Loves Me, Loves Me Knot

Knit 3

While Jenna was off God knew where doing God knew what, Gage touched the bottle of Corona to his lips and took a long swallow, wondering what Jenna was up to. It didn’t take a detective-which he just happened to be-to figure out that she was drunk off her ass, he just didn’t know why. Or what had apparently caused her to drunk-dial him after more than a year of no direct contact or one-on-one conversations between them.

He’d bet a month’s pay she was up to something.

Or maybe she wasn’t up to anything, but was simply nervous about having him around when they normally made a point of keeping Zack, Grace, Dylan, and Ronnie around as buffers.

But he still got the feeling there was more to it than that.

The minor bathroom issue that could have been resolved with a single twist of a wrist.

The sudden need to have a lamp looked at in her bedroom, when she could have just unplugged it and told her aunt she should have an electrician check over the house’s wiring when she got back.

The cold bottle of beer shoved into his hand the minute he walked through the door, and the second one she literally ran downstairs to retrieve.

That was the strangest thing of all. Even while they’d been married, he could count on one hand the number of times Jenna had greeted him at the door with a cold beer. Or brought him a beer at all, unless he’d asked her to.

If he didn’t know better, he’d suspect she was trying to get him drunk, too.

Of course, he shrugged off that thought as soon as it popped into his brain, because even Jenna could figure out that it would take a heck of a lot more than two beers to put him under the table. He was a big guy; two six-packs might not even have done it.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been three sheets to the wind, let alone flat-out, ass-on-the-ground drunk, but if it was going to happen, it would take something stronger than Corona.

Taking another pull from the bottle in his hand, he set his toolbox down beside the bed and flipped the switch to turn on the lamp Jenna had complained about. It came on smoothly, with no flickers or sizzles that might signal an electrical problem.

He shook his head and lowered himself to the corner of the bed, facing the doorway. Continuing to sip the beer that had no chance of making a dent in his blood-alcohol level, he listened to the sounds of Jenna moving around below.

The muted shuffle of her rapid steps as she crossed the floor. The smack of the refrigerator opening and closing. The echo of her moving back the way she’d come. He heard her bouncing up the stairs, heard her stumble and mutter a mild curse (because for Jenna, they were all mild) as her shin hit a runner, and knew the second she rounded the corner even before she reappeared at the door of the bedroom.

Then again, he had a feeling he’d have been able to sense her movements anywhere. Not only in a big, empty house, but in the middle of a crowded city street… a busy bar… an ear-splitting rock concert. Something about Jenna had always gotten to him on a level that didn’t necessarily require her presence. He smelled her, heard her, felt her, even before she walked into a room.

Living without her these past eighteen months had been a fun and inventive form of pure torture. He’d brought it on himself, he knew that. And he’d wished a thousand times, or maybe more, that he could go back and handle things differently.

But even if he had, it wouldn’t really have changed anything. They’d still have been in the same boat as when she’d filed for divorce in the first place.

So as much as he might have hated it, it was probably better that he’d been forced to move into a small, two-room apartment. A place where, even though Jenna had never set foot there, he still sometimes heard her or imagined her moving around.

He wasn’t crazy. His friends might have thought he was if he’d ever admitted to them just how much he missed his wife, but he figured it was no worse than an amputee who continued to feel their missing limb and think it was still there, even when it clearly wasn’t.

And that about summed up his relationship with Jenna perfectly. She’d been a part of him, a part he’d never wanted to live without, and when she’d left, it felt like she’d ripped his heart out and refused to return it to the big, gaping hole in the center of his chest.

Yeah. That was something he’d prefer no one-especially his best friends and his ex-wife-knew. He sounded like a damn Lifetime movie-of-the-week. Sappy. Broken. Pathetic.

Much more of this and he’d have to check his nads at the door.

Eyes locked on Jenna-and hers locked on him-he downed the rest of his beer.

No sooner had he set the bottle aside on the same nightstand as the lamp he was supposed to be fixing than Jenna was right there beside him, shoving a second bottle into his hand.

“Is there something I should know about this beer?” he asked her, eyeing the cold Corona quizzically. There was something going on here, getting fishier by the minute.

“No, why?” she replied just a little too quickly and with a little too much pitch to her tone.

He remained silent for a beat before shrugging a shoulder and raising the bottle to his mouth. “Just wondering.”

His throat flexed convulsively as he swallowed, taking in a full three-quarters of the fresh beer. He didn’t have a reason for taking so long to drink, except that it bought him some time to think, to contemplate what might be going on here, since he didn’t believe for a minute that she’d called him over just to help with a few random household tasks.

“So tell me again what the problem is with the lamp,” he said, setting the second bottle of beer next to the first and beginning to rise from the bed.

A wave of dizziness washed over him and his vision went from black to fuzzy to black again.

“Whoa.” Blinking in an effort to bring the room into focus, he stretched an arm out toward the carved oak headboard and slowly lowered himself back to the mattress.

“Gage? Are you all right?”

Jenna’s voice, filled with concern, came to him as if through a wind tunnel, hollow and reverberating. He lifted his head to glance at her only to have her face go all blurry and indistinct.

“I’m fine. I just-” He continued to blink, trying to shake off whatever had suddenly taken hold of him. His eyes were dry and tired, his tongue feeling about three sizes too large for his mouth, making it hard to talk. Not that it mattered much, considering his brain seemed to be having a difficult time putting two thoughts together.

“Why don’t you lie down,” Jenna offered.

She was beside him now, one arm around his back, helping to lower him to the mattress, the other pressing against his chest to make sure he went down.

“What did you do?” he thought he asked, though it might have come out as more of a slur.

“Nothing, you’re just tired. Lie back and go to sleep.”

But he wasn’t tired. Or he hadn’t been when he’d gotten here. He’d been wide awake-or darn near-after her phone call woke him from a dead sleep. How could he be tired again already? Unless…?

It was right there, on the tip of his tongue. The reason he was so groggy all of a sudden, the reason he felt like he needed a nap and might not have much say in whether he took one or not.

But then it was gone as his grogginess grew. It didn’t help, either, that Jenna was sitting on the bed beside him, her hip pressed against his, her fingers brushing lightly through his short hair and over his scalp in a soothing motion that was growing hard to resist.

He let his eyes drift closed, let her lull him in a way she hadn’t since they were first married. When they were still crazy in love, and before he’d fucked it all up.

Gage couldn’t remember a time in his life when he’d been this happy, this content.

Then again, what sane man wouldn’t be?

The way he figured it, things didn’t get much better than this. Waves lapping just outside the room. The warm island breeze blowing through the open balcony door. And the most beautiful woman in the world tucked securely at his side, her slim, sleek body rubbing sensuously against his own.

Oh, yeah, this was the life. If he’d known it could be this good, he’d have swept Jenna away to the Caribbean long before now. As it was, he was beginning to wonder if there was any way to stretch out their two-week honeymoon and stick around St. Thomas and its surrounding islands for the next… oh, fifty years or so sounded good to him.

The short, spiky strands of Jenna’s dark hair tickled his bare shoulder as she began to stir. Her leg, hitched over his own, bent and slid up his thigh until her knee came dangerously close to unmanning him. Instead of disturbing him, though, the soft brush of skin on skin heated his blood and generated thoughts of making love to her, even though it hadn’t been that long since their last passionate encounter.

Not that it mattered. He’d realized almost from the moment they’d met that he couldn’t get enough of her. He could still be inside her, limp and wrung out from one of the earth-shattering climaxes he always found in her body, and want her again. Find himself growing hard again.

He was one lucky son of a bitch.

And he knew it. Knew there wasn’t another woman on the planet who could set him ablaze the way Jenna Langan-now Marshall, thank God in heaven-did. Knew no other woman would ever match him as well. It sounded hokey, but she was like his other half, seeping in and filling all the holes in his spirit that had been empty and cold before she’d come along.

She understood him. Understood his love for his job, and didn’t freak over the fact that it sometimes put him in danger. She’d admitted that she worried about him, but had been quick to add that she trusted him, trusted his training, and knew that he’d do everything he could to come home safely at the end of the night.

She wasn’t like some cops’ wives who whined and cried and complained about the dangers of having a loved one on the force, about the long and unpredictable hours, about their husbands caring more about their jobs than they did about them.

And though she wasn’t classically beautiful, Gage couldn’t imagine another woman flipping his switch the way Jenna did.

Until he’d met her, he’d always been attracted to tall, leggy women with long hair and big boobs. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition types with more T and A than I and Q. Women who, frankly, tended to look more like her best friends, Ronnie and Grace.

He’d actually had his eye on Ronnie initially, thinking about culling her from the rest of the herd and hitting her with one of his tried-and-true come-on lines when he’d run into Jenna, and thoughts of asking out any other woman had flown straight out of his head.

She was tiny, the top of her head barely reaching his chin, her compact build looking almost shapeless and boyish beneath the plain, Bohemian outfits she gravitated toward. Faded jeans and colorful, flowing blouses. Long skirts and peasant tops.

And scarves. Or boas, as she’d recently trained him to think of them. She loved to knit long boas out of fancy, fluffy, brightly colored yarn and then wrap them around her neck to coordinate with whatever she was wearing that day.

At first, he’d thought she was using them as a shield to cover an embarrassing birth mark or scar, or maybe just some hickeys she didn’t want anyone to know about. Then, after he’d learned they were simply a part of her own personal fashion sense… and after they’d started getting hot and heavy… he’d gotten a secret thrill out of putting some hickeys on her neck himself that she really did need the scarves to cover. It had turned him on to see them and know that his sexy little marks on her body were hidden beneath.

He also enjoyed unwinding them, drawing them slowly from her neck, sometimes using them to loosely bind her arms behind her back or teasing other tender, sensitive parts of her body while he undressed her.

Oh, yeah, there were lots of fun, interesting things he liked to do with those boas.

Jenna’s slim fingers twitched where they rested on his bare chest and he lifted her hand to his mouth, pressing a firm kiss to her knuckles. She made a low, purring sound in her throat that went straight to his gut and squirmed against him.

Wrapping an arm around her waist, he dragged her from his side to lay on top of him, covering him from neck to ankle. She blinked like a sleepy owl, a wide, contented smile spreading across her face.

“Hi,” she whispered.

His own lips curved upwards. “Hi. Wanna get dressed and go down to the beach? Maybe grab some dinner?”

He knew what he wanted to do, and it didn’t involve food or leaving the room. But since it had been several hours since breakfast and the island offered plenty of shopping and sightseeing opportunities, he thought he should at least offer to show her as much of a good time out of bed as he was determined to show her in it.

She considered his question for a minute, her dark brows drawing together adorably over her tiny, wrinkled button of a nose.

“I’m thinking room service,” she finally responded.

His own brow quirked as he studied her. “You sure? The concierge recommended some restaurants she thought we should try. We could take the ferry over to St. John, maybe visit a few places over there.”

“Are you sick of my company already? Bored with your new bride?”

She propped her chin in the palm of her hand, her elbow digging into his pec. A small puff of air huffed from his diaphragm, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t move to relieve the pressure. He was too amused by his little wife to care about a minor twinge of pain.

“That’s not a good sign, you know. It doesn’t bode well for the rest of our married life if one of us starts feeling like the honeymoon is over during the actual honeymoon.”

“Honey,” he drawled, smoothing his hands up and down her bare arms, “I have a feeling our honeymoon won’t be over even when we’re ninety and swinging on the front porch, watching our great-great-grandkids playing in the yard.”

Her ripe pink lips pulled into an adorable bowlike moue. “You think you’ll still be up to honeymoon activities when you’re nearing the big nine-oh?”

Gage waggled his brows, cocking his hips to let her know how up he was to honeymoon activities at that very moment. “With you, I have a feeling I’ll be up to it even when I’m six feet under.”

A shadow passed over her face, but was just as quickly gone. “Let’s not talk about that sort of thing. In fact…” She slid her hands to the mattress on either side of his waist, did the same with her legs on either side of his thighs, and pushed herself into a sitting position. “Let’s not talk at all.”

His heart was pounding in his chest, his cock throbbing between his legs and pointing like a compass toward due North.

“What do you suggest we do instead?” he asked. And he was pretty sure he was only imagining the strangled wisp in his voice. He was heartier than that, right? He was a big, strong man; it should take more than a petite fairy of a woman to take his breath away.

Sitting back on her haunches, the globes of her ass cushioned on the tops of his thighs, she let her fingers trail along the tight, concave plane of his abdomen. “I think we should order room service,” she said.

With her gaze latched firmly on the path her nails were making as they raked across his flesh, she tipped her head to one side. “And while we wait for it to arrive, I think we should do dirty, naughty things that we can’t tell our friends about when we go home.”

“Sounds good to me.” Hell, it sounded like freaking paradise. And her hands drifting from his stomach to the Little General felt even better.

But instead of wrapping around his hard length, her hand skimmed past to gently cup and fondle his balls. Air hissed through his teeth, and any blood that had been keeping the rest of his body functioning immediately gave up the fight and headed straight for his groin.

“What about room service?” he grated, since she didn’t seem inclined to follow through with her suggestion.

“You dial,” she said in a sultry, brown-sugar voice. “I have a feeling I’ll be hungry, so order me one of everything.”

He started to lower his arm, wondering briefly how it had gotten over his head to begin with. He didn’t remember gripping the headboard, only stroking Jenna’s shoulders and arms.

She chose that moment to scoot back even farther and lower her head until her lips grazed the tip of his cock. A shock of electricity rolled down his dick and flashed like lightning through the rest of his system.

“I’m not sure I’m going to be able to dial, let alone talk, with your mouth on me.”

“Mmm.” She parted her lips a fraction and let her tongue dart out to lick his sensitive flesh. “That could be a problem. Maybe we should wait until after we’ve eaten to participate in more… interesting activities.”

But instead of stopping, instead of pulling away, she opened her mouth even wider and engulfed him by a full inch.

Though he didn’t know how he retained the ability to speak, he managed a wobbly, “I like the sound of that.”

Tugging once more at his arm, he tried to touch her face, tried to run his fingers through her hair, but his hand wouldn’t budge.

He frowned. What the hell was going on? Why couldn’t he move his right arm?

He gave up on the right and tried to lift the left. Same problem. Same dogged resistance.

Okay, this was getting ridiculous.

He rolled his head on the pillow, first to one side, then to the other, in an effort to see what was holding him back. There was something there, he knew it, but his eyes wouldn’t seem to focus. And the more he tried to clear his vision, the worse it got.

He returned his gaze to Jenna, who still hovered above him. Their surroundings were different now, though. He could no longer hear the waves lapping outside the open balcony door or smell the fresh scent of the island breeze. The four walls surrounding him didn’t look like those of the hotel room where they’d honeymooned, but were darker, plainer, and closing in on him.

Mind searching for an explanation, he turned his attention back to Jenna. Something felt strange. Wrong. And suddenly Jenna didn’t just look sexy, wanton, and desirable, she also looked… guilty.

“What did you do?” he asked, brows knitting as the words came out slurred. “What did you do?”