Brazen (B-Squad #1) (11 page)

She pressed her ear to the door. No sound came through. Letting out a soft exhale, she turned to Taz and pressed a finger to her lip and jerked her head toward the door. He nodded.

Easing the door open a crack, she sent up a silent prayer to whoever was in charge of things to please, please, please let something go right. Through the narrow opening, she spotted the guard sitting in front of the wall of video screens next to the computer now running Lexie’s tap-in bug. An unwrapped foot-long hoagie, bag of chips and two liter of soda sat on the desk. The guard took his nine millimeter from his holster and sat it down next to his food. Then, he sat back in the chair and loosened his belt before reaching for his sandwich.

She pressed the door shut and leaned against it. Someone up there had it out for her today. Taking a quick look around, she took in the precise layout of the computer racks, the raised floor tiles with the anti-static finish and the digital wall thermometer that read sixty-nine degrees. Okay, finally good news. Whoever had built the server room had followed the standard guidelines Lexie had insisted on when creating the B-Squad’s secure computer server room. That meant the room was soundproof.

“He’s settling in for the long haul,” she said and pulled her cell from her chemise’s decorative pocket.

“Calling in a 9-1-1?” Taz asked.

She nodded. “Lexie and Marko are on surveillance duty, but between the rest of the team’s devious minds, they’ll be able to come up with something to spring us without alerting anyone that we were here.”

BIANCA: TRAPPED. NEED A DISTRACTION TO PULL THE GUARD FROM SECURITY ROOM.

LEXIE: ON IT. GIVE ME FIFTEEN.

She put the cell on the shelf. Nothing to do now but wait and try not to think about everything Taz had revealed. From the few bits and pieces he’d let slip before, she’d known his childhood hadn’t been great. She hadn’t realizes just how grim it had been. It explained why he didn’t like sharing any more than she did.

They were quite the pair. Both of them were all jagged edges but their sharp points fit together seamlessly—at least that’s what it had seemed like in the cabana. But after all they’d been through in the past twenty-four hours with Tamara, Taz’s almost still-married status and getting hit with Genie’s Wish, it made it hard to figure out what was real and what was fake.

Not when it comes to what really matters.

She knew what she had to do, and she had to do it now before she lost her nerve and took the easy way out.

“Do you have the contacts in?”

Taz turned to face her. “No, why?”

Heart hammering in her chest, she stretched up on her tiptoes and looked into his eyes. The scent of his sandalwood soap surrounded her, this close in, and she had to fight to remember the point of all of this. “No dilation.”

“You either.”

Desire, unaided by anything chemicals beyond the testosterone punch of Taz’s pheromones, unfurled in her belly, warming her skin and making her nipples pebble. “We have fifteen minutes, and I want to know if that connection we felt in the cabana is true.”

His lips curled in a dangerous, predatory grin. “What do you have in mind?”

She hooked a finger in his waistband. “Let me show you.”

T
az captured
her wrist before she could take down his boxers. If she thought sex was all there was between them, was their only connection, then he wasn’t going to just give in that easily. She was going to have to work for it.

“That is not how this is going to go.” He pulled her hand away and the elastic of his boxers snapped back against his lower abs, leaving a satisfying sting.

Her pink tongue darted out and wet her bottom lip as she looked up at him with her big brown eyes. “Oh really?”

“Really.” He encircled her other wrist and raised her arms high over her head as he spun her around so her back was to the wall.

The move yanked up her sheer nightie so the ruffled hem stopped directly above her glistening pussy. The bare lips beckoned him with their heady scent to take a long, leisurely lap of her juices. Then another and another until his mouth was soaked with her desire and she was crying out in ecstasy above him.

“Already so wet for me.” He shoved his foot between hers and knocked her stance wide. “I could look at that pretty pussy of yours for hours, taste it, suck on your clit, and make you come again and again until you were begging for a break.”

“Big talk.”

“You know it’s not just talk with me, Kitten.” He adjusted his grip so he was holding both of her wrists in one hand. Then, he glided the backs of his fingers down the soft underside of her extended right arm. “Do I need to remind you about that night in Houston? Or the time in New York?”

She bit down on her full bottom lip and undulated her hips.

“I see not.” He traced a circle around the hard peak of her nipple straining against her nightie’s sheer material before dipping his head down and taking it in his mouth.

Bianca moaned and writhed under his touch as he sucked her nipple, pulling the sensitive nub to its limit then releasing it. Turning his attention to her other nipple, he repeated the circle-suck-pull routine as he slipped his free hand between her wet folds. God, her softness was so hot to his touch. He released her nipple with a soft pop.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have time for that, do we?”

“No,” she said, her breath a regretful, breathy whisper.

His hard cock, extending from the opening in his boxers, had no problem with the compressed timeline. Pre-cum made the swollen head slick. His balls were already tight against him. Genie’s Wish or not, this was how it always was between them. Beauty, brains and a brazen attitude, she was everything he’d never realized he was looking for until he’d found her. There was no way in hell, even after all the shit that had gone down in the past twenty-four hours, he was letting her go.

“You want to know if this is real with us?” He stepped between her splayed legs, released her arms, tugged her thong to the side and cupped her ass in his hands before lifting her up.

She locked her legs around him and arched her back so only her shoulder blades were pressed against the wall. The move drew him in close so the sensitive underside of his cock rubbed against her exposed sweet pussy. The pleasure just from that skin-to-skin contact was so intense, his vision went black for a moment. The urge to plunge inside her warm depths racked his body, but he held off—just barely.

“After six months you still don’t know?” he asked, using his hold on her ass to rock her tender flesh against him. “Are you
that
scared?”

She buried her face in his neck. “Yes.”

The sound was so plaintive, so unlike the Bianca he knew, that it froze him. He stopped moving his hips and he wrapped his arms around her, bringing her in close to him so there wasn’t an inch of skin he wasn’t touching in an effort to comfort her.

He turned his head to try to get a look at her face. “Why?”

She leaned back a little and looked up at him with watery eyes. “I don’t know that I could come back from losing you.”

That gutted him. Tamara. The marriage. Not telling her about his past. Before, he’d thought none of it mattered, but it had. By not sharing, he’d left her wondering, thinking that this thing between them was just that—a thing. It wasn’t. It was forever.

“You are a total badass, you could survive anything—but you don’t have to. I’m not going anywhere.”

She blinked away the wetness and grinned up at him. “Me either.”

“Glad that’s finally settled because you’re stuck with me.” He dropped one hand back to her ass and rocked against her slippery core once. “Today.” Twice. “Tomorrow.” Three times. “Forever.” And then slid deep inside her. “Never forget that.”

Taz pressed his face into the curve where her shoulder met her neck and used his free hand to hold hers. His teeth nipped at the tender skin and he slid into her wet pussy in one deep thrust after another. Pleasure ricocheted through his body. Her back arched like a bow, pressing her to him. Their fingers intertwined, staying bound together even as their bodies separated and joined at an ever-quickening pace.

His thighs burned. His balls ached. Sweat slid down his spine as he tilted his hips and changed the angle so he could slide deeper.

Bianca clenched around his cock, pulling at him, drawing him in and not wanting to let him go. Her legs trembled and she tossed her head back as her orgasm overcame her.

His climax started like an electric ball of energy in his lower back, enlarging in waves until his entire body buzzed.

“I love you, Bianca,” he groaned before withdrawing and entered one last time, burying himself to the hilt just as the charged sphere snapped. His orgasm hit like a bolt of lightning and he spilled into her, filling her, loving her.

“I love you too, Taz,” she whispered into his ear.

Still trying to catch his breath, he turned and lowered himself to the floor, taking Bianca with him. They’d barely made it down before the cell phone vibrated, alerting them to an incoming text. Lexie must have figured a way to spring them.

* * *

Bianca unwound herself from Taz and walked on jelly legs over to the shelf where the cell phone was resting.

LEXIE: BE READY. ELISA AND MARKO CAME UP WITH A BEAUTY.

Picking it up, she pivoted as she pocketed it. Taz sat on the floor, one arm propped up on a raised knee, with his eyes closed and his lips curled in a post-orgasmic smirk. The sight of him took her breath away—not just because of how he looked, which was pretty damn good, but because he was right. They might never be the tell-each-other-everything couple, but that was okay because they were in this together for the long haul. It wasn’t because of Genie’s Wish. It wasn’t just a honeymoon high after they’d gotten together after the Bisu Manor mission adrenaline rush. It was because they belonged together, they loved each other. The truth of it settled deep in her bones, a certainty as solid as the Rocky Mountains.

“I don’t know what’s about to go down,” she said, “but Elisa and Marko came up with the plan.”

Taz opened his eyes and shook his head. “Oh God, those two working together is never a good thing.”

“They only burned down one empty warehouse.” She almost got the whole sentence out without cracking a smile.

“Exactly.” He let out a weary sigh and stood up.

She had to hand him that one. The explosives expert and the con artist were a match made in trouble heaven, which was why it was a Godsend that the two couldn’t stop snarling at each other when they weren’t up to their elbows in the shit together.

Holding up a hand to silence him, she cracked open the door an inch. The guard was still at his spot in front of the video screens. The sandwich, chips and soda were history.

“Holy fucking shit on a rye bread cracker,” the guard yelled and jumped up from his chair. He grabbed his walkie-talkie next to the empty chip bag and turned it on. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, Bob, but it looks like aliens landing on the south beach.”

“Are you drinking, Jerry?” came the question out of the walkie-talkie.

“Fuck you Bob. Just get your skinny ass down there.”

The guard hot-stepped it out of the security room.

Bianca counted to ten and then walked out of the computer server room, dying to know how in the hell Marko and Elisa had managed an alien invasion from their spot on the Sutherland yacht anchored a mile from the island. She paused in front of the video screens and couldn’t help but chuckle.

“You’ve got to see this,” she said.

Taz stopped next to her, entwining his fingers with hers. “They outdid themselves this time.”

The manual labor was all Lexie, but the twisted idea had Marko and Elisa written all over it. Somehow they’d managed to isolate a handful of aliens from a movie and superimpose them onto a static shot of the resort’s south beach. If she didn’t know better, she might have had the same reaction as Jerry the guard.

“Shit on a rye bread cracker, indeed,” she said, giggling. “They outdid their crazy this time.”

Knowing they only had four and a half hours left until Blackfish and his DEA team crashed the south beach for real, she scanned the other video monitors, hoping against hope for a glimpse of Gidget or Sterling Walsh. It would be a miracle but the fates kind of owed her right about now.

The pool was all but abandoned, with only a few couples going at it on the lounge chairs. The resort’s lobby was empty except for a man masturbating in the wine bar. The next screen didn’t show anyone at all. She flicked her gaze to the fourth screen, but something in her periphery caught her eye. She turned her attention to the black-and-white image and peered closer. Nothing. Just an image of the path leading to the last grouping of bungalows.

“Taz come take a look—”

Movement in the left corner of the screen killed the rest of the sentence. A woman scurried from the trunk of one palm tree to another. After a five second break, she did it again. Because of the black-and-white image, it was impossible to confirm she had Gidget’s signature bright red hair. The woman had the right body type. If only she’d look up at the camera…

Bam! As if she had a telepathic connection to Bianca, she looked up right at that moment.

A shiver of recognition shot through Bianca.

“Shit, is that her?” Taz asked, squeezing her hand.

She nodded, becoming surer with each breath. “Looks like it.”

“I don’t see anyone else around her.”

“She must have gotten free somehow, or she’s drugged up and under their control. Either way, we’ve got to get her before she disappears again.”

Taz glanced at the analog clock above the wall of video screens. “The team can be here in thirty minutes.”

“There’s no time for that.”

They couldn’t fail her again. Not when they were this close. They’d missed her by mere hours at Bisu Manor. Then, about a month later, there’d been the desperate phone call Gidget had made to the B-Squad office. Now they were within running distance.

“We’ll tell the team to get as close as possible to the south beach and then send in the landing craft,” she said, already heading toward the door. “We’ll be out of here before Walsh even knows what’s going on. Then the DEA can have its fun.”

Taz nodded, a grim determination squaring his jaw. “Let’s do this.”

She fired off a quick text to Lexie and then she and Taz hustled out the door. They made fast work of getting out of the staff-only area, jumped into an abandoned golf cart and took off toward Gidget’s location.