Tied Up in Knots (Marshals 3)

“You should go,” I said, refusing to meet his eyes, even as close as we were. That intimacy was reserved solely for Ian. “They’ll shoot you on sight.”

“Such care for my well-being,” he mused before he leaned in and kissed me.

His tongue slipped between my lips, rubbing gently over mine as his hand fisted in my hair, holding me tight and still as his mouth took possession of me, fitting us together like long-lost puzzle pieces.

When I was a police detective, I’d once questioned a high-end call girl in a murder investigation, and because we were there late, I went out and got her good coffee and we’d talked about other things besides her dead drug-dealer boyfriend/pimp. She had told me that, much like in the movie Pretty Woman, kissing was actually much more intimate than fucking.

“You can fake intercourse,” she told me. “You can fake an orgasm and everything else in bed, but with kissing… you can’t. With kissing, you’re right there, eye to eye, cheek to cheek, and if you don’t feel anything, your hands don’t automatically reach out to grab and hold. The opposite is true and you want to push away—get away.”

I had listened and she’d smiled.

“You can’t fake a kiss. If you don’t want it, it’s a dead thing, and there’s only cold and that terrible awful fear in the pit of your stomach that the other person will know and feel your disregard.” She had slipped her bird-boned hand around my wrist. “A kiss from a man you don’t want is a disgusting press of flesh and spit and his taste on your tongue chills you to the bone. Never do it, darling. Only kiss men you love or at least want in your bed.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I swear.”

I’d kept my promise to that woman I’d never seen again. Kept it until now.

It was exactly as she said it would be. It was like kissing a corpse, and my heart hurt with the horror of the act.

But things were a jumble in my head.

I was terrified of Hartley, but he’d just saved me. Thoughts of him near me, holding me, woke me nightly from a dead sleep in a cold sweat. The only thing that kept memories of him away was sleeping with Ian, but Ian was gone more than he was around lately, which wasn’t his fault, and I had to learn to live with that and not blame him, but….

Hartley was here. He was the dreaded thing. He was the monster in all my nightmares and was responsible for me getting no amount of meaningful sleep and my half-ass functioning zombie state, but… he was here.

The gun gave me my out. The gun said I had no choice but to comply with his wishes. I’d bury this feeling that I was going to show the psychopath only because he was really good at keeping secrets.

I cupped his face again, my warm breath puffing over his skin before I kissed him, hard, grinding my mouth over his, sucking on his tongue, giving him more of me in that moment than I ever had, showing him the dark places that I was normally so careful to hide.

I’d been abandoned my whole life, and trust came so hard. Lately I’d fooled myself that the guy on the outside, the happy-go-lucky guy, was me. I’d pulled the girls into my life in college on a fluke. Janet was first and I’d acted without thinking, and there she was, firmly planted in my life before I even realized the friendship had taken root. I’d changed, not so mercenary with my attention and affection until finally I realized it was love. Each of them I loved, but not romantically, never the drowning, devouring, soul-mate kind of love that was supposedly waiting for everyone on the planet that, combined with sex, was like heaven on earth.

Until Ian.

I could actually feel my heart beating sometimes when Ian walked with me. I could feel the reverberation of his footsteps inside me because he was mine, my love.

I’d thought if I was in love, everything else was easy and fixable and good.

The reality was that I needed Ian where I could see him. The idea of him was not enough, and instead of hiding from that, I had to face it head-on. It would hurt if we parted, but it was better than taking what I needed from a psychotic madman who would kill me if he could.

Wrenching away from Hartley, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, horrified and ashamed.

He took a step forward and I braced for a fight without thought.

“You’re ravenous inside.”

I was, and he saw it, felt it. There was no lying.

He licked his lips. “I’ve changed my mind.”

I couldn’t speak yet, too shaken, too guilty.