Page 55 of Tied Over

I snickered and leaned over to check my phone.

Hayden said, “I would never just take him out there and be mean, Jed. That’s not me.”

He sounded annoyed, and I turned to apologize, but Bodhi put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently.

“That’s not what he meant,” Bodhi told him. “I don’t play because first, I get way too competitive. It’s like Jed when he plays chess.”

“You play chess?” Hayden seemed surprised, and I had the momentary desire to punch him.

“And second, I was a Division One All-American tennis player.”

“What?”

Bodhi shrugged.

“You were?”

He nodded. “I went to UCLA on a tennis scholarship.”

“You could have gone pro?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why didn’t—”

“Deputy US Marshal,” Bodhi said, smiling. “That was my dream.”

“Why?” Hank asked him.

“Justice. Integrity. Service,” he said, quoting the marshal creed.

Hayden sighed deeply. “You’re always going to be a marshal, aren’t you.”

“Yeah,” he said with that grin of his that made his eyes shine. “So that job at your law firm, the private investigator one? That’s not me. And I definitely don’t want to sit behind a desk.”

“I could sit behind a desk,” I chimed in.

He turned to me. “The hell you say.”

“Like Ian?”

His laugh in my face made me growl. “We both know Ian would rather be chasing down bad guys and dodging bullets.”

“I’m too old,” I whined.

“You just had a shoot-out with what, twelve guys, or however many there were, in a confined space and killed them all, just you and Crouse.”

Everyone was staring at me.

“That’s not what I’m talk—”

“It was on the news,” Bodhi told them.

Angie walked over to stand beside me and googled Chicago and marshals on her phone, and of course, it was the first thing that came up. “Holy shit, Jed, this is how you hurt your shoulder?”

I shot Bodhi a look that should have killed him dead on the spot.

“It says fifteen men here, Jed, just you and Special Agent Spencer Crouse.”