Heidi Betts: Loves Me, Loves Me Knot

“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.”