by Mary Calmes
“Ian,” I said, taking a breath so I wouldn’t say something wrong. “I—”
“You know what the worst part of this is?” he asked, heat in his tone. “I don’t think you even realize that you already are a father.”
“To who?” I asked sharply.
“Well, for starters, to Josue and Cabot and Drake.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Ian, I—”
“No, you come on! You have any idea what it’s like for me to watch you bring home strays? I mean, Jesus, Miro, why do you keep doing that? Where’s that compulsion come from?”
“From a place of caring? From being a decent human being?”
“Don’t gimme that,” he snapped. “We’re not talking about having Sharpe over after he and his girl broke up, or babysitting for Liam and Aruna, or something like that. We’re talking about you not being able to separate yourself from people you meet on the job.”
“I had no idea this bothered you so much. I can stop having the boys over so you—”
“I’m not talking about the boys!” he yelled, arms flailing, flushed now, his voice shredded with emotion. “I like the boys! What I’m talking about is the precedent that you’ve already set.”
“I—”
“You have to nurture others. It’s part of who you are, and it’s one of the reasons I love you, but I thought that at home, I would be enough, but I’m not.”
“You’re more than enough,” I gasped, blindsided by his admission. He was everything! My whole life walking around in one person. How could he believe for a second he was not?
“I don’t mean… it, like… shit—what I mean is that you have to take care of more than just me. You have to take care of everyone.”
“But that’s not true.”
“That’s bullshit, and you knew it was the second it came out of your mouth.”
I shook my head because I wasn’t sure how to make him hear me.
“Listen, I don’t fuckin’ care about this right now, we can figure the kid part out later—”
“Ian, I’m not dying to be a father or—”
“Again, this is not my immediate concern,” he said, his voice rising ominously but not yelling, back to pacing. Apparently he was done shouting. “What I do care about is the fact that you are not going to work in Custodial WITSEC, and that’s final.”
I crossed my arms, watching him move back and forth like a caged animal. “Is that right?”
“Oh fuck yeah,” he warned, his voice all steely and honed.
“And why not?”
“I forbid it.”
I wasn’t certain I’d heard him right. “I thought you said you didn’t drink last night,” I challenged, half of me pissed he thought his word had suddenly become law, half of me mollified by knowing all of his bluster had to do with being scared to death that I would get my heart eviscerated every single day. It came from a place of love, but he was being an ass, and I had to get him out of protective mode and back to the rational man I knew.
“What?”
“I thought you said you—”
“I had two drinks to your nine or whatever,” he retorted, the judgment there in his cutting tone. “And what the hell does that have to do with the discussion we’re having right now?”
“Because clearly you’re drunk,” I apprised him, trying for playful, hoping maybe that would work.
“What did you say?” His voice went way up.
“Forbid me?” I repeated, shaking my head like he was nuts. “The hell is with that?”
“Miro.” He huffed a breath like I was trying his patience to no end, jolting to a stop in front of me. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious, and don’t treat me like an idiot.”
“Then please, love, stop acting like one,” he said softly, lulling, his tone, everything, shifting to coaxing, wanting me to hear him, to listen, and using the depth and resonance of his voice to soothe me.
“Ian—”
He shook his head. “You’re not listening to me, and you’re hearing it like an attack, and it’s not,” he said, shivering with the emotion, his hands trembling as he took a deep breath. “Please just listen to me.”
I took a step closer, but he took one back, hand up to keep me away from him as he turned and walked to the bed and sat down before lifting his eyes to me.
“We’re made different. You need more than just me to take care of, and I get that, I do. So when the boys trickled in, as Cabot and Drake got closer because we’re all they’ve got—I was okay with that. When you added Josue last year—again—made sense. But now you’re talking about going beyond the occasional witness pickup to being a surrogate father to hundreds of kids. I just don’t see how that ends well.”
“It won’t be like that,” I assured him, walking over to take a seat beside him. I got close, but I didn’t touch him, unsure if he would want that.
There was resignation now, almost like he was grieving, and honestly, that was worse. The fight in him had drained away, leaving only defeat. I almost preferred the yelling to Ian ever being hurt, and especially by me. “I think you’re being really naïve.”
He was killing me. “Ian—”
As he turned to face me, the sadness in his eyes made my stomach hurt. It hit me then that he was absolutely terrified.
“I’m not gonna leave you.”
He nodded, but I could tell from the response, automatic, that he didn’t believe me.
“Ian—”
“You have to imagine, for a second, what does our family become if you keep trying to add to it? And if you work in Custodial, will I ever see you again?”
“I—”
“No, you really need to think about this now,” he stressed, holding my gaze. “What does you working there do to us?”
It would be the same as what I did now. Yes, the things I did would be different, the people I saw, what I dealt with on a daily basis, but it would still just be me being a marshal. I shook my head. “I truly think you’re making too much of this.”
“No, I’m not. I don’t want anything to come between us. I picked you; I want you. If you persist with this, then you’re telling me that I’m not enough.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I bit off because, all of a sudden, this felt like blackmail. If I didn’t follow him to SOG or wherever else, then he was going to question my commitment to him? It was ludicrous! I was in love with him, but I knew where my strengths lay, and they were not in kicking down doors and arresting people. “Ian, you need to—”
“No, think about it. I want to do a job. We can stay like we are, investigators working for Kage, or we can both go to SOG. Either way, those jobs stop at the end of the day. If you’re in Custodial, does that stop?”
He was basically telling me what he thought I should do with my life. It was arrogant and hurtful and blind… but I knew it was coming from a place of loss. Ian had lost his father to divorce, his mother to death, had just made a huge choice to leave the Army, and now, if he didn’t have me—his husband—then what was left? So I had to reassure him while sticking to my guns at the same time.
“Of course it stops.”
“No, I don’t think so. I know you. You’re going to be thinking about the kids, about saving them, about fixing things for them all the time.”
“Ian—”
“I left the Army to be here with you, home with you, and be your partner at work. If we’re not partners anymore and I don’t get to see you because you’re going to be putting in ridiculous hours, then what was the point? Tell me what the point was.”
“The point was that we’re together, and you’re home and—”
His phone buzzed on the nightstand, and after a few beats of pained silence, he got up and walked around the bed to check it because we were required to. After reading the display, he picked it up and answered. “Morning, sir.”
I watched him listen, saw him furrow his brows as he slowly drew himself up, all the rippling apprehension
that had drained away back in seconds, the strain easy to read on his scrunched-up features. In the past I would have thought he was about to be deployed, the call coming in to get his gear and head for the airport. But Ian had dropped his retirement packet, so he no longer went out on missions, just had to do his drills one weekend a month and two weeks’ AT in the summer. But the rigid stance I saw couldn’t be military, and so had to be something else.
“Yessir, we’ll be right there,” he said and then disconnected the call and turned to me.
“What?”
“This discussion isn’t over, but Kage wants us downtown now.”
I nodded.
He charged back around the bed, and I stood fast so that the second I could reach him, I reeled him into my arms. Wrapping him up tight, I pressed my face against his shoulder and simply inhaled, loving the fresh, clean detergent and fabric softener smell of his clothes, along with the trace of lime from the shampoo he used, and the vetiver and cedarwood from the skin balm he smoothed over his face every morning.
There was a truth here I needed to be smart about. Nothing was more important that Ian. I made him a promise the day we exchanged rings, and that was bigger than anything else. Remembering how it was when he was deployed, how I was, how lonely and untethered it made me, how I ached for him body and soul, made it even more obvious.
“I thought wherever I go, Miro goes. It was never a question.” Ian sighed, leaning his head on mine, holding me as fiercely as I was him. “I know that was an assumption, but—”
“No,” I insisted, even though I knew that in a way, he was right. It was an assumption, and truthfully, a wrong one. Because we didn’t have to do the same job to be together, and in that respect, he needed a reality check. We had completely different strengths, and what I was good at and what he was good at might not work on the same team. But there was one absolute, and I needed him to know. “I won’t sacrifice us for any job, Ian. I swear to you I won’t.”
“I don’t think that’s a promise you can keep,” he murmured before kissing my cheek and resting his forehead against mine so we were breathing the same air.
Taking the job or not had just become a much bigger decision than I ever imagined.
BY THE time we got downtown to the Federal building, I was stewing. It had occurred to me while Ian drove that, had he been with me when I got hurt, and had he seen Wen at the hospital and then gone to Cullen’s office with us, maybe he would have said something right then. And if he had spoken up when Kage was thinking about me in the director’s role, then perhaps Kage would have rethought his position, and none of this would have ever been an issue. Not that I didn’t want to help kids, not that this wasn’t the place for me, but maybe Ian could have stopped the whole cycle from starting.
On the other hand, had he done that, I might have died of humiliation right there, assuming Kage even let Ian get a word in, which was a stretch. I couldn’t imagine Kage letting anyone but that individual make decisions for himself.
The fact of the matter was, because Ian wasn’t there, he was coming late to the party after I had already given my word, and now everything was a huge fucking mess.
I slammed the passenger-side door to the truck and started toward the entrance to the building without looking at him. Ian caught me easily, grabbing my bicep and spinning me around to face him.
“What?”
He scowled instantly. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I shook my head. “It won’t fix anything.”
“Why’re you pissed at me?”
Really, the balls on the man, holy shit. “No,” I said, slipping around him to again head for the underground entrance.
“No?”
“I am not doing this when we’re about to go up in the goddamn elevator.”
He caught up to me easily, cutting in front of me, and when I went to walk by him again, he barred my path and put his hands on my hips under my John Varvatos suit jacket.
“I’m not stupid,” he said huskily, staring into my eyes. “I know if I’d been there yesterday that I could have said something to you—or even Kage—before this went down.”
Easing free of his hold, I stepped back and crossed my arms as I regarded him. “I was just thinking about that, and really, you would’ve said something to Kage when he was in fixer mode? Is that what you’re telling me?”
He was thinking about that, I could tell from the squint.
“When he gets all barky with the orders, and when he snaps all his words?”
The grimace was telling. No one I knew said a word when Kage turned into a steamroller. None of us had the balls.
“I’m just scared, all right?” he rasped, voice cracking. “We just locked this thing down, and I don’t want anything to fuck it up.”
“I don’t either, but you know how you’ve been saying that you want us together at work?”
“I do want that.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “but your actions don’t really convey that, right?”
“How do you mean?”
“Ian” was all I said.
He was quiet a moment before I got the grunt that told me he’d figured it out. “I have been spending a lot of time with SOG instead of backing you up.”
“Which is fine.”
“Except not yesterday.”
“That was a one-off. Doesn’t happen every day.”
“Yeah, but here I am telling you I want us to stay partners, and… I can see where I’d come off a bit hypocritical.”
It was one of Ian’s best qualities, his own self-awareness, given a little time.
“But SOG needs me,” he countered, still scowling. “They need us.”
“They need somebody to take charge, I’ll give you that, but I actually think you’re more qualified than is necessary, and I‘d be no help to them at all. Think about me there. Can you even see it?”
“Yes,” he said, crossing his arms as I dropped mine.
“Really?” I asked, taking hold of his biceps. “Ian?”
His growl made me smile. It was impossible for him not to see my side of an argument, had always been that way. He just needed time. And not that things were fixed—they were not, he was still scared—but I saw the thaw in his icy gaze.
“Yeah, well, maybe you can do some thinking for yourself.”
“Oh?” I taunted. “Can I?”
“You don’t have to be all—I mean, I can see where I could’ve come off like a dick.”
He wasn’t sorry, he wasn’t apologizing, but he had put himself in my place and saw himself from my perspective, and really, it was impressive.
“When you scare me, though, I can’t think.”
And I knew that too.
I held his gaze, marveling as I always did over the color. Every now and then, I was still amazed I had fallen in love with my best friend and that he’d fallen for me right back.
“I’m just—”
“Worried,” I offered, moving him back and forth a bit because I really wanted to shake him violently until he saw the truth of the situation. Because yes, I could be a bleeding heart, and most assuredly I was going to get hurt… but it would be okay because I had him to go home to every night. Wasn’t that the whole point of a marriage, of a union, to begin with? Having a partner who could strip away all the bullshit from your day, make you feel loved, help you enjoy life, and create a sanctuary that let you breathe? “But won’t you be there to pick up the pieces?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that what you signed on for?”
He nodded.
“Well, then.”
He searched my face a moment before leaning in and brushing a light kiss over my lips. It was fast, barely there, and then he took hold of my hand to tug me after him. Ian being possessive of me after we had any kind of disagreement was a usual occurrence, and since I liked it and it gave him comfort, I followed along behind him without another word.
Once the elevator hit the lobby, we had to mo
ve to the back of the car, and as more and more people crammed in, I found myself wedged into the corner with Ian in front of me, his broad, muscular back pressed to my chest as he stood there solid and strong where I knew he wanted to be, between me and everyone else. I would have grabbed him and hugged him if we’d been alone, would have let my head fall between his shoulder blades, would have simply kissed the back of his neck if we weren’t at work. And it hit me that was true for any two people who worked together in a professional setting, and there was something sweet and secret about our situation. As the elevator climbed floor after floor and became less and less crowded, I couldn’t help but give Ian’s hand a quick squeeze before he stepped away from me.
At our floor, we stepped out, and I immediately saw Kage was in the middle of the office—at Ian’s desk, actually, perched on the edge of it, addressing the room. Five men stood off to the side, and I thought at first glance I didn’t know any of them until I looked closer and saw that I did.
When I first met Josiah Redeker in the terminal of the Vegas airport, I thought he looked like a guy who ran a bar or belonged in a motorcycle gang. I’d been binge-watching Sons of Anarchy while Ian was deployed, so that was probably why that thought tumbled into my head. But as I got to know him over the course of a couple of days, I realized that under the carelessly kept surface was a man with laser focus and the ability to adapt quickly to any given situation.
He, like Ian, could go from complete stillness to an explosion of motion in seconds. There was also the whiff of loner that came off him, a sort of wandering cowboy quality complete with a gleam of danger in his dark eyes that was terribly appealing. There was no denying his masculine beauty, and I completely understood why his partner had it so bad. The fact that Bodhi Callahan was not standing beside him concerned me. If Redeker was in Chicago alone, the fallout must have been bad when Bodhi confessed his feelings. The last I knew, I thought that was the plan, but perhaps that was wrong as well. I hadn’t followed up, so maybe they had just gone their separate ways. And maybe not. Maybe I was reading way too much into him being here alone, and nothing had occurred at all. I was going to find out, though, just as soon as possible.