen rug that I bought. Do you like that thing? Because I was thinking of returning it.”

  “What? No! I love that rug. That was a little love letter from you to me.”

  His eyes softened. “Yeah. It was. How did you know that?”

  “Marcus, you told me in a hundred different ways how you felt about me. The entire time we’ve known one another. The only thing you didn’t do was tell me.”

  “Is that right?” he asked, pulling both of them down on the bed so that they lay on their sides, face to face. “Then you tell me, how do I feel about you?”

  Iris pulled her lips between her teeth out of habit, but when her eyes found Marcus’s, she realized that she wasn’t nervous. She didn’t have anything to be nervous about. “Well, first you just had a little shine for me. You liked it better when I was around. You liked my hair, the way I played the piano. And then you had a crush on me. One so big that it kinda hurt when I was around.” She grinned and he couldn’t help but grin right back. “But then, without even realizing that it was sneaking up on you, you loved me. No brakes, no u-turns, full on love.” The smile fell away from both of their faces and the moment was silent, stretching, and completely comfortable. “I know all that, because it’s exactly what happened to me. You love me and I- I love you.”

  He took her chin in his hand. “You love me and I love you,” he repeated before pressing his lips to hers. He tore his lips away after a minute.

  “Iris,” his voice was low and sounded pained. “I’m not rich. I hope you know that. But I work hard. And like I said, I’ll have steady work at the bureau for as long as I want it. A desk job. I talked to Jones. I might be able to train to be a handler. Or maybe I’ll work at the academy, teach the younger generation or something. But the bottom line is that we can fix this place up, however you want it. Or we can move. You’ll be the number one priority in my life, baby, but Eli and Jay and Ryan and Kat, they’re up there too.”

  “Your family,” she nodded. “Owen is the same for me.”

  Marcus nodded back, but he wasn’t done. “I’ll always keep you safe. Protect you, with my life if I have to. But I can be a difficult man, I—”

  She silenced him with her mouth on his, laughing right into him. “I know all that, Marcus. Just like you should know that I play music at all hours of the night and day. And that we’ll probably have to move to a bigger place because I’ll be bringing all my instruments from Pennsylvania.”

  “How many do you have?”

  She thought for a minute. “Fifty or so?”

  “Fifty?!”

  She laughed as Marcus groaned, raking a hand over his face.”

  “Baby,” he said. “We can’t afford that kind of space. But maybe you can leave some at Eli’s house or something—”

  “Also, I’m kind of a millionaire. Ess. Millionaress.”

  Marcus was perfectly speechless for going on a full minute. “Are you kidding me?” was what he finally came up with.

  Iris grinned and kissed him again. “Nope. Owen’s music made both of us a lot of money. And unlike him, I’m a very frugal person. Of course I’m gonna have to pay you back for everything you’ve bought for me and—”

  “No.” They couldn’t stop cutting each other off, with their words or their kisses.

  “Oh!” Iris said as she pulled back from nibbling on Marcus’s lower lip. “And one mor
e thing.”

  “What’s that?” he murmured, his eyes gone heavy lidded and his blood zinging in his veins as he held her so close.

  “I want to ask Eli if we can live at the beach house at least a month or two out of every year.” She looked up at him with those huge, ice blue eyes. “It’s kind of my favorite place on Earth.”

  He rolled her so that they fit together like spoons, but it wasn’t innocent. Iris found his frisky hands doing some very frisky things between her legs. “Well, you’re kind of my favorite person on Earth,” he murmured against the skin on her neck as he slipped her underwear down her legs, pressed against her from behind.

  “Marcus,” she whispered, though her words were warm and lazy. “We shouldn’t, you’re still recovering.”

  “Mmmmm,” he grumbled into her hair as one of his hands slipped underneath her t-shirt. “We’ll go slow, baby.” He pressed inside her and she didn’t have a single thing to say to protest, all she could do was revel in the feel of him, in her body and in her heart.

  You love me and I love you.

  It echoed in both of them.

  “We’ll go slow, baby,” he murmured again.

  And they did.

  EPILOGUE

  4 YEARS LATER

  “Andrés Brady! Si quieres vivir, then you better get your little butt back in here and clear the dang table!” Jay’s English and Spanish mixed together, the way they usually did, as he chased his six-year-old son out onto Eli’s back patio.

  When he caught him, he executed a brutal, relentless tickle torture that had the little black-haired boy gasping with hysterical laughter and tapping one hand over and over on the wood of the deck. “Okay, Papá. Okay!”

  Mari grinned from where she sat with her feet propped up in the living room as her son trumped past, his cheeks still rosy from the laughter. His father came through just a second later and flopped onto the couch next to her.

  “You’re such a tough guy,” she told Jay, bringing him in for a kiss.

  “Somebody has to lay down the law on that kid,” Jay said, smacking the back of one hand down onto the palm of the other. Andrés, hearing the comment as he walked past, stuck out his tongue and shook his booty, his hands full of plates and glasses.

  Both parents winced as one of those glasses wobbled precariously, but they didn’t say anything. Live and learn. That was their parenting style. Jay watched their son disappear through the swinging door of Eli’s kitchen, into the crowd of people in there, and he absently rubbed a hand over his wife’s quickly ballooning belly.

  “I talked to him again today,” Jay said quietly. “About the baby.”

  Mari nodded. “I did too. I think he’s starting to get it more. But I don’t think we’ll really know how he’s taking it until the baby is here. And real.”

  Jay dropped his lips to her belly. “Shit, I still can’t believe this baby is real.”

  After many long conversations, Mari and Jay had decided that adopting was the best option for them. Andrés had come into their lives at age three, and they couldn’t love him more. They’d both felt their family was complete. And then Mari had realized that she was pregnant. And then it had become very clear how much further their hearts were capable of expanding. All a little worried about how Andrés would handle having a sibling, the entire group was working little by little to make sure he was comfortable. It didn’t hurt that he already had a little cousin who he loved to distraction.

  Just then a little black-haired, blue-eyed girl squealed as she raced out the swinging kitchen door, just barely avoiding Andrés’s wiggling fingers. He’d been tortured by the tickle, and now he was looking for a victim of his own.

  “Hey!” Marcus barked as he followed them out of the kitchen. The intensity of his voice had both kids freezing. “Take it out back, you hooligans.” He reached down and grabbed Lily, his three-year-old daughter by the back of her long blue dress. “There’s a loaded supersoaker over by the swing set,” he whispered in her ear before puckering his lips up for a kiss. She carefully planted a little peck on his lips and then turned and ran like the hunted out into the backyard, Andrés hot on her heals.

  “Hey!” Marcus barked again in the exact same tone as he rose up and saw Tia carrying a tray of after-dinner coffee out of the kitchen. “Gimme that! You know you shouldn’t be doing that.”

  “You don’t scare me,” she glowered at Marcus, but handed the tray over to him as she waddled over to the couch to sit beside Mari. It was only the second trimester but her back was sure killing her.

  Marcus set the tray down on the coffee table, peeked out the back window to check on the kids, and slipped back into the kitchen. Eli was just coming through and barely avoided the swinging door.

  He stopped still when he saw Tia, feet propped up and head laid back, she’d begun to show and it thrilled him. Seeing her grow bigger was better than the Superbowl. “Twins,” he muttered, shaking his head from side to side as he came to sit at her feet.

  “Yes, twins,” Tia groaned as she shifted to get comfortable. “How many times are you gonna say that?”

  “As many times as it takes to get used to it, I guess,” Eli said, tipping his head back on her knees so that he could see her.

  “When are you gonna make an honest woman out of her, dude?” Jay asked, slipping an arm around his wife.

  Eli and Tia still hadn’t tied the knot. They’d been together the longest out of all of them and engaged for years. But both of them got such a kick out of being boyfriend and girlfriend. It was such a high school thing to be, and they hadn’t gotten to do it in high school.

  Tia shrugged. “Now we’re thinking that we’ll want the twins to be in the ceremony, so maybe in a couple years, when they can walk.”

  Iris groaned as she came out of the kitchen with a plate of cookies in her hand. “Are you kidding? You’re gonna make me wait even longer? I’ve had this damn speech prepared for years!”

  Her blonde hair was long and down her back again, she had a nice tan from the six weeks she and Marcus and Lily had just spent at the beach house.

  “What speech?” Marcus asked, pretending he wasn’t hovering at Ryan’s side as the older man crutched his way out into the living room. He’d tripped over a curb in the grocery store parking lot a few weeks ago and broken his ankle.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Ryan grumbled, but he didn’t bat away Marcus’s hand on his elbow. If there was one thing Ryan had learned throughout his life, it was that sometimes, you just had to let family take care of you. He plunked down in an armchair that he knew would be big enough for Kat to sit with him.

  “The speech I so desperately wanna give at their wedding,” Iris explained, jabbing a thumb toward Tia and Eli as Marcus yanked her down onto his lap. It didn’t matter how much seating was available, Marcus always insisted that she sit in his lap. They both liked it best that way.

  Last but not least, Kat and Owen came out of the kitchen. She’d taken him under her wing ever since that day in the Bahamas. The last four years hadn’t been easy for Owen, the scarring was worse than ever. But he had family. For the first time in his life, his family involved more than one person. Owen tried not to sigh as he looked around at all the happy couples. Kat plunked down in the seat next to Ryan and Owen stretched out on the floor, his good side facing the group. He didn’t know if he’d ever forgive himself for what he’d done. But something was changing inside of him. Something that had once been hardened and bitter was softening. He was terrified that it was his heart. He was terrified that he was starting to yearn for what all the people around him had. Not that love was necessarily terrifying, but the thought of looking for it was. Because who could ever love a man who looked like him? He rubbed an absent hand over his scarring at the same moment that Kat picked up the thread of the conversation.

  “Well, Iris, if you’re so desperate to give that speech, you could just change the names and give it at our wedding,” Kat said, slipping an arm around Ryan’s shoulders.
His mouth was dropped open. They’d said they’d tell the kids today, but he hadn’t thought it would be like this.

  “What!?” Three men jumped to their feet in unison, jostling their three women as they raced toward Kat and Ryan.

  Kat and Ryan grinned as Eli, Jay and Marcus’s arms wrapped around them, and then one another. Eli wiped tears from his eyes as Marcus heartily kissed Kat, then Mari, and then passionately kissed Iris.

  Jay hugged the heck out of his mother, and then his adoptive father.

  “Hey, you two!” Tia called out the back door to the soaking wet kids. “Come on in here, Grandma and Grandpa have some news for you.” They hesitated. “And there’s cookies.”

  The kids bolted toward the house.

  And then her eyes went to Eli and Marcus and Jay. So did Mari’s eyes. And so did Iris’s. The three men laughed and slapped one another on the back and hugged. The marriage of their parents was a symbol to them. A formal union of a family that had always existed.

  Marcus looked up just as his daughter bolted into his wife’s arms, the two of them snuggled together. He couldn’t believe that this was what happiness felt like. He couldn’t believe how much family he had.

  ~~~