🌈💻Blogger Review💻🌈: What's Left of Me by Davidson King

Summary:

Saint Brothers #4

Phoenix

My once carefree life—dancing, smiling, and never looking over my shoulder—ended the day I was kidnapped and held by a serial killer for three months. A part of me was certain I was never getting out of there alive…and then when I thought my end was near, I was rescued.

But the killer is still out there, and he wants me back.

The police and FBI are bound by red tape and procedures and because of that, my sister believes they can’t protect me…not like the Saint brothers can. Soon, I’m in a house filled with gorgeous, brilliant, dangerous men, and yet I feel safer than I ever have. Most of that has to do with a certain sunglass-wearing tech genius named Noel. For the first time since being rescued, I feel something toward someone, and I want to explore that.

Noel

I thought my brothers were idiots as I watched them each fall in love. I don’t want to be held down—I love my computers, freedom, and not having to answer to anyone. Then we take on a protection case and Phoenix Briar walks into my life. With a blink of his hazel eyes and barely there smile, I find myself willing to not just protect him but to do it at the cost of my life.

With the Broken Doll Killer on the loose and determined to get his perfect doll back, my brothers and I are in a race against time to keep Phoenix safe and to find his monster before he shatters whatever is left of Phoenix. I’m determined to give Phoenix the love he deserves…and the revenge he needs.

What’s Left of Me is book four in my Saint Brothers series. While it could be read as a standalone it is highly recommended you read Slay Ride, Kill Me Sweetly, and Mine to Keep first since characters from those books play a part in this story.

What can I say about Saint Brothers #4, What's Left of Me, that could even come close to what I'm feeling?  Those who follow me on SM or my reviews know that my life was turned upside down with the passing of my mother back in January.  Some days are better than others, but to be perfectly honest, my stress levels and anxiety grow with every day as I try to navigate a new path forward as I attempt finding a job that allows me time to still care for my dad.  This admission has nothing to do with Davidson King's book other than the story has given me an outlet for moments of relief and yet the stress makes my reviewing brain more clouded.  So I want to put that out there in my hope this review comes out clear. The fact that it does give me moments of relief speaks the loudest to my enjoyment of this story.

Though I am part of the author's FB group, I always try to stay clear of her teaser Tuesday posts when I can, sometimes you just have to have a peak but in general, I like to be completely taken off guard when reading.  Boy was I ever!  I knew there was a serial killer element to the story waybackwhen, but I had no idea just what that would entail.  I won't go into specifics, having been so unaware heightened the fear factor for me and I would never want to rob any reader of that same "WOW!" moments.

Before I talk about Noel and Phoenix, I want to mention that, even though What's Left of Me, is laden with dark moments, violence, and fear, I personally think the author's #3 Mine to Keep, is still the darkest and most soul-crushing entry as it dealt with both the subtlety and in your face effects of stalking.  Having said that, just as I'm writing this review, I realized that the entire Saint Brothers series plays heavily into the psychological side and after effects of the crimes.  Not sure how I missed that before this moment, because it's so clear to me now.  Hindsight can be our biggest moment of clarity.

So, on to the men at the center of this amazing and disturbing story.

Phoenix. I loved how the author dealt with his fears.  Through his inner monologue we have a fuller picture of what the serial killer did to him, or more significantly, what impact the vitriol he hammered into Phoenix has left on his psyche.  Through his interactions with his sister, Hazel and gradually the Saint brothers, we see how it has affected his day to day emotions.  As drawn to Noel Saint, Phoenix is, I think it's actually the interactions he has with the brothers' partners that begin to ground him and see that healing and overcoming trauma is doable.  Don't get me wrong, this is a Phoenix and Noel story, but the author's use of the partners, though small in page-time, is huge in healing.

Noel.  Him and his brother, Nick(the Saint star in Mine to Keep) are the computer nerds of the operation and the frustration with the non-tech family members are front and center of the humorous scenes of the story.  Won't lie, there are not many comedic moments but these family funnies help balance the darkness and left a calming effect on me.  I really love how he relies on Dr.Aziza when it comes to making sure Phoenix is protected and the best ways to approach certain factors.  This is not something you often see in stories about revenge and physical protection, generally those who are doing the protecting are all about the do-now-think-later but not the Saint brothers, they get the importance of the survivor's mental health(I said "survivor", I don't like "victim").  Again, don't get me wrong, they are all about the doing but not without the thinking, for the most part😉.

Put these men together and you have a very powerful and rewarding love story that rounds out this psychological suspense thriller, creating a whole package of entertainment.  What's Left of Me is oh so disturbingly yummy.

One last thing, for those wondering about reading order, I highly recommend reading Saint Brothers in order of release.  Yes, each book is about a new brother and a separate crime but because the past entry's relationships play a huge found family part of each new story, everything just falls into place more realistically when read chronologically.

RATING:

PROLOGUE

BNN News Outlet: “The body of a woman appearing to be in her early twenties was found today in Reisling Field at around seven this morning. Sources are saying she was dressed as what they can only assume was a doll. Dead flowers surrounded her body, and moving her has been difficult. More information on this story as it comes to light.”

One month later

BNN News Outlet: “A startling discovery came this morning when the body of a young man was found beside Franklin Fountain. Much like Kimberly Henning, who was found last month in Reisling Field, he was dressed to look like a doll—or puppet. Dead flowers surrounded his body. As we found out after Kimberly’s autopsy a few weeks ago, the bones in her body were broken and it’s assumed the same here and that whoever killed her is likely behind this death as well. More to come.”

One month later

BNN News Outlet: “It was a frightening morning as yet another body was found, killed the same way as Kimberly Henning and Richard Bells: dressed as a doll or puppet, posed on the ground, with dead flowers surrounding his body. A woman jogging in Billings Park came upon the man a little after six a.m. The mayor and police commissioner are holding a press conference this afternoon at Town Hall. This is the third victim of what the media is referring to as The Broken-Doll Killer, while others are calling them the Marionette Maker. What we’ve uncovered is that before their discoveries, Kimberly Henning and Richard Bells had been missing for six months to the day, and every bone in their bodies had been broken postmortem. What did these victims suffer through in their months of captivity? And will the authorities catch this serial killer before they strike again?”

Two Months Later

BNN News Outlet: “This morning, at about seven thirty, the body of Rochelle Hammer was detected, displayed just as Kimberly Henning, Richard Bells, and Henry Miller were. After no bodies were uncovered last month, we all held on to hope that the brutal murders had ended. Sadly, that’s not the case. Rochelle Hammer’s body was found by a staff member outside the main entrance of Mayfield Children’s Museum. She was dressed as a puppet and was surrounded by dead flowers. What we know so far about The Broken-Doll Killer is that they take their victims, hold them for six months to the day, and then display them publicly in a haunting manner, bones broken, yet made to look perfect. Authorities have no leads, and the only connection anyone seems to have found regarding these victims is that they were all in their early twenties, in very good shape, and they were what many are referring to as beautiful people. Who is killing these young, beautiful, vibrant people? The mayor will speak tonight at Town Hall at six p.m.”

Three weeks Later

BNN News Outlet: “A remarkable rescue happened this afternoon. Two hikers came across a shack in the mountains, where they’d hurried in to escape a sudden rainstorm. Inside, they stumbled upon a man who’d been reported missing a little over three months ago. That is all the information being released at this time; for his safety, the man’s name won’t be announced. And what are they protecting him from? Sources say this young man was kidnapped by The Broken-Doll Killer. This is the biggest break in the case, and authorities hope this young man can help them finally put an end to these heinous murders.”

Saturday Series Spotlight

Part 1

April 2025 Book of the Month:  Mine to Keep

What's Left of Me

Davidson King

Davidson King, always had a hope that someday her daydreams would become real-life stories. As a child, you would often find her in her own world, thinking up the most insane situations. It may have taken her awhile, but she made her dream come true with her first published work, Snow Falling.

She managed to wrangle herself a husband who matched her crazy and they hatched three wonderful children.

If you were to ask her what gave her the courage to finally publish, she’d tell you it was her amazing family and friends. Support is vital in all things and when you’re afraid of your dreams, it will be your cheering section that will lift you up.

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EMAIL: davidsonkingauthor@yahoo.com

What's Left of Me #4

AMAZON US  /  AMAZON UK  /  GOODREADS TBR

Saint Brothers Series

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🌈📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘🌈: On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Summary:

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi

“A rich and rugged western about dreams deferred and living defiantly.” —O: The Oprah Magazine

A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow dangerous paths through the American West.

Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: she misses her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. She begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. Meanwhile, Julius is testing his fate in Las Vegas, working at a local casino where tourists watch atomic tests from the roof, and falling in love with a young card cheat. As each gets increasingly lonely, lost, and wild, will they be able to find one another again?

On Swift Horses is a debut of astonishing power: a story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promises them everything.

ONE 

The sea 

At the Heyday Lounge the horsemen think they are the only gamblers. They file in each morning, their shoes dusty and their pockets jangling with coins, like parishioners. They sit in a dark corner under a single blade fan, a plantation relic hauled from the lounge owner’s Southern home to this coastal city thirty miles from Mexico. Above them the fan has the look of salvage but it makes no sound, and though it keeps the flies from their faces and necks and midmorning cocktails they do not notice it. 

Every weekday the men come. They speak openly because they believe the lounge owner to be simple—which is true—and Muriel, their waitress these long mornings, to be a woman and therefore incapable of both memory and complex reasoning. It does not help that she is young, that she looks like the empty plains she comes from, flat and open and sad. She and Lee, newly married, have been in San Diego only a few months and are learning slowly how to be modern, and though she has always worked it is fair that the horsemen take her for a housewife forced into labor by circumstance. They could not know from her wide shoulders and square waist and rural modesty that she had taken the bus from Kansas on her own, that she could play cards and drive a car, or that she’d left behind a house she owned outright, to come here. 

So they wave their hands at her and call her sweetheart from across the room and order their drinks with pointed enunciation as if she were hard of hearing. Though she remembers not only their drinks but the clip of their mustaches, the red-rimmed dimness of their eyes, she writes the orders down on a notepad and hands the paper to the bartender. The horsemen are retired trainers from the furlongs at Del Mar or bookmakers for rich men in the coastal hills. A few are ex-jockeys, burned out and overweight, unsure what else life might have to offer them. They talk as men do, confident and gently adversarial, about the coming race day, the horses off their feed, the jockeys with tapeworm, the cup and feel of the track. They set long odds and argue over them. 

For a few months Muriel listens. She writes down their private speculations and begins to join their language to its objects. When her shift ends at two she walks toward the sea and takes a late lunch at a restaurant where she works a second job on the dinner shift. She sits in a booth in the corner and studies her notes and the previous day’s racing form. She might rise and walk then, along the rolling line of surf. She thinks of horses, and her mother, and the day she was married. As she walks she collects shells and beach glass and slips them in the pocket of her sweater. Before she returns to work she unfolds the pocket and dumps these same items back onto the beach, so all that’s left is a rim of sand in the pocket hem. At ten Lee walks to the restaurant from the factory a few blocks away and they go home together, arms linked like young lovers and not like married people, because they do not know each other very well.

*****

THEN, IN EARLY DECEMBER, Muriel has a night off from the restaurant but tells Lee she’s working. In the drugstore across the street from the Heyday Lounge she buys a pair of sunglasses she considers ridiculous. They cover her eyebrows and half of her nose and make her look much older, like a woman in possession of a fortune or a married lover. She buys a sunhat and a thin scarf printed with flowers. She removes her sweater though her arms show and she worries they will burn in the low winter sun and make her sleep difficult. She takes a twenty-minute bus ride to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The bus winds around Jimmy Durante Boulevard and from the windows of the bus she can see the grand entrance to the track, the high hedges and the waving flags. A statue of Bing Crosby, the track’s founder and financier, gleams hard and gold in the afternoon light. In San Diego in those days it was said that Crosby used the track to impress Grace Kelly, who hated horses but loved men. Muriel lets the bus wind back around to Camino del Mar and gets out to have a coffee in a diner along the beach. She smokes and looks around as if she is waiting for someone. Her shoulders are warm and the bridge of her nose sweats under the sunglasses. The sea is soft and cold-looking. From the beach several others watch as a woman wades out to the breakers and stops. Muriel thinks of her mother, who had told her about the shore at Galveston, where she had been once with a man Muriel knew was not her father. Her mother said the sea was smooth as a lake and brown, and that someone told her it was filled with jellyfish. Muriel watches as the woman at sea turns and lifts a hand to her forehead and seems to regard the shore in contemplation of some final leaving. It is a curious thing, being married, how Muriel must think of this odd afternoon errand as something done for both of them, an adventure Lee will share in one way or another. She had thought it would be difficult to lie to him but she found it easier than their daily recitations of the truth. She had expected for herself the same power her mother found in men. But she often finds her husband’s gaze embarrassing. 

Finally she stands and walks up the seaside street and back across Durante. She passes the high hedges and the tall gates and walks past the turf club and the runs. At the turnstile she crowds in with another woman and two men. The warden in the booth waves them through. She climbs the stairs behind the three others and lets them break off in the stands. From this height she looks around. She is surprised by how many people are at the track and how many of them are drunk. The sailors clump together and slap each other’s backs. Their heavy white pants hang to their heels and they laugh and push back their vigorous hair. There are men in ripped shoes and young boys in bow ties and there are many other women too, Muriel is glad to see. She sits under the second-floor balcony in the shade and covers her hair with the scarf. 

From the stands the horses are not what she imagined. They are tall and obdurate and only lightly controlled. A dozen of them are paced out and lined behind the gates. The field is looped first in grass then dirt, a third smaller track built for harness racing and unused. Across the field the stables are lined in courtly rows, and from this height Muriel can see the sharp shadows thrown by the palms, over the hot-walkers and the low-roofed stalls. The smell of the dirt and the stables and the wheaty smell of the grass are familiar to her, though from the sea comes a punkish wind. She has a gimlet and studies the racing form, thinking of the words she’s heard the horsemen use, the names of trainers and jockeys. She watches the men file to the betting windows along the aisle. For a long time she watches without seeing any woman approach the glass and she begins to worry that perhaps she is not allowed to bet at all. The horses rear in their gates. Their bridles clang against the gates and sound like vespers. Then the gunshot and the race begins. The men in the stands yell instructions at the huge dark horses in a language of violence rolled in with endearment—summer up, take it, ride that, brake baby. The dust and the noise are thrilling, and Muriel stands without thinking and watches the horses turn the track, the pounding of their hooves at odds with their agile speed. When the race ends the men rise and punch the air, then tear their tickets in half and throw them to the ground. 

After the race the crowd calms. Muriel moves to the windows and the cashier does not look up and when she speaks he is not surprised. She plays two dollars on the next race, on a horse named Pastoral, whom the men at the bar called canny and somber. The odds are six-to-one and when the horse crosses a length ahead she is up twelve dollars. She can hardly believe it. She takes her ticket back to the man behind the glass, who smiles this time and counts out the bills. She drinks another gimlet and no one notices. She lets the next race pass and then she rises and leaves through the tunnel. She takes the bus back downtown, her money folded away in her purse. Lee comes to collect her at ten and they walk home together. By then the drink has come out of her and she is tired, her dress dirty with sea air and car exhaust. The wind off the ocean blows down the alleyways and makes her shiver. 

Lee says, “You should have worn a sweater.” 

She leans into him and his solidity is a fact that seems weighed against possession. He puts an arm around her and she considers the scarf in her bag, which would warm her. Though he would make nothing of it, she does not want him to see it, it is too much a part of the day. 

Across the street a barbershop is closed but still lighted, a man sweeping up, his silent figure inside the fluorescence like an image on a screen. By the door of the shop a boy of seven or eight is still out at this late hour, throwing rocks across the empty street in some game of his own devising. When he sees them he comes forward with his hand out. Lee looks at her and then at the boy and makes a gesture meant to indicate penury. The boy turns to Muriel and she sees the fox in him and he knows she sees it. He starts to sway back and forth and then to dance. His pockets are full of rocks and they make a sound like dice. Then the sweeping man disappears into a back room and the shop lights go out and they are suddenly alone with the boy. In the dark street he lifts his knees high and slaps his little palms against them, and though he does not sing he seems about to. He holds Muriel’s gaze and she laughs and pulls her purse up and brings out a quarter and hands it to him. Lee reaches out for her arm but does not stop her. The boy takes the coin and gives a look to Lee, who says to Muriel, “Oh for heaven’s sake,” in the embarrassed way his Lutheran mother might have said it, if he’d ever known her. The boy turns from them and dances back to his post at the curb; Muriel thinks she will remember him a long time, as the recipient of her good fortune. 

In the hallway of their boardinghouse Lee stops to call his brother from the shared telephone. Most often Lee does not reach his brother but tonight he does. Muriel listens to his quiet voice on the phone, laughing and then pleading, the way he is even when Julius is merely mentioned now, an older sibling’s curse, to envy the freedom of the younger man and also believe he will suffer from it. It is the same voice he used in the street and he would use this voice on her again, if he knew. And if she took him to the track he would not understand, he would scowl at the dirty men and the fragrant, snorting horses.

*****

THE MORNINGS in San Diego have a particular tang, the ocean air sweetened by the drift of tanker fumes. Muriel and Lee are among the many thousands arriving each month, husbands and wives but mostly just men, bright with Western promise and their own survival, back from the Pacific. In general a masculine city, Muriel thinks, sailors and black ships and swirls of oil in the ports. The coastal hills cut a jagged line at the horizon. The great fig tree in Balboa Park spreads its roots like an apron of snakes. 

At night when it is dim and she is tired she often mistakes the waving surface of the bay for wheat, and this she prefers to the sea, the low intimation of the Plains glimpsed sidelong. Days when they are both off work they walk together through town and along the thoroughfares, collecting cans and bottles for the junkman. South of Balboa Park the interstate is being pulled through by cranes and paddle scrapers and a hundred men a day on the iron trusses. Often the two of them stand watching for long moments as Lee narrates the freeway’s path, through La Jolla and Oceanside and all the way to Oregon. A second highway crosses the first and runs east all the way to Ohio, passing through the open country they left behind. These routes will isolate the naval station and the ports, and the dark district by the railyard where the sailors take their leave, and the locals speak of this as a blessing, a cross over something vague and unseen that the future will not accommodate. 

Inside this new grid the city widens up and out, over the coastal hills and north to the mesas, networks of tract housing all the way to Birdland. Lee wants a half-acre in Mission Valley, on the San Diego River, where they can build a three-bedroom and plant fruit trees. He has pinned the advertisement above the window in their kitchenette. When he and Muriel sit up late smoking and playing cards he tells her about the narrow valley, once settled by missionaries and then by nut and dairy farmers, now divided into lots graded flat and grassless. Sometimes he stands and goes to the little window and touches the pastel houses and the long furrows of cypress trees, and though he sighs dramatically and smiles Muriel knows he is not joking. She knows that he imagines her there in a real kitchen and a real bed. He believes the great future will meet them, in the new suburban landscape. They could prod that future along if they sold her mother’s house in Kansas, but Muriel will not yet consent to it. When Lee asks she says she isn’t ready, and if he worries why that might be he doesn’t say so. The truth is he doesn’t need her permission but he wants it. 

It is 1956 and Muriel is twenty-one years old. Old to be starting a family, but she had waited almost a year to marry Lee and refused for a year before that. She had thought she could live as her mother had and then her mother died. Her mother had been the first woman in Marshall County to own a car, an eight-hundred-dollar Chevrolet she won in a department store raffle. She was Catholic but would not attend any Mass where the women weren’t allowed to wear pants, which left one church on the north side of Topeka. Every weekend they left Muriel’s stepfather in Marshall County and drove a hundred miles to hear the Mass in slacks. They stayed Saturday night in a motel by the highway and washed their faces and their scarves in the sink and rose early the next morning. After church they ate at a seafood restaurant across the street called Lucky’s. When rain filled the gutters they jumped from the street to the curb in their flat church shoes and stayed another night while the weather passed. Later, Muriel’s mother was the first woman in Marshall County to get a college degree and then a divorce. She died at thirty-six, a month before Muriel’s nineteenth birthday. When the paper reported her death they said that she was married and that she’d died at home, neither of which was true. 

That Christmas Lee came home and brought his brother, whom she had never met. Both men owed another year to the navy and they’d agreed to pool their discharge pay and build a house in California when it was all over, but Lee took the leave when she asked. She hadn’t written him in months though she had received letters almost weekly. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. He and his brother hauled in to Long Beach and spent five days on a bus through the snowy mountains and arrived on the last Sunday in Advent. It had been just four months since her mother died.

The day the men arrived Muriel and Lee made love on top of the covers with the weather radio on. It was a balmy winter, rainy and with little snow, and even with the radiator off and fingers of steam reaching across the windows they sweated in their underwear. She asked him to wear a condom—a tube of lambskin she’d bought the week before, both weighty and soft, like an elbow glove—and he’d asked her again to marry him, this unsuperstitious Catholic girl living alone in her dead mother’s house. 

While they lay together Julius returned from an errand in town and came into the yard and saw the pulled curtains and the fogged glass. He took off his heavy jacket and boots and his shirt and he lay down in the damp grass under their window. When Muriel opened it to smoke, as Lee wet his face and hair in the bathroom down the hall, she saw Julius lying there, bare-chested, staring at the window above. She startled, but being a woman generally unafraid of men, she cocked her head curiously at him. He raised one hand from the ground in a funny little wave. 

“Toss one of those down to me,” he said. 

Muriel hesitated but sensed in his receptive pose someone merely curious. The cigarette fell limply and landed on his shoulder. He reached across and took the cigarette without sitting up and placed it between his lips, then feigned checking his coat pockets by patting the sides of his bare chest. 

“And now a match,” he said.

Muriel began to laugh, then covered her mouth so Lee would not hear. She dropped the matchbook out the window and Julius caught it and lit his cigarette and his smoke began to wind along the side of the house. He lay smoking and smiling and then with one prone hand he tried to toss the matches back up to her. Each time they fell back to the ground comically. 

“I guess I’ll have to return these later,” he said. 

They looked at each other a long moment and then Muriel became embarrassed and stubbed her cigarette out on the window sash and ducked back inside. 

That night they stayed up with a bottle of rice liquor and Julius told jokes about Eisenhower and Protestants. Neither he nor Muriel mentioned his bare chest or the rain on his skin. He told them about Korea, about the landscape paintings he had seen burning there, stacked so that mountains burned through mountains, rivers melted onto ocean waves curling up like hair, and he said it must be like how the world began. When they were very drunk they went out and walked into the shaved wheatfield and lay under the winter sky. It was Christmas Eve. The men talked of their father and California and between them Muriel felt included in a deep understanding. Later, as Lee slept, she and Julius played cards and talked and though soon they were too drunk to make much sense she remembers the snap of the cards on the table and an alertness to her dead mother’s proximity. Julius told her about a man he knew years ago, before the navy and the war, who sold rabbits in town. The man bred them in a hutch lashed to the bed of his pickup, Julius said, each night stopping somewhere near a park or a wooded lot so as the rabbits slept they might hear the sounds of their brethren, of their own country. Curled in the cab of the truck the man slept under blankets made of rabbit fur. He was the rabbit man, Julius said, he wanted to be one of them. He had the thickest hair you ever saw, and a little nose like a rabbit, and big brown eyes. 

The man drove all over town, to fairgrounds and schoolyards and to the flea market downtown, offering everywhere some different price for the rabbits, depending on how he felt about them. One day you’d see him, Julius said, and a three-pound rabbit he was snuggling in his arms would cost fifteen cents, then the next day it’d be up to fifty, because the thing had held his gaze for a full minute in a way he thought of as romantic, then that same unsold rabbit would do something terrible, like scratch his arm all up or fight with another rabbit, and the price would drop again to almost nothing. You see, it was his affection that drove that particular economy, and for that reason he made so little he had to sell his truck and all his rabbits, and I heard he wound up working in a gas station, like anybody else. But oh, he was still handsome as all get-out. 

Julius leaned across the table in feigned amusement and showed his missing tooth when he smiled and Muriel smiled back at him. In the look held between them was some acknowledgment though Muriel did not know what the story meant. She had never heard a man talk this way about another man. She felt she was hearing a riddle.

“He didn’t live anywhere?” she asked. 

“He lived in that truck.” 

“So how did you know him then?” 

Julius did not answer. Instead he reached out and held her hand for a moment and turned it over palm up then dropped it. She thought about his chest rising and falling and the rain on his skin and the way he’d looked up at her. Then he picked up the cards and shuffled them and dealt and did not say much after that. 

In the morning Lee banged coffee cups in the kitchen and mended things in the house that she did not know how to mend and she agreed to marry him after all. Because she was orphaned and alone, but also because of Julius, who had made her feel that the world was bigger than she had imagined and because Lee, in loving his brother, became both more interesting and more bracing. She knew her mother would not approve but her mother was not around to say so. She sold first the car and then the furniture. Her mother’s clothes she left boxed on the porch for the Lions Club. She bought the bus ticket and paid the tax board for the year and with what little was left she paid the Carter boy down the road to insulate the pipes and till up the lawn and cover it over with gravel to keep the grass from overgrowing. She sent the same boy home with her mother’s houseplants and hoped for the best. She told Lee they’d keep the house because that’s what her mother would have wanted and Lee did not argue with her. That she would get to California and find Julius gone was not something she considered.

*****

THE FIRST TIME is a transgression. The second is a strategy. After work, Muriel takes a quick lunch down the street and emerges from the café transformed, her dress balled in her purse, wearing now a pair of loose slacks and one of Lee’s striped dress shirts, the low-brimmed hat over her hair and the big sunglasses. She gets off the bus a stop early and walks the last half-mile to Del Mar. She does this once a week, then twice. Depending on what she’s heard that morning she bets a quinella or a box or a place, at first on just one race and then on three or four. She does not always win. Sometimes she deliberately lays money on a horse the men have said is lame or sick in the head, or on a jockey they’d seen drinking rum with young women the night before. When she loses those races she feels a sense of power she never gets from winning, because losing proves the accuracy of her judgment. It has the benefit, too, of concealment. As long as she is not seen by the men at the lounge—who, she thinks, have never actually looked her in the face and would not recognize her even if she introduced herself—she feels she may engender any speculation she wishes except that she is cheating. 

It comes to her naturally. From the horsemen she learns a vocabulary built from idiom and double entendre—silks and shadow rolls, tongue straps and hand rides—and the rest she learns by instinct. She learns what it means when the track is cuppy, when a horse is washy or ridden out. She becomes familiar with the anatomy of horses, croup and neck, muzzle, cannon, hock, loin, as if she had run her hands along each and felt what they were made of. She begins to think of the landscape differently, as if the horses themselves have given it names. The hills and the lowtide terraces are sorrel, dapple-gray. The round, unburdened trunks of palm are chestnut in the coastal light, light that’s blood bay or buckskin depending on the weather, cast high and cloudless over the roan sea. 

She is stopped sometimes, at work or waking in the mornings, by a poignant feeling. The feeling is like happiness but it comes so slowly and is so austere she might easily mistake it for grief. She could not explain it but she knows this feeling has something to do with keeping a secret from Lee, which she had somehow always felt she was doing even before she had a secret to keep. It has something to do with wherever Julius is and what her mother would think of all this. If she were a different kind of person she might have wondered whether love was always this way, if it existed in the spaces between people, the parts they kept strange to each other. She tapes the money inside a white envelope, on the underside of the lazy Susan, a place her husband will never look and may not even know is there.

*****

A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas they borrow a Lincoln from Lee’s boss to see the lights at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Neither has seen Christmas lights before. At the fairgrounds they go on for miles, roped lights in the shape of trees and hills of snow, illuminating the space around them and the horizon in each direction, like a city gone nuclear. The cars line up with their headlights off and wind through the new world. Those with radios tune to a station playing Christmas songs. Lee turns his broad face to her as they sit idling in the line of cars. His is a simple amazement, the way his eyes become bright and focused when something small and unmiraculous makes him happy. If she had not heard his stories of the war or the privation of his childhood she might think him a savant or an innocent, someone inured to pain or ignorant of it. He seems unchanged by the sea or the city. She knows that even strangers recognize this immutability in him, that they see it as heroic. For a moment she considers telling him about the horses, because she envies the smallness of his joy. She is able to imagine that he would not care how she came by the money, only that she had it. 

“To think this time last year we were in Kansas,” Lee says. 

The racetrack lights are off but she can see the dark palms rising above the stables, just ahead. Lee leans across the bench seat and over Muriel’s handbag to kiss her. She thinks how quickly it had all happened. On the radio the Jackie Gleason Orchestra plays “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” like a dirge. Car horns bleat behind them and Lee laughs and pulls away from her and drives on. The palms move in gray contour against the winter sky. Of course there is no snow but the lights throw shadows on the ground in metallic circles that trick the eye. She hadn’t known the trees would be so lovely in the dark or that the track would be so close. 

“You know,” he says then, “it ain’t like we have to wait for him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” 

“You’ve said that before.” 

Lee shakes his head. 

“It was your plan to come here. You two,” she says. 

“But it’s just us now.” 

“He’s just stretching his legs. It was a long time you were overseas.” 

“It ain’t shore leave, now.” 

“It’s only been a few months.” 

Lee sighs. The music snaps out and is replaced by static, then another station breaks through. That station plays a bandstand number too loud and ends the conversation. Lee reaches over and cups her knee and drives on. 

Back home they kiss for a long time until Lee leans back and looks at her softly and lets his hands rest on her arms. He waits a moment. This part of lovemaking Muriel finds stifling and inelegant, though she could not say exactly why. She does not know if he wants her consent or her desire but either way she wants to refuse him, simply because he asked. She looks away and knows he will read this as demure. He kisses her neck and brings his arms around her again. Her secret makes her more aware of his deference. She thinks of what it will feel like in another few minutes when he is inside her and how straightforward this feeling is. She’d like to skip ahead to that moment. Beyond his shoulder the perfect flat wall of the bedroom catches their shadows. The window is open and the noise of traffic and other lovers and construction and children and cooking is the noise of a city breaking into itself. A man calls out the name of their street and another that crosses it and a second voice calls back. Of course the men are not in the room or even near enough to see, but like the cars and the birds and the backhoes their voices become part of lovemaking, and it occurs to Muriel that she might like this noise and the cover it offers. 

Later, they lie together a long time. The supper hour has come and gone and the city has quieted. The phone in the hall rings a long time before Lee finally rises to answer it. Muriel hears him wish his brother a happy Christmas and say that they should be together, that Julius should come soon. Muriel stands and goes to the window that looks down into the alley between their building and its twin. She can feel the cold outside the window against her bare skin. She lights a cigarette and lifts the window. The streetlight falls into the alley and over the dry bricks and a few birds fly soft and quick across the entrance and toss small hand-shaped shadows against the alley wall. She recalls a boyfriend her mother had, sometime in the forties, who sold lightbulbs door-to-door. To persuade housewives and old widows, he cast against their walls the silhouettes of butterflies and rabbits and men in tall hats. After dinner, in those few months her mother loved him, that man taught her to twist her fingers into cheerful creatures. He had been kind, slimly built. The bulbs he sold made bluish light and glowed through the flesh of his hands. For a moment she thinks that man must be sitting somewhere against the wall of this alley, making birds with his fingers. In the hallway she hears Lee ask his brother if he needs any money and then his long sigh.

*****

THE NEW YEAR comes and the weather hardens. Muriel adds more and more of the winnings to her tips and blames the extra money on holiday cheer, on the business brought in by the last of the men back from Korea. Lee folds the bills into eighths and stores them like hock in a coffee can. On Sunday nights he counts them out. Then, as the fairground lights on the racetrack’s edge disappear, as spring comes, the horsemen begin to lose and Muriel does too. At the lounge the men sit grimly late into the day. They wonder if they’ve lost the touch. They worry they’ve misread all the signs. The feel of the track has left them, perhaps as punishment for their arrogance. They have no feel for jockeys and turf conditions, no joy for horses at all. They spit on the floor and smoke cigarettes until the fan above merely pushes the smoke back and forth, like a machine for making waves. 

They have had all these conversations before but Muriel doesn’t know that. In this new reality she becomes reckless, betting conspicuous amounts on odds-on favorites for little gain, just to remember the feeling of winning. She comforts herself by thinking she has solved the problem of her dishonesty. In the lazy Susan there is less than two hundred dollars; a few more weeks of padding her wages and it will be gone. She feels determined to lose the rest of it, as a kind of retribution or for the sake of some strange neatness. She thinks the word, neatness, as if she is tidying up the kitchen or ironing a dress. 

Then the track is closed for two weeks. When it reopens, the turf is newly surfaced and smooth as hair. The horses have been traded out, some up from Santa Anita and others from the Canadian circuits, the jockeys rested and sweated out to make weight. On Fat Tuesday the races stretch through the afternoon and she drinks too much. She wins two races in a row and is flushed. Yet even with the drink she feels self-conscious and the crowd is tight around her. It is unusually warm and the track has been decorated with bunting and palm fronds tied into hearts and sprays like hands. 

The last race is a special stakes and by evening the crowd has swelled. Women fan themselves with the palmhands and dab their temples with bits of ice. Muriel stands next to a woman from out of town, who tells her husband in an accented voice what to bet. Both Muriel and the woman have a decent bounty on a horse called Flood to win and they discuss his chances as the horses come to post. The horsemen have picked him, though they think he is too young and jumpy as a virgin. As the race begins, the foreign woman flicks Muriel’s arm with her fingers and winks. 

“This is us,” she says, nodding to the track.

The horses burst free and the race comes together. Next to Muriel the woman bounces on tiptoe. When Flood wins by a length, the woman turns and puts a hand on Muriel’s shoulder and kisses her lightly on the mouth. The strangeness of this kiss makes Muriel laugh. Her mouth opens around the sound and her teeth scrape the woman’s big straight teeth—horse teeth, Muriel thinks, and laughs again. The woman laughs back at Muriel and Muriel can taste mint and whiskey on the woman’s lips. Had Muriel said it out loud, horse teeth? They both pull away. For a moment the woman’s eyes catch hers with a wince, then turn softer, turn down, and she raises her glass and jiggles the ice and mint and says, “Time to repent.” She licks her lips, then wipes them with her fingers. The horses settle with their pit ponies, the air heavy with the heat of their bodies, and the noise of the track returns. The woman’s husband fans his wife with his hat and asks if they have won. The woman does not answer him but looks again at Muriel and Muriel does not know how to look back at her. Then the woman turns to her husband and flashes her ticket and flicks Muriel’s arm again as she walks away. Muriel is careful not to watch the woman though she wants to see her full height, the shape of her legs. 

She carries this desire to the bus stop and downtown, then through the streets with Lee, past the oblate sea and the colorful houses, stopping in a pub for a drink and another at home. They leave the radio on as they make love, Lee’s astonished face next to hers on the pillow, a soft fold in the dim light. Her tough man, undone. He says, Muriel, we should have a child. He whispers into her hair, Muriel, don’t ever leave me. She knows after these months together to expect this as she expects his deference, and so she lets him murmur, touches his temples and his thick eyebrows with her fingertips until he falls asleep. She is like a parent then, not resentful but protective. The bedside clock ticks on the nightstand and the sheets scallop at the edge of the mattress. 

When he is fully asleep she takes the money from the inside of her shoe and puts it in the envelope in the lazy Susan. Suddenly it seems there is too much of it. She’d won not a third of her money back, but she has a feeling of great prosperity. She knows this feeling would please the men at the lounge. That they would say she’d cut her teeth. That in gambling there is a plateau, a period of time when progression ceases, when exhaustion sets in, and then the odds shift. You win and you are alive again. She could play another month or longer if chance runs her way.

*****

LATER, THE PHONE RINGS and wakes her and when no one picks it up Muriel rises from the bed and steps quietly into the hall to answer it. 

When Julius hears her voice he laughs so sharply she has to pull the receiver from her ear. She brings the phone back and says Julius’s name and finds she is grinning in the dark hallway. She asks him when he’ll join them and he says, “Oh soon now, not long.”

“You mean it?” she asks. 

“You bet,” he says. 

She asks him what it’s like in Santa Barbara or Ventura or wherever he is and he says, “Girl, you wouldn’t believe it,” and then he starts to sing a song about the badlands and how dark they are even in the morning. On his end of the line a siren spools out and when it stops she hears he’s still singing and she listens until he can’t remember the words and then she asks him if he’s been eating and how the weather is and anyplace they might send a letter. He asks if she’s been winning at cards and when she says she tried to teach Lee how to play hearts he says, “No trick-taking games, he’s not brutal enough for it. You better stick to war.” 

Through the wall she can hear Lee snoring. In the kitchenette the radio plays the Grand Ole Opry. She slides down the wall smiling into her hand until she sits with her legs in front of her and her bare feet shooting into the hallway and disappearing into the dark. What a strange miracle to talk on the phone for no particular reason. They talk for ten minutes, then twenty, until Muriel begins to worry about the coins Julius is dropping for the line. She tells him he shouldn’t waste his money and he says it’s no waste at all but then he seems to remember his purpose and asks after his brother. 

“He’s asleep and I’m out here in the hallway with my hand over the receiver.” 

Silence on Julius’s line and then a clank of freight and men’s voices raised some distance away.

“We sure hoped you’d be here by now,” Muriel says. 

“My brother hopes a lot of things.” 

Muriel nods to the darkness. 

“Don’t you think it’d be strange?” he says. “All of us together?” 

“That’s what Lee wants though.” 

“True enough,” Julius says, though she can tell he isn’t sure. 

“I want,” she begins, but she worries she should not say the next thing. She is not sure what the next thing is. The dark hallway is silent and outside she can hear the traffic lights clicking. For a moment neither speaks. 

Finally Julius says, “There’s sometimes lots of ways of getting to a place.” 

She thinks of Christmas Eve and the story of the rabbits. His tone is the same, it seeks her approval for something. She wants again the feeling she’d had that night, of recognition. So she laughs. The line tosses back her laugh in delay and Julius says, “Well fine, what do you think then?” 

“Oh now, Julius, it’s just the way you said it.” 

“Maybe I will have to come there just to set you right.” 

His tone is lighter but not quite kind and when she laughs again he says, “You think I wouldn’t.” 

“You haven’t yet,” she says, and then he laughs too. Her face is hot and she wants a drink. She thinks that no matter what else is true about Julius he loves his brother, and because he loves his brother he is also obliged to her. She had come all the way out west knowing this. And if he knew about her or about their life without him he might come along finally too. So she tells him about the horsemen and the notes she’d taken and how she’d run their advice both ways to see if it worked. For a moment he doesn’t say anything. She worries the whole thing will lose its sweetness, in the open air between them. Then he laughs, asks her what her favorite kind of horse is, guesses geldings in a teasing voice. He means it cutely but she’s disappointed. She can tell he doesn’t believe her. Aloud it is hardly believable. 

“No geldings there, Julius,” she says. 

“That’s a nice racket for a gal, though,” he says. 

“Oh, but it’s just a whim,” she says, to take the sting out of the moment. 

“Careful now. Might be one of them things you can’t ever get enough of,” he says, but he’s still kidding her. The operator rings on and asks for another dime and Julius searches his pockets and comes up empty. The line goes dead and Muriel sits a long time with the receiver in her lap and the dial tone chiming. She hears Lee’s snoring and the pipes laboring in the wall and the radio in the kitchen plays “Walking the Floor over You” and then “Goodnight Irene.”

Muriel and her husband Lee are about to begin a bright new life, which is upended by the arrival of Lee's brother. Muriel embarks on a secret life, gambling on racehorses and discovering a love she never thought possible.

Release Date: April 25, 2025

Release Time: 117 minutes

Director: Daniel Minahan

Cast:

Daisy Edgar-Jones as Muriel

Jacob Elordi as Julius

Will Poulter as Lee

Diego Calva as Henry

Sasha Calle as Sandra

Kat Cunning as Gail

Don Swayze as Terence

Shannon Pufahl

Shannon Pufahl grew up in rural Kansas. She teaches at Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in fiction. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere, on topics ranging from John Brown and the antebellum Midwest, to personal memoir. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife and their dog.

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🌈⏳Throwback Thursday's Time Machine⏳🌈: Fit to Be Tied by Mary Calmes

Summary:
Marshals #2
Deputy US Marshals Miro Jones and Ian Doyle are now partners on and off the job: Miro’s calm professionalism provides an ideal balance to Ian’s passion and quick temper. In a job where one misstep can be the difference between life and death, trust means everything. But every relationship has growing pains, and sometimes Miro stews about where he stands with his fiery lover. Could the heartstrings that so recently tied them together be in danger of unraveling?

Those new bonds are constantly challenged by family intrusions, well-intentioned friends, their personal insecurities, and their dangerous careers—including a trial by fire when an old case of Miro’s comes back to haunt them. It might just be enough to make Ian rethink his decision to let himself be tied down, and Miro can only hope the links they've forged will be strong enough to hold.

Original Review August 2016:
Miro and Ian return and what a follow-up Fit to be Tied makes!  Even with an established author that ranks towards the top of my favorite list, there is always a question will the new installment live up to the previous?  Well, Fit does and in my opinion surpasses All Kinds of Tied Down on all fronts, romance mystery, intrigue, and the WOW factor is off the charts.  When Miro's past comes back in the form of an escaped serial killer, the pair face their biggest trials yet.  That's all the plot references you'll get from me but it's definitely worth the read but you will want to make sure your day is free and clear because once you start you won't want to quit till you hit the last page.  Coming late to the party, I only have a month to wait for book 3 and even that seems like forever.

RATING: 

Chapter One
I COULDN’T control the whimper of delight. Since we were out in Elmwood, where we never were, I’d begged and pleaded with Ian to stop at Johnnie’s Beef and buy me a sandwich before we got to the house we were sitting on. I hated stakeouts; they were so boring, and I tended to use them as an excuse to eat good instead of the alternative. It could be argued that an Italian beef sandwich with sweet peppers was not, in fact, a gourmet meal, but anyone who said that had obviously never had one. Just opening it up, with the smell that came wafting out… I was salivating.

“This better be worth the long drive outta the way,” Ian groused.

No amount of grumbling was going to get in the way of my happiness. And besides, he owed me. The day before, on our way to the same stakeout, I’d stopped and gotten him hot dogs at Budacki’s—Polish with the works, just how he liked it. I’d even broken up a fight over ketchup between a native and an out-of-towner while I was there and still managed to deliver the goods. So swinging by the beef place was the least he could do.

“You wanna screw the sandwich?” he asked snidely as he started on his pepper and egg one.

I lifted my gaze to his, slowly and purposely seductive, and I got the catch of breath I was hoping for. “No. Not the sandwich.”

He had opened his mouth to say something when we heard the shots.

“Maybe it was a car backfiring,” I offered hopefully, having peeled back the wrapper, ready to take a bite. On this quiet tree-lined suburban street, the kind with white picket fences and people walking their dogs and little A-frame houses with picture windows, it could definitely be something other than a gunshot.

His grimace said no.

Seconds later, a man came flying across the street and down the sidewalk past our car that was sitting quietly on the storybook street at a little after one on a Tuesday afternoon.

“Motherfucker,” I groaned, placing the sandwich gingerly on the dash of the Ford Taurus, out the passenger-side door seconds later.

The guy was fast—I was faster, and I was gaining on him until he pointed a gun over his shoulder and fired.

It would have been a miracle if he’d hit me—he was moving, I was moving—but still, I had to make him stop. Stray bullets were bad, as we’d learned in our last tactical seminar, and more importantly, we were in a small, quaint residential neighborhood where at this time of day, women could be jogging with strollers, followed by beagles or labradoodles. I would make sure reckless discharge of a firearm was tacked on to the charges as soon as I had the guy in custody.

He shot at me a second time, missed me by a mile again, but it was enough of a threat to make me alter my course, cross into a heavily foliaged yard, and cut through two others—one with a swing set, the other with wildflowers—to catch him at the corner. Arm out, using the classic clotheslining move I knew from my days of fighting in foster homes, I had him off his feet and on the pavement in seconds.

“Oh shit, what happened?” Ian asked as he came bounding up beside me. He put his boot down on the guy’s wrist, pinning it painfully to the sidewalk as he bent to retrieve the .38 Special. I’d been the one stepped on before, so I knew the pressure hurt like a sonofabitch. “Look at this. I haven’t seen one of these in years.”

I nodded, admiring my FIORENTINI + BAKER suede boots on him, not even caring if he messed them up, loving more that what was mine, he considered his.

“This is a nice gun that you tried to shoot my partner with,” he said menacingly, his voice icy.

“I’m fine,” I reminded him. “Look at me.”

But he didn’t; instead he lifted the gun and bumped it against the stranger’s cheek.

“Fuck,” the man swore, his eyes wild as they rabbited over to me, pleading.

“How ’bout I make you eat this,” Ian snarled, much more pissed than I’d realized as he hauled the runner up off the sidewalk and yanked him close. “What if you’d hit him?”

The man was either smarter than he appeared or his survival instinct was exceptionally well honed. He correctly surmised that talking back to Ian at that moment, getting lippy, was a bad choice. He kept his mouth shut.

“Everything’s fine,” I soothed Ian as police cars surrounded us.

“Freeze!” the first officer out of the car yelled.

Instead of complying, I unzipped Ian’s olive green field jacket, which I was wearing, and showed them my badge on the chain. “US Marshals, Jones and Doyle.”

Instantly they lowered their weapons before surging around us. Ian handed off both the prisoner and the gun, and told the officers to add reckless discharge of a firearm to whatever else they were charging the guy with.

I was surprised when he grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me after him a few feet down the street before jerking me around to face him.

“I’m fine,” I assured him, chuckling. “You don’t have to manhandle me.”

But he was checking, looking me over, still scared.

“He missed me clean.”

He nodded, hearing but not listening, not taking my words in. I was about to tease him, wanting to nudge him out of his worry, when I realized he was shaking.

“Come here,” I prodded, tugging on his sweater, getting him closer, unable to hug him—not with so many people around—but able to whisper in his ear. “I’m okay, baby. I swear.”

He muttered something under his breath, his shoulders dropped, and his fists unclenched. After a second, he seemed better. “I bet your sandwich is cold,” he whispered.

“Fuckballs,” I muttered, turning to trudge back to our car.

“So what’d you learn?” he teased, normalcy having been restored with my swearing.

“Not to run after other people’s suspects when we’re supposed to be eating.”

Ian’s snicker made me smile in spite of myself.


A LITTLE more than eight months ago we were Deputy US Marshal Miro Jones and his partner, Ian Doyle, but it hadn’t meant what it did now. Then, it was us living apart, him dating women, me wishing he was gay so there would be hope that I could have him instead of comparing every man I met to my very straight, very unavailable partner. Everything changed when I finally saw what having his full and undivided attention actually meant, and when he got up the guts to tell me what he wanted and needed from me, I dove in quickly, drowning in him as fast as I could so he wouldn’t have time to think that maybe, since he’d only recently discovered he was bi, he might want to try the dating scene before settling down. The thing was, though, Ian was one of those rare guys who wanted the one person in the world who fit him like a glove, and that person, it turned out, was me.

So, yes, Ian was still technically bi, but was exclusively now Miro-sexual andwasn’t interested in trying the buffet. All Ian wanted was to stay home with me. I couldn’t have been any happier. Everything was mostly working in my life. Professionally I was in a great place, and personally I was ready to put a ring on Ian’s finger. Like really ready. Like maybe even too ready for Ian, but all in all, my life was perfect except for the grunt work we were currently doing.

After our interrupted lunch, we had to drive all the way back downtown to file a police report to be in compliance with Chicago PD—since we’d been the ones to make the collar—and then turn around to head back out to Elmwood.

“This will teach you to help,” Ian grumbled, and even though I knew he was kidding, it was still a huge pain in the ass.

We were supposed to sit on the house of one William McClain, who was wanted for drug trafficking, but I got a call from Wes Ching, another marshal on our team, asking us to help serve a warrant out in Bloomingdale instead. He and his partner, Chris Becker, were already in Elmwood on another errand, so they would take my and Ian’s crappy stakeout chore and we would take their more—in theory—interesting warrant duty.

I was not a fan of the suburbs, any of them, with or without artery-clogging food, or the hours it took to get to them from each other or the city itself. Traffic in Chicago, all day every day, was a beast, and added to that was the fact the radio in the new car didn’t get Ian’s favorite channel—97.9 The Loop—and the crappy shocks that let us feel every bump and dip in the road. Because we drove whatever had been seized in a criminal investigation, sometimes the cars were amazing—like the 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle SS we had for two weeks—and other times, I worried if maybe I’d died and gone to hell without anyone letting me know. The Ford Taurus we were in currently was seriously not working for me.

“It’s fuel-efficient,” Ian prompted me, reaching over to put a hand on my thigh.

Instantly I shifted in my seat, sliding down so I could get his touch on my cock instead.

“What’re you doing?” he asked slyly even as he pressed his palm against my already thickening shaft.

“I need to get laid,” I said for the third time that day.

It was all his fault.

Instead of getting right out of bed that morning like he normally did, he’d rolled over on top of me, pinned me to the mattress under him, and kissed me until I forgot what day it was. He never did that; he was so by the book in the morning, so on task and barky with the orders. But for whatever reason, I got Ian in languorous vacation mode, all hard and hungry, hands all over me, putting hickeys on my neck, instead of the drill sergeant I normally had to deal with until he got the first cup of coffee in him. He was ravenous and insistent, but then our boss called and Ian was up, out of bed, doing the “yessir, right away, sir” thing and telling me to hurry up and get in the shower fast.

“What?” I roared, sitting up in bed, incredulous when I heard the water running. “Get your ass in here and finish what you started!”

He actually cackled as he got into the shower and was still chuckling as I sat there in bed, fuming, before I fell back to take care of myself.

“Don’t you dare touch that!” he yelled from under the water.

I groaned and climbed out of bed and plodded downstairs to get coffee. Chickie Baby was happy to see me, mostly because I fed him. Stupid dog.

“There was no happy ending for me this morning,” I complained to Ian, back in the present. “You didn’t take care of me.”

“What?” He chuckled, moving his hand back to the wheel. “I woke you… up nice… and… crap.”

I wanted Ian, needed Ian, but he was distracted as he slowed the car, and when I dragged my gaze from his profile to the sight in front of me, I made the same noise of disgust he had. Immediately I called Ching.

“You fuck,” I said instead of hello when he answered.

Snort of laughter. “What?” he said, but it was muffled like he was chewing. “Me and Becker are doing stakeout for you in Elmwood and then following up on a lead from the Eastern District warrant squad.”

“Where the fuck are you?” I snarled as I put him on speaker.

He said something in reply, but it couldn’t really be categorized as a word.

I was instantly suspicious. “Are you at Johnnie’s Beef?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Asshole!” I yelled.

“Oh, come on, Jones, have a heart. We’re doing you a favor, right?”

“I’m sorry, what’d you just say to me?”

All I heard was laughing.

“You know we’d rather follow up a bullshit lead than serve a warrant with a task force, you dick,” Ian growled from beside me. “This is fucked up, Wes, and you know it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ching finished with a cackle. “You two get to work with the DEA and the Chicago PD for the second time today. That’s awesome.”

I should have known when he offered; it was my own fault.

Ian reiterated my thoughts almost perfectly, which made things that much worse. “You have no one to blame but yourself.”

After Ian parked the car, we walked around to the trunk and got out our TAC vests, put the badges on our belts, and Ian put on his thigh holster that carried a second gun. Walking over to the group, Ian asked who was in charge. It turned out to be exactly what Ian and I expected; it was a clusterfuck better known as a task force. We saw both district and regional groups, this being the latter because I could see local law enforcement as well as guys from the DEA who all looked like either grunged-out meth addicts or GQ models. There was no in-between with them. I had, as of yet, never met a DEA agent I liked. They all thought they had not only the toughest job, but also the most dangerous. They were a bunch of prima donnas I had no use for.

It was amazing how many people thought that marshals did the same things other law enforcement agencies did. They assumed we investigated crime, collected evidence, and sat in front of whiteboards to try to figure out who the bad guy was from a list of viable suspects. But that was simply not the case. Much like it was in the Old West; we tracked people down and brought them in for trial. As a result, a tremendous amount of time—when we weren’t out on loan to a joint task force, for instance—was spent running down leads, watching houses, and basically doing surveillance. It could be a little mind-numbing, and so, occasionally, when the usual was broken up by things like traveling to pick up a witness or taking part in an undercover operation, it was viewed as a welcome diversion. But neither Ian nor I ever thought working with the DEA was a good thing.

Today the task force was looking to pick up three men with ties to the Madero crime family who’d slipped federal custody in New York and were apparently hiding out with one of the guys’ distant cousins in the burbs of Chicago. That was what serving a warrant meant. It was fancy phrasing for taking someone into custody.

The plan was for us to go into the five-story apartment building like thunder with battering rams, the whole deal. The raids were my least favorite, but I understood why we were there. Normally a Fugitive Investigative Strike Team consisting of Feds, local police, and other state agencies extracted a witness, and FISTs fell under the purview of the marshals service. It wasn’t a task force without us, so our office had been tacked on.

Chicago PD went in first, the DEA douchebags following. Ian and I stayed put on the first floor until we heard shots fired in the stairwell. We went straight up while people yelled that there were men escaping onto the roof.

I yelled first to let anyone else around know what was going on, then for backup, but they’d all scattered to the lower floors, so that left Ian and me to charge up to try and head off whoever was up there.

“Do not go out that door!” I yelled after Ian, who, as usual, was in front of me. The only reason he’d been second earlier in the day was because I’d been in the passenger seat when the guy ran by the car. Nine times out of ten, I followed Ian into whatever the situation was.

He burst through the heavy metal door leading to the roof and, of course, drew immediate answering gunfire.

I ran out after him in time to see Ian level his gun and fire. Only in the movies did people yell “don’t shoot” when people were actually shooting at them.

The guy went down, and I watched another turn and run. He didn’t have a weapon that I could see, so I holstered my gun and took off after him as Ian rolled the guy he’d shot onto his back and roared at the men who had followed us up to take him.

I raced across the rooftop hard on the fugitive’s heels, churning my legs and arms to catch him before he reached the edge. He sped toward the building’s ledge, then launched himself into the air. I had no idea if there was another building there, but since there had been no scream, I pushed myself harder and followed after him into the sky.

The rooftop of the four-story building across the narrow alley was a welcome sight, and I landed easily, somersaulting over onto one knee, then pushing up into a dead sprint again. I guessed we were out of real estate when the man abruptly stopped, whirling to face me. Pulling a butterfly knife from his back pocket, he flipped it open and advanced on me.

I pulled my Glock 20 and leveled it at him. “Drop the weapon, get on your knees, and lace your fingers on top of your head.”

He was deciding—I could tell.

“Now,” I ordered, my voice dipping an octave into a cold, dark place.

He muttered under his breath but released the knife and went to his knees. I moved fast, reaching his side before he complied with the entirety of my request, kicked the knife away, and pulled a set of Plasticuffs from my TAC vest. Shoving him facedown, I waited for backup.

My phone rang and I winced upon seeing the caller ID. “Hey.”

“What the fuck was that?”

“That was the Ian Doyle special,” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.

“Oh, no, fuck you! I don’t jump off shit, Miro, only you do that!”

I did have a bit more of a history with that than he did. “Yeah, okay.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m good,” I replied, smiling into the phone. “Promise. I’ll meet you downstairs as soon as I get some fucking help up here.”

His inelegant snort made me smile.

Moments later I was swarmed by police officers ready to take the fugitive off my hands. As I was following the men down four flights, I asked the sergeant in front of me if we were transporting the criminals to their station, whichever one that was, or if they were going in our holding cell downtown.

“I think the DEA is taking custody of all three.”

That meant all three men would be questioned and the one with the best information would be given a deal. The others would be turned over to the police. It was a waste of time for Ian and me to have even been there.

“Did you hear this bullshit?” I groused at Ian as he came hurdling up to me. “We don’t even get—”

“Shut up,” he growled, grabbing the armhole of my vest and yanking me forward. His gaze ran over me and I heard how rough his breathing was.

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry,” I whispered, leaning close so he could hear me but not touching, the motion making it seem like I was relating privileged information and nothing more.

“I have faith in you, don’t get me wrong,” he said quickly. “But you know as well as I do that you leaped without knowing what was there, and that’s plain stupid.”

He was right.

“Don’t fuckin’ do it again.”

“No,” I agreed, leaning back to search his face. “So am I forgiven?”

He nodded, and I finally got a trace of a smile.

We were going to head back to file a report when we saw the people who were flushed from the apartment, three guys in all, now sitting outside on the sidewalk.

“What’s goin’ on there?” I asked the closest officer, gesturing at the men.

“We’re about to let ’em all go.”

“Why?” Ian asked, clipping the word, clearly irritated.

“Hey, man,” the cop responded tiredly, “we ran those guys through NCIC for outstanding warrants already, and they all came up clean. There’s no use keeping ’em.”

“Mind if we check?” I replied, trying to make my tone soothing.

“Only if you take custody,” he replied petulantly. “I don’t have time to stand around here with my thumb up my ass waiting on you.”

“Sure,” Ian agreed, his tone silky and dangerous. “Transfer custody to us.”

It was done in moments, and the freed officer jogged over to let his sergeant know. His superior gave us a head tilt, clearly thinking we were DEA since he couldn’t see the back of the vests. Had he known, he wouldn’t have given the go-ahead. No one ever turned people over to the marshals because with our warrant information network we could always find something extra, just that bit more and being shown up pissed them off like nobody’s business. No one ever hated asking for our help to pick someone up after the fact or on a lead that’d gone cold, but having the marshals show them up at the scene of a bust made everyone bitchy.

Ian pulled out his phone as I squatted down in front of the first guy.

“So who the fuck are you?” our first suspect asked.

“Marshal,” I answered. “We’re going to run you all for warrants again.”

No one seemed concerned.

Mike Ryan and his partner, Jack Dorsey, were on desk duty that morning, which meant they got to look up the records of the men sitting on the curb. We released the suspects one by one—Ryan and Dorsey making a note of it over the phone—removed their cuffs, and wished them a good day. “Go to hell” was the most popular response to Ian’s cheerfulness while “fuck off” ran a close second.

It turned out a warrant for attempted murder and aggravated battery came back for the last guy.

“Winner winner chicken dinner,” I announced, smirking at him.

“Fuckin’ marshals,” Dario Batista griped. “I thought this was a DEA bust.”

Ian cackled as we hauled him to his feet.

“Come on, man,” he whined. “I have information I can give you. Let’s work out a deal.”

“We’re marshals,” Ian said as the three of us began walking back to the Taurus. “We don’t make deals.”

I called in as we stuffed him into the backseat.

“What the hell kind of clown car is this?” Batista complained.

“It’s fuel-efficient,” I rationalized as I set the childproof lock on the back door before getting in.

“God, I hate this car,” Ian growled irritably.

I promised we’d check on a new one when we got back to the office.

Matter of Time

Saturday Series Spotlight 2017

Re-Readables 2019: 🎧Audiobook Edition🎧

With George

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Marshals

Saturday Series Spotlight

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Mary Calmes

Mary Calmes lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and two children and loves all the seasons except summer. She graduated from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, with a bachelor's degree in English literature. Due to the fact that it is English lit and not English grammar, do not ask her to point out a clause for you, as it will so not happen. She loves writing, becoming immersed in the process, and falling into the work. She can even tell you what her characters smell like. She loves buying books and going to conventions to meet her fans.

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