Tied Up in Knots (30 page)

I hugged Janet tight and looked over at Liam, who muttered, “I hate you.”

I smirked at him as his phone rang and he answered.

“What kind of cranberry salad should I make?” Aruna asked me.

“Don’t you just open a can?”

“Heathen,” she labeled me.

“Oh,” Liam said loudly, dramatically, walking into the kitchen with his phone to his ear, “actually, why, yes, yes she is, Ned. Let me put you on speaker.” He held it in his hand, smiling triumphantly as he stepped into the center of all of us. “Go ahead.”

“Janet Eugenia Powell, how dare you go out of town and not tell me!”

“Eugenia?” Liam asked.

“She doesn’t like it,” I told him.

“She kinda hates it,” Aruna echoed me.

Janet shot him a look that was meant to kill.

“Miro, you selfish piece of crap!” Ned shouted on the other end of the line.

“What?” I retorted, surprised that he actually sounded mad. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Yes you did! You always do!”

Everyone was crazy except me and Ian.

“Did you even think for one second of telling her not to get on the plane? Did you think, oh, she’s pregnant; this Thanksgiving she’ll be pregnant, and won’t that be awesome for her to spend time with her family on—”

“I’m with my family!” she shrieked, pulling free of me as she went to stand over Liam’s phone so she could scream directly into it even as the big man began slowly leaning away. “And that’s the part you never get! We always do everything with
your
family, every goddamn holiday we’re with
them
, but what about
my
family? When do I get to come here and see them? When is it my year?”

“Janet—”

“Just because they’re not related to me by blood doesn’t make them any less important to me or vital to be around, and that’s the part you refuse to understand!”

“Janet—”

“You think when my mother died that I became an orphan, but just because Miro and I don’t have any blood relatives doesn’t mean we don’t belong to a motherfucking family!”

We were all silent and nobody moved.

“So yes, I know you don’t get it, and neither do Liam or Eriq or that new guy Min’s dating—” She turned to look at Aruna. “What does he do, again?”

“Some kind of performance art where he drinks coffee and looks at you,” Aruna explained. “And draws at the same time.”

“How is that different from college?” I asked Aruna.

She shrugged.

“Janet,” Ned tried again. “I just—”

“I’ll be home on Sunday, and we can talk and figure out what to do for Christmas and New Year’s this year. If you want to stay there, then—”

“No!” he yelled. “I love you, and I’m sorry I was a dick about your hormones. I was an insensitive asshole because I’ve never been through this, either. We’re both just finding our way. But in my defense, I’m used to number-cruncher girl, and emotional passion girl threw me for a loop.”

We could all hear the kitchen clock ticking on the wall. It was a good clock, I liked it. I’d picked it out when the old one died. It was stainless steel, very retro 1950s chic.

“You thought I was passionate?” she asked tentatively, and by the way her voice dipped, got silvery and sweet, it was more than clear that she loved the rest of us, but Ned was her endgame.

“Yes, darling, very.”

“Do you miss me?”

“Terribly.”

Her sigh was loud.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he told her. “And we’re staying with Aruna and Liam; they at least have a guest room.”

“Hey,” I growled.

“And I’m going to kick the crap out of you when I see you,” he warned me.

“If you can get through the Green Beret to me, more power to you.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Ian’s a Green Beret?”

I grunted.

“Huh.”

“Yeah, huh.”

“Well, Liam will help me.”

“Have you met Ian?” Liam asked.

Ned cleared his throat. “I’ll be there in the morning, and God help you if my flight’s delayed.”

I really hoped he’d have clear skies. “I’ll see ya tomorrow.”

“I need you all to go away so I can speak to my wife.”

Liam took it off speaker, and Janet took his phone and walked into the living room, curling up on one end of my couch.

“He loves her,” Aruna said, hand over her heart. “It’s sweet.”

“Do I get to eat any curry?” Liam asked her as she made me a plate and added the dill rice I loved that she’d made special.

“I don’t know, are you sure you want it?” she asked sharply. “Your mother didn’t.”

“For crissakes, woman, that’s not what she said.”

“Oh?”

I wanted to hear the explanation as well.

He huffed out a breath in exasperation. “She said since you were going to make the Indian dishes, that she would make the traditional ones so you didn’t have so much to do.”

She nodded slowly. “Because I can’t do both. Because it was finally my year to host, and now she’s going to horn in and cook.”

“No, she was just trying to help because you work, plus you take care of Sajani.”

“She didn’t ask Karrie if she needed help last year, and Karrie has two kids, Liam,
two
, plus she’s a full-time graphic artist, so…. Where’s the disconnect here?”

“Maybe Karrie wanted help too.”

“She did, and she asked me, not your mother! When it’s finally your turn to have the whole Duffy clan over, you don’t want to mess it up! But your mother is just waiting for us to crash and burn because then this experiment will be over, and she’ll go back to hosting all the holidays at her house.”

“Well, sweetie, she is the matriarch of the fam—”

“Who complained every year for years that it was so much work, and so we all agreed to the rotating holidays, and now this year, when it’s finally my turn, she needs to help me because my dishes are too ethnic?”

He made a noise of pure disgust. “That’s not what she said!”

“She hates me.”

“Oh, she does not.”

“The acid that drips from her voice when she speaks to me could etch diamonds,” she said flatly.

I lost it.

“Oh God,” her husband lamented.

“You know what, you can go over there and eat with your family, but Sajani stays with me. We’ll be here eating with
my
family.”

“We went to see your family in Dallas last year.”

“Well, I’m lucky I have family there too. I have you, Sajani, Miro, and Ian here, and that way I’m never alone, even if I never lay eyes on your mother again.”

His smile was defeated and gentle at the same time. “You realize you counted me in with our kid and the boys, right?”

She glared at him. “Of course I did. You belong to me. Why wouldn’t I include you?”

He moved then, fast, and grabbed her, scooping her up off her feet in the princess carry, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned in and kissed him.

It was not a PG kiss, and when she leaned back to smile at him, I saw that he was flushed.

“I’m still not going over there, even if you sex me up.”

I choked on my curry.

Liam groaned.

And Aruna looked very pleased with herself.

When Ian and Sajani and Chickie came home right before the sky opened up and dumped down rain, Ian asked what he’d missed.

“Not too much,” Aruna assured him, swapping him a plate of food for her daughter. “Eat something. You’re too thin.”

He glanced at me.

“Just eat.”

After I fed Chickie, I got a call from Barrett. I let it go to voice mail, as well as the other four.

“Oh shit,” Aruna announced. “I need marshmallows. Crap!”

Sometimes it was a domino effect. Ian needed beer, and Liam was more than ready to go with him to get that. Janet wanted some things from the store because now Ned was coming, and there was a grape salad that was his favorite thing in the world. But Chickie had eaten, so he had to take his constitutional.

“I’ll stay here,” I told everyone.

No one moved.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you know I’ll be fine.”

But no one was moving, especially Ian, who crossed his arms as he looked at me.

“Oh come on.”

He didn’t move an iota.

“May I remind you that there are two FBI agents on our front curb.”

“Aren’t they the ones that lost Hartley to begin with?” Aruna asked.

Ian tipped his head at her like yeah, that.

It was stupid, but the idea of Ian and Liam walking around together, choosing beer, made me very happy. I wanted the man I loved to bond with the man Aruna loved because, clearly, as evidenced earlier, he was getting close to the girls, and I wanted the same with their significant others. So Ian doing something without me or Aruna, with just Liam, I wanted that. I wanted to build a network of friends, and I could be honest: the more Ian liked everyone, the more rock solid the foundation of our life became.

But at the moment, he wasn’t going anywhere.

“I’ll be fine,” I assured him.

He shook his head.

And then my hip was bumped as a loud dog yawn caught my attention. There was Chickie beside me, sitting, his head coming to my waist.

I motioned to the dog, because, really, there was no arguing with 150 pounds of werewolf. Chickie’s protective instincts had been proven time and time again.

Ian gave in because it made sense. “Yeah, all right.” No one was stupid enough to try to get past Chickie into the house. That was simply suicidal, and Hartley had never been labeled that.

As I herded everyone out, Ian charged over and gave me a scorching kiss good-bye. When I had to grab for the counter, I got a world-class smirk. He was so proud of himself and of his power over me. I liked seeing him like that—smugly confident. It was very sexy.

Once I was alone, I let Chickie out, got the towel ready for him when he came back in, and started washing dishes. When I heard a soft knock on the back door, I turned and saw Barrett there, and with the lighting in the background, he was bright, outlined for a moment, and then he was in shadow again. I trotted over and opened up slowly.

“Hey,” he greeted me softly. “Can I talk to you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know that we have that much to say.”

“No, I think we do.”

“Listen, Barrett, I—”

“Miro, I want you to meet my old friend from New Jersey.”

I began to say no when another man came up behind him, wet like Barrett was, about his same height, but nowhere near as handsome. He was thicker, with lots of muscle on him. What riveted me, though, was not his countenance, but the Walther P22 he had in his hand that was pointed right at me.

“I need a word,” the man said coldly.

“Who the fuck are you, and what’re you doing here?”

“I’m Eamon Lochlyn, Kerry’s older brother.”

Of course he was.

WHEN HAD
I become such a crappy judge of character?

“Don’t blame yourself, Miro,” Barrett said kindly. “There was no way for you to know about us. Nobody did.”

“What do you want?” I asked Lochlyn.

He looked at me oddly. “I would think by now, after the others, that that would be self-explanatory. Clearly, I want to kill Ian Doyle for what he did to my brother.”

“And what was that?”

“He and the others drove him out of the Army, and my parents drove him to suicide because they told him he was a failure and not a real man because he couldn’t be a soldier.”

“Your parents are dead, I understand.”

“Well, they are now.”

When you’re an orphan, you dream of having parents. I always had. To imagine anyone hurting theirs was beyond me and made my heart hurt. “You killed your own parents?”

He cleared his throat. “No. Barrett did the honors there.”

I glanced over at the man who I thought had been my friend. We’d been to hockey games together, had dinners and bowled. And all that time, I missed who he really was. “You killed people?”

He nodded.

Lochlyn snapped his fingers to get my attention.

“So as I said, I want to kill Ian Doyle, but he’s better trained then the others—the man’s Special Forces, after all—so getting the drop on him is damn near impossible.”

I would have agreed, but I was listening, not talking.

“So when he comes back, I’m going to point the gun at you, have him follow us outside, and then I’m going to shoot him dead.”

My stomach threatened to empty, but I took several deep breaths in rapid succession.

“And I know what you’re thinking right about now,” he informed me. “Those men who are supposed to be watching the house will protect me. But unfortunately they’ve both died very recently.”

“Those were FBI agents; you’ll get the needle for that.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about what’s going to happen to me,” Lochlyn said with a smile. “Because about a second after I put a bullet in Ian Doyle’s head, I’m going to shoot you and everyone else who walks through the door with him.”

I would put money on Ian not getting shot, and he was trained to not negotiate for hostages because nine times out of ten, the hostage died too.

Ian would be all right.

It was the girls.

It was Liam and Sajani.

They would panic, and Lochlyn would start with shooting Liam and work his way down to that beautiful little baby girl.

I could never allow that.

Charging forward, I plowed into Lochlyn, catching him off balance, spinning him around and slamming him down onto my reclaimed barn wood floor. It was solid, I knew it was, and as hard as his head hit, he wasn’t getting back up.

The gun went skittering across the floor, and I scrambled off Lochlyn’s prone body to grab for the grip, but Barrett wasn’t tangled up, and he ran.

He reached the gun first and aimed it at me. “The hell was that?” he shouted, furious and scared at the same time.

“People never expect you to rush them from a fixed position, so they let their guard down,” I informed him. “It’s a thing they teach you.”

“It’s a gamble.”

“It is, but it was worth it.”

“How so?”

“There’s only one of you now, and I can yell out for Ian before anyone else gets in here. I may die, but Ian’s safe.”