“We’re going to a wedding.”              

The words had Iris dropping the flowers she was holding right into the vase she’d been arranging them into.

It was the second thing that had shocked the hell out of her today. The first had been the fact that Marcus had brought home flowers.

Irises.

It had been two weeks since they’d come back to hide in plain sight at Marcus’s house. Two of the strangest weeks of either of their lives.

The day after Iris had dyed her hair, Marcus had introduced her to some of his neighbors as his girlfriend. He explained that she was going to be living in the building for a while. He’d taken her to buy clothes at the mall, just as he’d said he would.

He’d bought her a watch. One that he’d picked out by himself. Iris had no idea why that had meant so much to her, but it had.

Besides the fact that he was sleeping on the couch every night, he was going about his normal life. He’d gone out to see his friends, Eli and Jay, a few times. He’d gone to see his quasi-parents, Kat and Ryan, a few times.

“What did you tell them about me?” she’d asked him.

“That you were my friend and that you needed help and that you were staying with me for a while,” he responded. She noted that he didn’t lie about the girlfriend thing to his best friends. She was both relieved and annoyed by that.

Most of their time was spent at the house. Together. He wasn’t comfortable leaving her on her own and she wasn’t comfortable being out in public, so they stayed in. And avoided one another.

They were walking a line. There was no hiding how badly they wanted one another. It was clear in every tense moment, sliding past each other in the hallway, catching one another’s eye when Marcus left the bathroom with a towel around his waist, when Iris would emerge from his bedroom in the morning, rumpled and soft.

But they hadn’t crossed the line. They both had their reasons. Iris didn’t want her heart to be ripped to shreds. And Marcus didn’t want to rip Iris’s heart to shreds. So they carefully avoided temptation.

Movie nights were a thing of the past. They didn’t snuggle anymore.

But it wasn’t like it was a faucet you could just turn off and that was that. Their feelings were revealed in other ways. The way they cooked for one another. Elaborate, delicious meals, filled with things they couldn’t say out loud. The way Iris folded his laundry. The way he’d started bringing home little things to brighten up the space they spent all their time in. He’d brought home a colorful rug for the kitchen, a mirror for the bedroom, and a couple of bright vases.

Iris knew that he was bringing them for her. That, even though they were for his house, they were really for her. He wanted her to feel good at his house, to feel comfortable and bright. But she hadn’t been expecting the flowers. If the rug for the kitchen had been an admission of caring about her, the bundle of Irises wrapped in brown paper had been damn near a love poem. She’d taken them with shaking hands and he’d watched as she’d trimmed the stems, started placing them lovingly in one of the vases he’d bought for her the other day.

“What?” Iris asked, her eyes as big as saucers. “What did you say?”

Marcus cleared his throat and jammed his hands in his pockets. Why he was nervous he had no clue. He felt like he was asking a girl to the prom or something. “My best friend, Jay, is having a wedding ceremony in the Bahamas. And we’re going.”

Iris furrowed her brow and concentrated on one detail at a time. “I thought Jay was already married?”

“He is. To Mari. But they jumped the broom in Vegas a few months ago and now they want to have a real ceremony. On the island where they met. It’ll only be a handful of people.”

She cleared her throat. “Who?”

“Eli and Tia, Kat and Ryan, Jay and Mari, of course. And you and me.”

Oh. Just all the most important people in Marcus’s life. Great. That oughtta be a breeze. “And I’m coming along as your…?”

“Friend. My friend Irene. I can’t lie to them the way I did my neighbors. But we’ll still keep your identity hidden. For their protection as much as yours.”

“Yeah. Um. When?”

“Two days.”

Iris gawped. “In two days? Marcus, in case you didn’t know, the Bahamas are a different country. I’ll need a passport.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little blue booklet, sliding it across the counter to her. Iris opened it up with trembling hands. The picture that had been on her real passport looked up at her. Irene Carver. It was a falsified document.

“How did you get this?”

He flashed that smile that made her week at the knees. “I’m on suspension, but I still have friends at the bureau.”

“Agent Jones,” she guessed, her eyes glued onto the passport.

“Baby,” he said and had her eyes snapping up to his. He’d taken to calling her that these days, and she knew it was because he didn’t like the Irene thing any better than she did. “The only thing you have to lie about is your name. The rest is true. You’re my friend. You need help for a while. You’re a musician, your brother is MIA. None of it is a lie.”

Iris nodded. She took a deep breath and fussed with the placement of the flowers in front of her. “I’ll need a bathing suit or two.”

She didn’t need to look up to know he was grinning at her.

***

It was two and a half days later that Iris found herself in the passenger seat of an open air Jeep racing down a narrow, jungle-like street in Grand Bahama.

“I’m a good driver, you know!” she shouted over the wind as her hair blew every which way. The shorter hair was much harder to restrain with a hair tie than her longer locks had been.

He grinned at her, one tanned arm stretched out over the steering wheel, such a contrast to his blindingly white t-shirt. “I’m sure you are. But there’s only so much control I can hand over at once.”

“I’m sorry,” Iris raised an eyebrow as they pulled up to a stop light. “Are you implying that you’ve rescinded control to me at any point? Because I’m pretty sure I missed that part of the program.”

He grinned at her even bigger. “Fair enough.”

Iris was a little stunned at the transformation that had come over him as they’d landed at the airport. He was somewhere caught between Marcus and Agent Marinos, with a little bit of kid Marcus thrown in for good measure. He was playfully excited about this wedding. Iris could tell. He'd had a boyish glint in his eye for the last hour and secretly, Iris couldn’t get enough of it.

“Here we are,” he pulled into the parking lot of a tall resort hotel.

“I thought we were staying on a little abandoned island? Where they met?”

“Nah,” Marcus shook his head as he turned off the car and grabbed the duffel bag they’d packed their things in. “That’s where the ceremony is tomorrow, but we’re all staying at this hotel. There’s nowhere to stay on their island.” He paused for a second. “I’m pretty sure you and I are in one hotel room. Because they didn’t account for me bringing someone. I hope that’s okay.”
It gave Iris a flip in her stomach to think of them in the same hotel room. But she shrugged nonchalantly. “Pretty much the same thing as what we’re doing at your house, right?”

Marcus’s apartment was pretty small. And they were living there just fine. She didn’t see how a hotel room would be much different.

“Alright,” he said, his eyes on her, burning. She knew him well enough by now to know that he wanted her eyes. He wanted her to look at him. But for some reason, she found that she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. She needed the distance. She was nervous as hell about meeting all his special people. And about pretending to be Irene Carver. And the game was going to be on in about T minus 30 seconds.              

“I was thinking,” Marcus said as they walked side by side through the parking lot.

“About what?”

“About calling you Irie.”

Iris turned to him. “Why?”

“Look,” Marcus said, brushing some of her short hair out of her eyes. “I’m sorry, baby, but Irene just doesn’t fit you. Irie is halfway in between.”

“Irie.” She tried it out and shrugged. “Suit yourself. You’re the one who has to say it.”

He checked them in at the opulent, seashell-themed front desk of the humongous hotel. There were tourists and beach goers bustling in every direction of the lobby, and Iris had to swallow back a little bubble of panic. This was easily the most crowded place she’d been since she’d been abducted. Even the airport had been less of an ordeal than this.

Marcus’s phone chirped as he guided Iris through the lobby of the hotel toward a row of elevators with golden doors. “That’s Eli texting. They’re all having a drink in Jay and Mari’s suite before dinner. We can drop our stuff and meet them.”

“Alright,” she said, nerves galloping in her chest.

Those nerves multiplied by about 8000 percent when Marcus unlocked the door to his hotel room and Iris realized that there was only one bed. A king size. But still. One bed. Marcus tossed the duffel bag right onto it and went into the bathroom to wash his hands.

“I’m gonna take a shower real quick,” he called out to Iris who was still standing in the entryway of the room, staring at the bed.

She shook the life back into her head. And snapped to. “Uh, can I go first actually? That way I can dry my hair while you shower.”

“Sure,” he said, coming out of the bathroom to see her staring, one lip caught between her teeth, at the bed. He realized what she’d realized the second she’d come in.

One bed. Two people. Lots of skin. Mmmmm. Sleepy Iris. All soft and rumpled in the mornings. Just an arm’s length away at most. Marcus cleared his throat. “Bathroom’s all yours.”

Iris unzipped their duffel, grabbed the clothes she needed and darted into the bathroom.

She showered quickly and pulled on the red sundress she’d brought along. She figured it walked the line between formal and casual.

Her eyes cast to the ground, she held open the bathroom door for Marcus and immediately went to dig around in the duffel.

She was uncomfortable. It was extremely obvious. Marcus cast around in his brain for any way to comfort her that wasn’t overtly affectionate. He’d become an expert at that since they’d returned to Ocean City. How to show her how he felt without actually showing her. It was killing him, slowly, but it was the only way he could see to do this thing with her. He wouldn’t let himself have her. But he couldn’t not have her either.

He showered as quickly as she had. He was anxious to get to his friends. He’d barely seen Jay or Eli since he’d returned from the beach house and he knew they were confused about what the hell was going on with him. Everyone was confused as to why he was bringing a girl along. First of all, he’d made it clear that they weren’t together and second of all, they all knew that he’d sworn off women for the time being.

All he knew was that he needed advice. Advice from his two oldest, best friends on how the hell he could keep resisting this woman.

He pulled on a pair of nice dark jeans and a navy blue button-down shirt that he rolled up to his elbows and left open at the collar. Island casual was not really his thing; he’d be hot in what he was wearing. But short sleeve button-downs were not his thing. And besides it was just dinner, it didn’t matter what he wore either way. The ceremony was tomorrow.

He pulled open the bathroom door to see Iris leaning over the dresser, toward the mirror, mouth slack and putting on mascara. Her body was clearly outlined in the red, ankle-length sundress she wore.

Marcus gritted his teeth as his eyes swept over her. Christ, she was beautiful, with her short hair all styled and that dress on. He’d never seen her in a dress before.

He cleared his throat. “Almost ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” she sighed, capping the mascara and turning to face him.

They took the elevator up to Jay and Mari’s suite. They’d treated themselves to a colossal room on the top floor. It was their wedding, after all. And they had some sort of thing about staying in a hotel on Grand Bahama. Something about their bucket list. Marcus wasn’t sure.

Without thinking too hard on it, Marcus briefly squeezed her hand as he knocked on the door of the suite. She took a deep breath and let it out as the door swung open and an older, very handsome man immediately folded Marcus into a bear hug.

“Ryan,” Marcus grinned as he hugged the man back just as hard.

Okay. Now was the time for brain power. Iris had heard a lot about all these people and now was the time to keep them all straight. This silver fox definitely had to be Elijah Bird’s dad. Same patented smile and good looks. Ryan. Marcus’s second father. Or, as Marcus might put it, his real father.

They broke the hug and shuffled into the room, closing the door behind them.

“Ryan, this is my friend, Irie. Irie, this is Ryan Bird.” Marcus gestured to the two of them.

“Nice to meet you,” Iris said, her voice a little trembly. She held out a hand but the large man just hugged the heck out of her instead.

“Welcome,” he said, simply, and Iris had the distinct impression that he wholeheartedly meant it. The greeting went a long way toward calming her nerves.

Marcus led her into the large living area of the fancy honeymoon suite and five more people sat on the plush couches. They all rose up.

Iris was introduced to everybody. To Jay, Marcus’s really good looking best friend. With his shaggy blonde hair and blue eyes, he gave off a surfer kind of vibe. Very casual and laid back, unless his eyes were on Mari, and then they burned with intensity. He also gave Iris a hug instead of a handshake.

Mari was next, and she was extremely little. Just a touch over five feet tall, but wiry and muscular. She had long, unadorned black hair down her back and dark eyes. She wore a simple black dress. No muss, no fuss. She didn’t smile during the introduction, but Iris got a friendly vibe from her nonetheless.

Next came Kat, a strikingly pretty woman, probably in her late fifties. She had trendy salt and pepper hair and good fashion sense. She enveloped Iris in the softest hug she’d maybe ever had and Iris had the insane urge to keep hanging on.

Then there was Tia, a striking woman. Tall and statuesque, she had a square, serious face and the shiniest hair Iris had ever seen. She surprised Iris by hugging her—she would have thought the woman to be more of a handshaker. Iris froze up a little, during the hug, when she realized exactly how many of this woman’s clothes she’d worn in the last month. Oh well. Nothing to be done about that besides to thank her in private later.

And last but not least, there was Elijah Bird. Eli. The celebrity crush of Iris’s life. And damn, did he not disappoint. First of all, he was huge. Second of all, he was handsome as hell. And third, that smile of his was panty melting on television, but it was panty death-ray melting in real life. He gave her the biggest hug of all, and Iris found herself stumbling away from it a second later.

She didn’t notice Marcus’s scowl, or the way he jammed his hands in his pockets at full force, but his friends sure noticed.

A little flummoxed, Iris ran her fingers through her hair and scanned the group. She said the first thing that came to her mind. “Wow, you are all really good looking.”

The group laughed, hard, and Iris was extremely relieved that her words hadn’t been met with awkwardness. She went pink in the cheeks that only intensified when she felt Marcus’s firm grip on her shoulder.

She looked back, expecting him to be guiding her somewhere, but no, he was just resting his hand on her shoulder. Just because.

A few minutes later, Iris found herself sandwiched on the couch between Mari and Tia, a glass of cool rosé in her hand. She realized that it had been over a year since she’d been in a group this large, socializing. And she didn’t think she’d ever been in a group that had this much fun together, or loved one another so much.

There was an excited buzz racing through the group about the ceremony tomorrow. Everyone was beyond curious to see the island where Mari and Jay had met. Iris could tell there was an interesting story there, but she was too nervous to ask. She let Kat and Ryan do most of the talking as they sat across from the three women.

Meanwhile, Jay, Eli, and Marcus stood out on the balcony of the suite, the sliding door closed behind them, to keep the air conditioning inside.

It felt good to Marcus to be just the three of them. It was a baseline for him, their friendship, it had been for as long as he could remember.

“You nervous to tie the knot tomorrow, my dude?” he asked Jay, clapping a hand on his back and shoving a small glass of whiskey into his hand. Jay barely ever drank. But on an occasion like this, he might have a glass or two.

Jay laughed and rolled his eyes. “Well, considering we’re already married, my nerves are pretty settled on that front.”

“Then what are you nervous about?” Eli asked, eyes narrowed on Jay’s tan face. The three of them knew one another well enough to be able to cut through the bullshit and figure out when one of them was feeling the feels.

“Ah,” Jay muttered, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck and staring out toward the ocean. “Just seeing the island again. You know? The last time I was there, I was pretty much dying. And that’s where I lost Mari.” He paused. His love story with his wife had been filled with plenty of pain. He didn’t need to tell Eli and Marcus that. They’d lived a lot of that right alongside him. “It seemed like such a good idea, to have the ceremony there. But now that we’re here, I’m wondering if it’s just going to bring up all that fear and pain we went through.”

Marcus squinted his eyes around him at all the foliage, the ocean glinting like a bright jewel in front of them. “Jay, man, I don’t want to belittle your feelings or whatever. But this is literally paradise. How bad could it be?”

Jay laughed a little, held up his drink in a small toast to Marcus. “I guess you’re right.”

“And if it’s terrible tomorrow,” Eli chimed in. “Who cares? It’s not about the ceremony. It’s about the marriage. And you two are in it for the long haul.”

Jay’s eyebrows flicked up. “That’s the truth.” He turned and squinted back through the balcony glass at Mari’s dark head of hair. Good lord, he loved that woman. And after what felt like a lifetime of waiting, she was his. Good and his. And that was all he needed to concentrate on tomorrow. Mari leaned back on the couch and it brought Marcus’s pretty little friend into Jay’s line of sight. He swallowed his nervous feelings about tomorrow and decided to engage in one of his favorite pastimes. Giving his friend shit. “Speaking of long haul, what’s the deal with Little Miss Wife Material you brought as your plus one?”

Marcus inhaled a little whiskey down the wrong tube and frowned, hard. “Irie?”

“Duh,” Eli said, rolling his eyes and leaning against the balcony railing.

“Don’t lean against that, dude,” Marcus frowned. “You never know how often these buildings are inspected.” His two best friends had been in the hospital enough times for him to have a particularly sharp eye for things that could cause them harm.

Eli straightened up and sat on one of the loungers instead. “Don’t evade. What’s going on with you and Irie?”

Marcus frowned more and sat on his own lounger. “Nothing.”

Eli rolled his eyes again. “For fuck sakes. If you can’t tell the truth to us, then who can you tell?”

Marcus swirled the whiskey in his glass and looked out at the ocean for a second. Eli was dead right. If Marcus kept it inside, it was just going to die there. “Fine. There’s a lot going on between us. But it’s all beneath the surface. Nothing’s happened.”

Jay took another look at the very pretty woman sitting inside the hotel suite. “Why the hell not?”

“First, because of work. And don’t ask, because I can’t tell you more.” They didn’t push. At this point, they were both very used to Marcus having to keep many, many FBI-related secrets from them. Actually, they preferred it that way. Just as Marcus didn't want Eli leaning against a balcony railing twenty stories in the air, they didn’t want to know about any firefights Marcus might be involved in.

“And second?” Eli prompted, though he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

“And second you already know,” Marcus waved his hand through the air in resignation. “I’m no good for women. So I’m, you know, abstaining.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Jay set his glass down and sat next to Eli, facing Marcus. “This celibacy thing is forever? I thought it was just until you found a girl you really liked.” He yanked his thumb back in the direction of the suite. “Like that one.”

Marcus scraped his hand across the top of his head. “Well, forever wasn’t the fucking plan. But now I’ve got this girl that I…” he didn’t bother finishing the sentence. “And I have absolutely no way of being with her.”

“What?” Jay asked, utterly confused.

Eli, who was a little more in the know about how Marcus was viewing this whole thing, sighed. “Marcus, I still think you’re being too hard on yourself.” He turned to Jay, knowing that Marcus didn’t want to go through the whole thing again. “Marcus thinks that he destroys women when he’s with them. That he leaves them worse off than when he found them. And he, what was it again? Has weird sex hang ups.”

Marcus couldn’t help but laugh for a second. “I don’t have weird sex hang ups. I just, I don’t know. Women tell me I’m a lot to handle. Far more experienced women than Irie. And I just, I can’t do that to her.”

“Wow.” Jay eyed his friend in a discerning, but non-judgmental way. “Don’t you think that’s something she should decide for herself?”

Marcus flicked his eyes to Jay. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, she might be inexperienced. But from what I can tell, she’s a grown woman. And you’re obviously into her. So you’re not gonna treat her badly. Doesn’t it make the most sense to put your cards on the table and let her decide whether or not to play?”

Marcus clapped his mouth closed. It hadn’t occurred to him to think of it like that. And now that he thought about it, he supposed it was a little condescending that he was so sure what would or wouldn’t be good for her. He was caught, balancing between two ideologies.

The door beside them slid open. “Ready to go?” Kat asked, leaning against the door and scanning her eyes over her three boys. Jay was the only one who was biologically hers. But damn if she didn’t have a real soft spot for all three of them. Her eyes lingered on Marcus the longest. It didn’t take much to see that he was beating himself up about something. But then, Marcus was always beating himself up about something.

The men stood and Kat watched them file inside, her eyes on Marcus. If he was still in this funk at the end of the trip then she was gonna have to pull him aside and make him talk. He wouldn’t like it, he never did, but she’d been taking care of him for long enough to know exactly what he needed.

The younger generation, talking and laughing, left the hotel room, leaving Kat and Ryan alone for just a moment.

“Did you…?” Ryan asked, pointing toward where Marcus had just left.

“Yeah, yup, I noticed,” Kat cut in. They’d known one another for so long, had been raising these boys in tandem for so long, that she didn’t even have to ask what he was referencing.

“My money’s on the girl.” Ryan carded a hand through his hair.

“You think he’s all twisted up over her?”

“Sure do. I happen to know exactly what all the signs are of being all twisted up over a girl.” He grinned at Kat and crooked an elbow in her direction.

None of their boys had asked, yet, exactly what was going on between them, but as they’d only booked one room, there was quite a bit to be assumed there.

If any of them asked, both Kat and Ryan would tell the truth. They weren’t hiding anything.

“I wonder if I should talk to him,” Ryan mused as they strolled down the hallway, a good ways back from the kids. “Tell him about how things went with you and me.”             

Kat raised her eyebrows up high. “You’d do that?”

“If it helped him figure out which way was north, then I would.”

Kat watched the side of his face. “You’re a good dad.”

He grinned. “I know.”