Fit to Be Tied [Marshals: 2] (28 page)

He was so strong and powerful, his skin was like warm silk over steel, and when I was all the way inside him, buried, the second he moved, I felt my body flush with heat.

“You feel too good,” I warned him. “I’m gonna come.”

“Not yet,” he whispered, curling over me, hands fisted in the covers as he started to rock back and forth, rising and lowering, setting a gentle rhythm that quickly increased, eliciting a low moan from deep in my chest. “I need you.”

I knew what he needed. “If I can, if it’s up to me, I’ll always be here.”

“Right here,” he rasped as his muscles clenched around me, and I saw him visibly fighting to keep his orgasm at bay.

“Yes.”

“With me.”

“Yes.”

“I know we can’t promise,” he whispered, and I saw his jaw clench, his lips pressed in a tight, hard line.

“No,” I agreed, reaching to cup his cheek. “But we’ll try as hard as we can.”

His attention never left my face even as his movements became frenzied, riding me, not caring about anything but reaching his climax. He didn’t touch himself, and I couldn’t, capable only of grasping his thighs, holding him tight, my fingers digging into his muscles. When he spilled over my abdomen, lost in the throes of release, I yelled his name as I came deep inside his body.

Before Ian, I’d been selfish in bed. I had tried to make the other person feel good, but in the end, my pleasure was paramount. That had all changed when my partner joined me. With Ian I made sure: I wanted to hear my name in a breathless moan; I loved the smell of him, his taste, but more than anything, seeing him sated afterward, replete, panting beside me, on me, draped in a boneless sprawl…
that
was what I craved. To know that I had cared for him, loved him, made my heart swell almost painfully.

“God, Miro, I better not have ripped your stitches,” he said gruffly, rising off me gently, the small gush of fluid running down my cock and balls.

“I don’t think so, but who cares.”

He bent to kiss me, but I turned my head. “What’s with—”

“Think where my mouth was last,” I reminded him.

“I don’t care, you don’t care,” he growled, capturing my face in his hands. “I wanna kiss you.”

He mauled me until his head finally clunked down over my heart and his eyes fluttered shut, even with how hard he was fighting sleep.

I put my hand in his hair and massaged his scalp. “You should turn off the light.”

“You turn off the light,” he mumbled.

There was no more discussion after that.

T
ALKING
TO
the staff psychiatrist, Dr. Johar, was something I really tried to put off, but two weeks later after lunch on a Saturday—Kage scheduled the meeting himself—I had no way around it. He’d brought me into our meeting room, where we normally talked to people entering witness protection, and had my file, complete with pictures of my injuries in living color, spread out in front of him.

We were quiet for long minutes before I finally asked if he had any questions for me.

“I do,” he answered, smiling. He was older, early fifties—I’d never thought to ask—but as Kohn had said on a number of occasions, he
looked
like a shrink, with his mustache and beard, all dark chestnut brown, and his pale blue oxford, charcoal gray tie, and black cashmere sweater. He’d taken off his suit jacket, also black, which I thought he always did to make us feel more comfortable.

“So, normally I don’t talk to the other marshals about one another, but in this instance, I needed to know what they thought about you.”

“Okay.”

“Are you curious about what was said?”

“I dunno.”

His grin was warm. “They said you’re normally quite the clotheshorse.”

It was true, everyone knew that. I’d grown up poor in lots of foster families with nothing of my own. In reaction, I now had too many clothes, too many shoes, and I’d made sure that one of the first things I ever acquired was a thirty-year mortgage on an $800,000 home that had only become manageable after I became a marshal. When I’d first bought the house on my detective salary, my budget had been meager. Now, I could eat, buy clothes, and pay the bank on the fifth of every month.

“Why aren’t you dressing up right now?”

I shrugged. “I’m stuck in the office, and with my broken ankle I can’t wear any of my good shoes.”

“You’re wearing one combat boot, I see.”

It was Ian’s, and since it was already beat to crap, I didn’t feel bad wearing only the one. “Yeah. I don’t want any of my good shoes wearing unevenly so—gotta wait.”

“That’s important to you.”

“What’s that?”

“That your shoes wear evenly.”

“Sure,” I agreed.

He nodded and was quiet a moment, writing. I wondered what deep truth he had ferreted out of me with my confession about the soles of my shoes.

“So tell me about Agent Wojno.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Anything you’d like to tell me.”

I thought a second. “He didn’t deserve to die like he did.”

He stared at me.

“And I’m glad they only told his family that he was killed, but not how.”

“Did you know he was married?”

“He was divorced.”

“Yes, but that’s not what I asked. What I asked was, did you know he was married when you first met him?”

I cleared my throat. “No.”

“Did you have a relationship with Agent Wojno?”

“No.”

“No, you didn’t have a relationship with him?”

“I had sex with him three or four times. It was not a relationship.”

“You didn’t go drinking together?”

“No.”

“You didn’t have him over to eat pizza and watch a movie?”

I leaned forward. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

I met his gaze. “If we ran into each other and it was convenient, we’d hook up. I went to his place once, there were a couple of bathrooms, and his car, if I’m remembering right. I never had him over and we didn’t hang out.”

He nodded. “Well, then, please explain to me why you feel so much guilt over his death.”

I was surprised. “What’re you talking about?”

“Everyone I’ve talked to, including your boss and your partner, say that you’re not yourself. You come in, you go right to the back and sit in the computer room where you answer the phone all day, run searches, and work cases from the desktop.”

“That’s all I can do right now.”

“Yes, it’s true, but also, you wear your White Sox cap in every day, you’re always in jeans or chinos, you’re always in a hoodie and the one boot.”

I threw up my hands. “I have no clue why any of that matters at all.”

“No?”

“I’m doing my job!”

“Craig Hartley is still at large.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“His sister is in WITSEC.”

“I know that as well.”

“Your old partner, the police detective, Norris Cochran, was put on paid leave, and he and his family were relocated for the foreseeable future.”

“I’m seriously waiting for you to tell me something I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you go?”

I scoffed. “We tried that. He found me.”

“Because of Agent Wojno.”

“Yep.”

“But the leak is gone now. It won’t happen again. You could go to another city and work, and there would be no issue.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Who’s to say? I’d rather be home here where I know everyone, than in another city trying to get acclimated.”

“But there are people here that Hartley might hurt to get to you.”

I scowled at him.

“Marshal?”

“Did you ever meet Craig Hartley?”

“Yes, I did. We were colleagues.”

“Well, then, you know hurting someone I care about is not something he’d do.”

“But you cautioned your friend Aruna not to visit your home while you were in Phoenix.”

“Because if he was at my house and she stumbled onto him, he’d have to hurt her on general principal, from a witness perspective. But he would never go over to her house for the express purpose of harming her to get at me. He wouldn’t see the point of that when he could hurt me directly.”

“And your partner—Marshal Doyle? Aren’t you worried about him?”

“The same dynamic applies. If Marshal Doyle was protecting me when Hartley was trying to hurt me, that’s when he’d get hurt. But hurting Marshal Doyle to punish me or make me suffer is not his way.”

“No?”

“No. He’s got this huge ego, right? If he’s trying to hurt me, it’s me he wants.”

“So you’re only worried about others getting caught in the crossfire.”

“Yes.”

He studied me a moment, his small sepia eyes taking my measure. “Why do you feel guilty about Wojno?”

“I don’t.”

“He betrayed you.”

“He did.”

“He would have let you die to save himself.”

“Yes.”

“When the joint task force between the FBI and the marshals service went through his personal e-mail, downloaded his calls and other correspondence, they found that Wojno was personally recruited by Hartley to get close to you and sleep with you because Hartley wanted to know everything about you, right up to what you were like in bed.”

“I’ve been briefed,” I said sharply because I was so sick of thinking about this, having it all run around day and night in my head, that I was ready to put my fist through a wall.

“Hartley was blackmailing Wojno, yes, but his plan wouldn’t have worked if you hadn’t slept with him.”

“What’s your point?” I asked, frustrated, feeling my anger rise, hating that Hartley, even though nowhere near me, was still the one in control. Because of him I was stuck feeling like shit and having to talk to a shrink.

“My point is that maybe your guilt is not from how Wojno died, but that he was in the position to report to Hartley to begin with only because initially you found him attractive.”

Since I couldn’t deny it, I kept my mouth shut. The truth was, if I hadn’t fucked Wojno the first time, he might still be alive.

Maybe.

I couldn’t say for certain what would have happened to Wojno. He’d made a mistake and Hartley knew about it, and between the time Hartley found out and the time when Wojno turned me over to him, he’d become an FBI agent. It was naïve to think that Hartley wouldn’t have collected his pound of flesh at some point.

As I’d run the last time I’d spoken to him back through my brain over and over, I was at a loss to figure out what I could have done differently.

“Marshal?”

“Okay,” I conceded, so tired of all of it, the second-guessing myself, trying to figure out whether if I’d been able to connect emotionally with Wojno, things would have gone differently.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, I feel guilty, alert the media. What the hell am I supposed to do about that?”

He seemed confused. “You stop it.”

“Just stop it?” I was incredulous. “This is your sage advice?”

He chuckled. “There is absolutely nothing you could have done to save Agent Wojno. He had to save himself. You were the one cut open, beaten, knifed, and hung up like a slab of meat. You were brutalized, marshal, and it’s a wonder you made it out alive. You are in no way responsible for anyone but yourself.”

I crossed my arms because I was shaking and I didn’t want him to see. “Yeah, but what if, right?”

“How do you mean?”

“If I could have been a bit more convincing, maybe I could have gotten him out too,” I whispered, the floor I was staring at beginning to blur. When the tears welled up seconds later, I tried to rub them away fast. Goddamn Wojno, I had no idea why I even cared, other than he absolutely did not deserve to be dead. Rotting in jail, yes, but not dead.

“It’s important to you.”

“What?” I’d lost track of the conversation, as lost as I was in my own thoughts.

“It’s important to you to have saved him.”

“Well, of course.”

“To do what?”

“I’m sorry?”

“He would have spent the rest of his life in prison.”

“But he would have been alive.”

“And would that have suited him? Prison?”

“I don’t know.” I huffed out a breath, letting myself fall back in my chair, crossing my arms as I regarded the doctor. “Again, I think the alive part is key.”

He put down his pen and apparently made himself comfortable as well, hands behind his head, legs stretched out in front of him. “You need to stop blaming yourself for something completely out of your control.”

“I’ll get right on that.”

He was back to scrutinizing me. “May I say that your partner, as well as the rest of your team, all think very highly of you, marshal?”

“Oh yeah? Even my boss?”

He was silent.

I laughed at him. “Yeah, see, I knew it.”

“He’s very guarded.”

“Yeah, maybe you should go head shrink him.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You scared?” I baited him.

“Perhaps a bit.”

I stood up. “You’re clearing me for continued service, right?”

His sigh was deep. “I am, yes.”

“Thanks,” I said, heading for the door.

“You’re a very lucky man, marshal. Don’t waste your life mired in second-guessing yourself.”

“How’re you supposed to learn anything, then?”