Fit to Be Tied

by Mary Calmes

  His arms slid around my back as he leaned into the kiss, his tongue seeking entrance that I happily conceded.

  The doorbell ringing was the only thing that kept us vertical. It bothered me that, on the way down the stairs, Ian drew his gun and called through the door instead of just opening it. I hated that we had to be on guard in our neighborhood, in our home.

  “It’s clear,” Ian let me know as he opened the door. “Finish packing.”

  I did as I was told, and minutes later Ian thumped up the stairs, chuckling.

  “What’s funny?”

  He lifted his head to look at me, and I was struck by the sight of my beautiful man and his crinkly-eyed smile. Sometimes he simply took my breath away.

  “Your alias,” he said, laughing, holding up the ID for me.

  “Smith?” I read indignantly.

  “Because you’re Jones now!” He broke into raucous laughter, finding the whole thing much funnier than it was.

  “Who has the small brain?” I asked pointedly.

  He would have responded, but his phone rang. I went back to packing while he answered, realizing it was a bit more difficult than I’d thought it would be. After a second I caught a scrap of the conversation.

  “I’m sorry. Would you repeat that, sir?”

  Kage.

  Shit.

  I swallowed quickly and then turned to Ian. Even from across the room, I could see him staring daggers at me.

  Fuck.

  “I understand, sir,” he said as his free hand balled into a fist.

  I really wouldn’t have to worry about Hartley anymore, because Ian was going to be the one to kill me. He pivoted to face the wall and drove his fist into it like a sledgehammer. It rattled the armoire beside it.

  Slowly, as to not arouse suspicion because I didn’t want him to run after me, I started backing out of the room. As I heard him wrapping up, I quickened my pace.

  “Miro!” he roared the second the call ended.

  It was not a “run for cover” yell or in any way cautionary. He was pissed.

  I decided the better part of valor was to lock myself in the bathroom and was actually impressed that the door held when he kicked it. Although all the doors in our place were solid wood, so I should have had a bit more faith.

  “Open this fuckin’ door!” he demanded, kicking it again for emphasis.

  “Why’re you mad?”

  “Because you talked to Kage and asked him to make me stay here!”

  “As I said,” I replied softly, hoping that if I sounded calm, he would become so. “All I was thinking of was you getting hurt, and it kills me even to think about.”

  He banged the door. “The only time I don’t wanna be around you is when I’m deployed, yeah? Otherwise, asshole, I wanna be with you.”

  “I feel the same,” I said, loud enough so he could hear me from where he was on the other side.

  “Well, then,” he coughed, “stop trying to ditch me.”

  “But that’s not what we’re talking about,” I qualified. “I cannot, will not, have you hurt, and I don’t see how you expect me to change that.”

  It got quiet, so much so that I would have thought he’d walked away if I didn’t know better.

  “Miro.”

  Even through the barrier between us, I heard the change in his voice. He wasn’t mad anymore. The emotion was gone, replaced by something else altogether.

  “Love, open the door.”

  Love.

  It was crazy. Every drop of air should not have left my body just because Ian Doyle called me something that wasn’t some part of my name.

  And mean it—love—because he did.

  I heard it in his tone; it was gentle and possessive and I knew I was being oversentimental and vulnerable because a psychopath was after me, but still… Ian called me his love, and it was dear and sexy and very, very hot.

  It was a wonder I didn’t combust.

  Love.

  God, who knew I was such a sap?

  “Please.”

  The growl with just a hint of delicious, seductive evil, the languorous timbre of curling smoke and slow-poured whiskey made me whimper in spite of myself.

  “Please, love, open the door.”

  “You’re not playing fair, and since when?”

  “Since when what?” he answered, his voice so decadently gruff that it was no surprise at all that my dick responded before my brain kicked in.

  “Love—” I repeated, “—I doh-don’t—” Shit. “You’re not—you… no endearments.” I gave up. Talking was not happening at the moment.

  “I’ll call you whatever I damn well want to. Now open the door.”

  “Ian,” I managed to get out, fingers splayed on the wood as I tried to focus on what I was trying to do and not what I wanted.

  “Do you know what it’ll do to me if you keep me from going with you?”

  That had actually never occurred to me. I’d been so wrapped up in wanting to keep him safe that I had not considered how he felt.

  Not once.

  “What if—”

  “Is that what we do?” he pressed, and I heard him bump the door. “We sit around and think about what could happen?”

  No, we didn’t. That would be the death of us as lovers, partners, marshals—everything. Worrying led to a life of static and I didn’t want that for either of us.

  “So because you’re scared, we’ll be apart.” It was a statement, but the sound of him, seductive, silvery, sent a throb of need rushing through me. “And on top of everything else, you’ll miss me, and it’ll be you deciding, finally, what I will or won’t do.”

  I wanted to see him, but I didn’t dare open the door. He had me if I did. “That’s not what this is.”

  “Oh no? Because it feels like you exercising power over me.”

  Shit.

  “And you’re not like that,” he concluded softly. “How could you be?”

  “Ian—”

  “It’s how I know you really love me,” he said, clearing his throat. “You don’t try and change me.”

  I scoffed.

  “Except for that one thing,” he chuckled.

  I smiled wide, alone in the bathroom because, yeah, I wasn’t about to let the marriage thing go. “Okay,” I agreed. Being without him when I didn’t have to be was just plain stupid. I was a lot of things, but not that. Plus, saying no to Ian had always been next to impossible.

  A moment ticked by.

  “You gonna open the fuckin’ door?”

  “Don’t sound so smug,” I shot back.

  “Open the door,” he demanded. “I wanna kiss you before we gotta catch the red-eye.”

  I couldn’t say no to that, either.

  “HOLY SHIT,” Ian groaned as we got off the shuttle that had taken us from the airport terminal at Sky Harbor International in Phoenix to the one where all the rental car companies were. It was only a circle of pavement, a stone sidewalk, and a glass building, deserted at this time of the morning. We were the only ones out there after the shuttle dropped us off. It was also hot, and I was surprised the temperature was already so high. “This is like fuckin’ AT out in Twentynine Palms all over again.”

  I chuckled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and what is AT?”

  “Annual training,” he muttered before he put on his aviator sunglasses.

  “And Twentynine Palms is what?”

  “It’s a hellhole in California towards Nevada, but the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center is there, and that’s the important thing.”

  “Oh, you train there with them.”

  He nodded. “Sadly, yes.”

  “So, what, the temperature reminds you of it?”

  “Everything does,” he grumbled. “The dirt I can see over there, the rocks, the cactus—God, I hate the fuckin’ desert.”

  “You didn’t have to come.”

  “The hell I didn’t,” he retorted.

  I threw an arm around his shoulders
, pulling him toward me, and sank my fingers into his hair. “It’s not that bad, and it’s really not that hot.”

  He muttered something about me needing a psych eval, and I couldn’t stifle a laugh.

  “We’re in the shade and it’s hot,” he complained. “It’s like standing in an oven all day.”

  “If you hate the heat so much,” I teased him, nuzzling my face into the side of his neck, “you seriously should have stayed home.”

  “I already told—what’re you doing?”

  I was always looking for that one scent I would love and wear forever. I spent money on cologne. It wasn’t like I was forever haunting the mall, but if I was there, I checked. Ian, on the other hand, used stuff he picked up in Chinatown that was dirt cheap, that he bought off the shelf at some place that also sold supplements and herbs and seasonings. He didn’t buy anything to make him smell good. That didn’t even blip on his radar as something he needed to consider. He only bought the essentials—shampoo and conditioner, that had no English anywhere on either bottle—and something that he slathered on after he shaved to keep his face from hurting. I suspected it moisturized, but I would never tell him that. The thing was, his hair stuff plus the product—singular—he put in his hair, all of it together cost fifteen dollars. I knew because the last time he ran out of everything I’d gone with him to buy more. The man was stunning, so whatever he was using worked great, but the best part was the mixture of scents.

  Holy God, he smelled good.

  Whenever I got close to him I inhaled citrus and vetiver with hints of sandalwood and amber, cedar, and leather. All of it together made me want to lick him all over.

  “M?” He chuckled as I breathed him in at the same time I sucked the spot behind his ear.

  “You smell so good,” I almost mewled.

  “I smell like sweat,” he grumbled, but I could hear the begrudging rumble of happiness. Me wanting him turned him on big-time. “Come on. Let’s go get the car so we can first report in and then figure out where we’re staying. We need a bed.”

  We did, it was true.

  Half an hour later, we had the Toyota Sequoia and Ian drove us out of the parking garage, heading toward the street. The temperature on the dash read 101, but I was pretty sure that was because the asphalt was absorbing all the heat. I was interested to know how people drove in the summer and wondered if they slipped on a pair of oven mitts to be able to touch the steering wheel.

  “Where are we going?” Ian asked irritably.

  “Okay, so right now we’re on East Sky Harbor Boulevard, and you’re gonna want to take a right onto I-10 in like a minute.”

  “Then what?”

  “Do you know that in the summer they cook eggs on the sidewalk out here?”

  “Shut up. What do I do once I’m on the freeway?”

  “Oh, are you there already?”

  “This is me driving.”

  True. “Okay, so then you’re gonna take the 7th Avenue exit, which is exit 144.”

  “Roger that—now what?”

  “Okay, now you’re gonna take the 7th Avenue ramp south, and you’re staying on that until you take a left onto Jefferson. It says the courthouse is on Washington just east of 7th, and by the way, it’s dubbed the ‘Solar Oven.’”

  “Oh fuck you,” he growled.

  I cackled. “In the summer, they let people who work there, security and stuff like that, wear short-sleeve shirts.”

  “They do not.”

  “They do, but now it’s not as bad.”

  “It’s a fuckin’ blast furnace out here,” he complained, gesturing to the temperature displayed on the dash. It read 92 degrees. “It’s October, for crissakes.”

  “Yeah, but look, it already dropped nine degrees from when we got in the car.”

  “You think your body can actually tell the difference between ninety degrees and a hundred degrees?”

  Perhaps not. “You know, Kage told me before we left the office that when he was on a task force here once that he and the other guys said it’s like a giant greenhouse from hell.”

  Nothing for a moment before he turned to me. “Are you fucking with me?”

  The look on his face was priceless.

  “That’s what he said?”

  “He says it’s like being in the devil’s terrarium.”

  Ian groaned and I died.

  Died.

  I laughed so hard I couldn’t even breathe.

  “Can you please pull your shit together?”

  It took several minutes, because having to leave home because there was a psychopath after me was scary, but Ian was with me, so it was sort of like a vacation. All in all, I was feeling a bit unbalanced.

  “He said”—I wiped at my eyes, still chuckling—“that it’s all glass when you walk in, and in the summer it’s like being in a sweatbox, and it’s not much better in the winter.”

  “That’s because during October here, it’s still ninety-two fuckin’ degrees!”

  “I bet it doesn’t cool down at night, either,” I mentioned. “Look at all this concrete.”

  At first, we didn’t find parking anywhere near the building. It was all blocked off. But Ian finally saw what looked like a gated area and drove around behind it, and sure enough, that was where the people who worked there parked.

  We had to stop and show the guard our badges and IDs before we were finally allowed into the atrium. And our boss was right: gorgeous building, all steel and glass, and hotter than hell. Outside, it was like standing in the blast of a blow dryer set to crispy, but inside, for whatever reason, it was hot and humid.

  “This is like Chicago in July,” Ian moaned.

  “And yet back outside, it’s a dry heat.”

  “I wanna go home.”

  The people working the coffee kiosk and some others wore shorts and T-shirts—some even in tank tops—and I got it, I did. If they were dressed like most people you saw inside a federal courthouse, they’d melt. It was hot inside the atrium, and I wondered if, as winter rolled around, it got cold inside and held that temperature too?

  At the security station, we got out our badges and IDs again, passed the guns over, and were finally admitted. Before we could head up to the second floor, though, one of the deputy US marshals we had just spoken to made clear that we were supposed to report to the security director of the court and that he was in the Central Court Building, which was not where we were now. We needed to go back outside and walk a bit.

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “We’re not reporting to Security Administration & Operations. We’re reporting to a task force.”

  “Oh.” He seemed startled. “You don’t do court security?”

  “Not as our main job,” Ian said. “We’re not security officers, we’re inspectors.”

  It was a gray area.

  Kage had us both coded as deputy US marshals, but technically, as neither of us supervised anyone and because we worked with WITSEC as well as with the organized crime units and drug enforcement, we were inspectors. It was only important when we left home, because it let other marshals know what we could be counted on to do.

  “Oh, okay,” Padgett—his name tag read—was still surprised. “I didn’t know we had any openings currently.”

  “You don’t,” I said quickly. “We’re on loan, we’re not here to stay.”

  He seemed relieved, and I understood. If you were in court security, you wanted to move up, to get into the field, to be Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, even though the issues with that flick were endless. It was the same with all kinds of TV shows and movies; it was impossible to get every little detail right. I had dated a sailor once who explained in excruciating detail all the things that were wrong with The Hunt for Red October and he thought that I should turn it off and hate it on general principle because of those inconsistencies. He went home and there was no second date. I loved what I loved, and whether or not it was wrong changed nothing.

  “We’re going to the second
floor, right?” Ian asked, returning my thoughts to the task at hand, that of us finding out whom we reported to. We had a name, Brooks Latham, and that was all. “That’s what we were told.”

  “Yeah, you can take the elevator or the stairs,” Padgett replied amiably.

  Amazing how nice people were when they knew you weren’t after their job.

  As soon as we reached Latham’s office, I realized considering all the people in the room, all the different white boards, and the configuration of the clustered desks, that we were looking at not a single task force, but many.

  “Help you?” a man asked as he strode over to us where we stood beside a cubicle wall.

  “I’m Morse,” Ian said quickly, “and this is Smith. We’re supposed to see Latham.”

  “Commander Latham,” he corrected.

  “Commander Latham,” Ian parroted.

  “Let me get him.”

  We would not be invited into the main area until we had passed muster. And while I understood, at home we were never all about who had the biggest dick. We were a warm, welcoming bunch. Except for Ian.

  There was a shrill whistle, and we both looked up as an older man gestured at us from an office in the back.

  Ian groaned under his breath. “I love being called like a dog.”

  “At least it’s air-conditioned in here,” I offered, pointing out a plus.

  He was not impressed.

  Latham held the door open and closed it behind us, not moving, staring, taking us both in.

  “What kind of background do you guys have? I haven’t had time to read your sheets.”

  Ian described how we’d both been marshals for three years, told him I had been a police detective and that he was Army Special Forces.

  “You a Green Beret?”

  “Yessir.”

  He nodded, clearly in awe. “So you’re used to doing things by the book.”

  I was so proud of myself for not laughing my ass off.

  Latham turned to me. “The detective piece will help. This is a highly transient state, so running down people fast is important.”

  “We’ll do all we can to help, Commander,” I affirmed.

  “Excellent,” he responded, offering me and then Ian his hand. “Now let me tell you a little bit about how we work.”